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On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World
How did colonial Georgia, an economic backwater in its early days, make its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants operated in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents?
In On the Rim of the Caribbean , Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character.
Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution.
In On the Rim of the Caribbean , Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character.
Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
392 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 24, 2015
The title of this book understates its scope. For while Pressly shows how colonial Georgia was tied to the West Indies and Atlantic trade, he also tells how Georgia’s economy rose from next to nothing during the Trustee period to prosperity by the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
The strength of this book is the amount of research Pressly brings to the page. While other accounts might simply state that rice and deerskins were important to the economy, Pressly shows us the map of where they came from, gives us stories about the people who traded them, and lists the statistics of how many pounds were shipped out each year. It is a good combination of individual examples with global statistics.
While there are times when the details slow the book down, he gives a good picture of the struggles people faced at the time. How did they make a living? What did they produce? Who were their buyers? Who gave them credit? By answering these questions, Pressly has written a very informative history of the development of colonial Georgia.
The strength of this book is the amount of research Pressly brings to the page. While other accounts might simply state that rice and deerskins were important to the economy, Pressly shows us the map of where they came from, gives us stories about the people who traded them, and lists the statistics of how many pounds were shipped out each year. It is a good combination of individual examples with global statistics.
While there are times when the details slow the book down, he gives a good picture of the struggles people faced at the time. How did they make a living? What did they produce? Who were their buyers? Who gave them credit? By answering these questions, Pressly has written a very informative history of the development of colonial Georgia.
October 27, 2020
The particular value of this work is that the author takes you step by step through the process by which a failed exercise in recreating the social structures of English rural society became a rip-roaring participant in an imperial trade based on rice, timber and deer skins, that was more part of the Caribbean than associated with the rest of British North America. This thus becomes something of a bleak thought experiment in that the question of whether a Neo-European society not based on slavery and/or the conquest of Indian land could have been a success, and the answer would seem to be no. As for what this meant politically, the merchants of Savannah, and the men who dealt with the Creek Nation for deer skins (an input into leather production), were among the last to join the "Patriot" movement; it was the Congregationalist population of the colony and the onrush of settlers out of Virginia and North Carolina who swept the loyalist leadership of the colony aside. Pressly leaves one with a nod to Georgia's role in the rise of the Cotton South; but just a nod. While Pressly sometimes feels as though he's weighing you down with detail, he actually does this in a fairly entertaining matter for an academic monograph.
June 11, 2013
Very well written and very detailed, but not quite what I was expecting. This book assumes the reader already knows how places like Savannah and St Simons were first established, so it makes mention of things like Bloody Marsh and Jenkins Ear without explaining what those are. But if this book is light in explaining how the Georgia colonies came to be it is unparalleled in explaining what happened after, and how the economies of those colonies worked.
December 24, 2013
This book is the most excellent overall history of Georgia's colonial period to be published in many years. Pressly brings Georgia forward into the discussion of the Atlantic world through a timely reinterpretation of economic and social facts.
April 3, 2014
Fascinating view of the two Georgias (up country and low country) in the years just before the Revolution.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews