T THOUGH scholarly discussion has enhanced understanding of the colonial Chesapeake tobacco and West Indian sugar trades, the rice trade of the Lower South has received less attention. Yet rice, grown by slaves in irrigated inland and tidal swamps, was the major cash crop exported from the coastal lowland of South Carolina and Georgia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Despite periodic slumps, especially in wartime, rice exports from South Carolina and Georgia rose twenty-five-fold from an annual average of 3,364,752 lb. in I7I3-I7I7 to 77,009,100 lb. in I768-I772. The largest growth occurred from the early I760s to the early I770s, when exports more than doubled.1 By the early 1770s, rice accounted for over half the Lower South's export earnings; all other commodities exported from the region-indigo, naval stores, deerskins-were worth less individually than rice shipments. For the whole of British North America on the eve of the American Revolution, only tobacco, wheat-flour products, and fish, in descending order of importance, exceeded the value of rice as exports.2 Rice was the principal foundation of planters' fortunes in the Lower South. By I774, South Carolina had the highest per capita wealth among the