Hunter Wallace quotes at length from David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World in a recent article at Occidental Dissent about the enormous influence of Barbados and the European colonies of the Caribbean on Dixie. This is a little known and fascinating part of our history that describes the origins of Southern culture and civilisation. One of the excerpts is about how the Barbadian model was spread to the Lowcountry of South Carolina and then to the rest of what would in time become the Lower South (as well as influencing the culture of the Upper South):
Colonial map of Barbados, where the plantation culture of the Lower South was born
In the third distinct region, the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry, plantations modeled on the Caribbean prospered by producing rice and, for a briefer period, indigo, for the dying of textiles. By the late eighteenth century many planters turned to high grade “Sea Island” cotton along the coast. Then the perfection of the cotton gin gave a tremendous stimulus to the cultivation of short-staple cotton, which revolutionized the British and American textile industries and eventually spread westward from inland Georgia and South Carolina to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.
Also see: The Barbabian influence on Carolina, Barbados, Carolina & the civilisation of the Lower South, ‘Red Legs’: White slaves of Barbados & their descendants and The American Revolution & the Golden Circle
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