South Carolina’s black majority emerged directly with rice cultivation

Evidence

[D]uring precisely those two decades after 1695 when rice production took permanent hold in South Carolina, the African portion of the population drew equal to, and then surpassed, the European portion. Black inhabitants probably did not actually outnumber whites until roughly 1708. But whatever the exact year in which a black majority was established, the development was unprecedented within England’s North American colonies and was fully acknowledged long before the English crown took control of the proprietary settlement in 1720. … The thought that newcomers from Africa were the slaves most likely to rebel does not appear to have been idle speculation, for the late 1730s, a time of conspicuous unrest, was also a time of massive importation. In fact, at no earlier or later date did recently arrived Africans (whom we might arbitrarily define as all those slave immigrants who had been in the colony less than a decade) comprise such a large proportion of South Carolina’s Negro population. By 1740 the black inhabitants of the colony numbered roughly 39,000. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1981

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the rise of the African majority and its link to rice economy - parallels the reader’s interest in the material conditions underlying Black radicalism’s origins.