Charleston's Colonial Riches

Charleston, South Carolina was the wealthiest city in North America in the decades before the Revolutionary War. Its wealth was built on the cultivation of rice and indigo by enslaved Africans, many of whom brought agricultural knowledge of rice cultivation from West Africa that made the plantation system viable in the Carolina lowlands. By 1770, South Carolina's per capita wealth was more than four times that of New England, concentrated among a small planter class that shaped the political and cultural character of the American South for generations.

Source: Wikipedia