Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Locountry [Hardcover]

Explores how disease and human responses to it influenced the South and the United States.In 1776, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. It owed both largely to rice cultivation using African slave labor. Rice plantations emerged in the environs of Charleston, South Carolina, around 1690 and later spread to parts of Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. This book examines how people created, combated, avoided, and denied the virulent disease environment; and how disease and human responses to it influenced the region, the South, and the United States, even contributing to American independence.In 1776, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. It owed both largely to rice cultivation using African slave labor. Rice plantations emerged in the environs of Charleston, South Carolina, around 1690 and later spread to parts of Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. This book examines how people created, combated, avoided, and denied the virulent disease environment; and how disease and human responses to it influenced the region, the South, and the United States, even contributing to American independence.On the eve of the Revolution, the Carolina lowcountry was the wealthiest and unhealthiest region in British North America. Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry argues that the two were intimately connected: both resulted largely from the dominance of rice cultivation on plantations using imported African slave labor. This development began in the coastal lands near Charleston, South Carolina, around the end of the seventeenth century. Rice plantations spread north to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to Georgia and northeast Florida in the late colonial period. The book examines perceptions and realities of the lowcountry disease environment; how the lowcountry became notorious for its tropical fevers, notably malaria and yellow l3Ê