The exploitation of African agricultural expertise, and a dependence on hundreds of thousands of unpaid laborers

The exploitation of African agricultural expertise, and a dependence on hundreds of thousands of unpaid laborers who endured brutal conditions in bondage, led to previously unimaginable profits. “For 100 years, Charleston was the wealthiest city in America — and arguably the world,” Green says.

The city’s charm and beauty, its soaring church steeples and antebellum mansions, did not arise by happenstance. Between 1670 and 1808 (when a federal ban on the slave trade went into effect), an estimated 40% of all enslaved African people who were brought into the United States entered through the port of Charleston. The city boasted the first liquor store in the colonies — the Tavern at Rainbow Row, which opened in 1686 and is still selling bottles today — as well as the first museum.

Enterprise boomed. According to Roberts, the average export of Carolina Gold rice from the Carolinas and Georgia in the early 19th century was about 160 million pounds per year. And according to Kim Cliett Long, project administrator at the Jonathan Green Maritime Cultural Center, the wealth per capita in South Carolina during a flush period was around £180 (or about $35,000 in today’s dollars) versus £38 in the colonies of New England. Rice (as well as cotton) flooded Charleston with money. With money came a new white aristocracy and the financial resources that could convert a colonial upstart into an international superpower.

Amethyst Ganaway, a Charleston-based chef and writer, puts it this way: “There would be no America without rice.”