“P” is for plantations

“P” is for plantations. In the seventeenth century the term “plantation,” which formerly referred to any colonial outpost, evolved to refer specifically to large agricultural estates whose land was farmed by a sizable number of workers, usually enslaved persons, for export crops. Englishmen initially created plantation societies in the West Indies, and in the 1670s South Carolina became a northern extension of this empire. A common misconception is that when slavery ended, the plantation system collapsed. Sharecropping and tenantry replaced slavery as a labor system. In the late nineteenth century, many properties were sold off piece meal or to wealthy northerners who transformed them into hunting preserves. Since the 1970s former rice plantations have become upscale housing developments and golf communities. Further inland, abandoned plantation lands have frequently been harvested for their timber rather than cotton.