Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry examines the impact of disease in the region known as the South Atlantic lowcountry. The book focuses primarily on South Carolina and its metropolis, Charleston, from 1670 to 1860. Because this area was in many ways the seedbed for much of subsequent southern and American culture, the story told here has a much wider significance. In the mid-eighteenth century, the rice and indigo plantations that dominated the region spread north into the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and south to the coastal lands of Georgia. After 1763, they moved into northern Florida. In the late eighteenth century, the lowcountry plantation regime began to move into the Carolina backcountry, though cotton replaced rice as the most important crop. In the nineteenth century, lowcountry folk spread their plantations and diseases westward throughout much of the South. What a small number of settlers began in 1670, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean (a local joke), had a huge influence on the history of the South and the United States. The Carolina lowcountry became the wealthiest region in late colonial North America.