1690s

South Carolina planters deliberately imported enslaved people from rice-growing regions of West Africa — particularly the Windward Coast — because of their expertise in cultivation, irrigation, and milling. The Gullah/Geechee people's specialized agricultural knowledge became the technical foundation of the colony's wealth. Planters profited from expertise they neither possessed nor compensated.

South Carolina planters deliberately imported enslaved people from West Africa's rice-growing regions for their expertise in cultivation and irrigation. The Gullah/Geechee people's specialized agricultural knowledge became the technical foundation of the colony's wealth — expertise planters neither possessed nor compensated.

Parliament ends the RAC's monopoly, opening the slave trade to all English merchants. The volume of enslaved people transported in English ships roughly triples within two decades. Bristol and Liverpool merchants rapidly expand operations; between 1698 and 1750 English ships transport an estimated 500,000 Africans into slavery, dwarfing the RAC era.

A 1693 Spanish royal proclamation offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped English colonies, converted to Catholicism, and served the Crown. By 1738, Fort Mose near St. Augustine became the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in North America.

Captain Thomas Phillips of the Royal African Company vessel Hannibal recorded in his journal that of approximately 700 enslaved Africans loaded on the ship in 1693, roughly 320 died during the Middle Passage crossing, a mortality rate of over 45%. Phillips documented deaths from dysentery, smallpox, and what he called 'fixed melancholy' — enslaved people who refused to eat and died. The Hannibal's log is one of the most detailed first-person accounts of Middle Passage conditions and mortality, documenting the scale of death as a routine business matter.

A 1693 Spanish royal proclamation offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped English colonies and converted to Catholicism, provided they served the Spanish Crown. This created a direct incentive for flight south. By 1738, Fort Mose near St. Augustine became the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in North America, a destination that shaped the logic of the Stono Rebellion and other flight attempts.

Enslaved people from the rice-growing regions of West Africa — particularly present-day Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal — brought their knowledge of rice cultivation to the South Carolina lowcountry in the 1690s. Planters specifically sought enslaved people from 'the Rice Coast' for their agricultural expertise. This knowledge transfer, extracted under conditions of slavery, transformed South Carolina into one of the most profitable plantation colonies in North America, making a small white elite enormously wealthy while condemning enslaved Africans and their descendants to brutal labor in disease-ridden rice paddies.

South Carolina enacted its first comprehensive slave code in 1696, modeled on the Barbados slave code of 1661 — brought to Carolina by Barbadian planters. The code classified all enslaved Africans as property, established brutal punishments for resistance (castration, branding, and death), restricted movement, prohibited assembly, and made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read. It was one of the harshest slave codes in the English colonies and would be strengthened further after the Stono Rebellion of 1739. The 1696 code laid the foundation for the plantation slavery system that would make South Carolina the wealthiest colony per capita in North America.

Parliament removed the Royal African Company's monopoly on the slave trade in 1698, opening the trade to all British merchants. The result was an immediate and dramatic surge in the volume of Africans transported to British colonies in North America. Where the RAC had shipped roughly 4,000 enslaved people per year in the late 1600s, independent traders now vastly expanded the trade. South Carolina and Virginia saw their enslaved populations grow exponentially in the decades immediately following. The RAC had previously branded enslaved Africans with the letters 'DY' (Duke of York) or 'RAC' on their chests using hot irons. The end of the monopoly transferred that brutality to dozens of competing private firms.

As enslaved West Africans — primarily from Sierra Leone, Senegal, and the Gold Coast — were concentrated in the South Carolina and Georgia lowcountry in the 1680s–1690s, they began forming the distinctive Gullah-Geechee culture. Geographic isolation on Sea Islands allowed enslaved communities to preserve African languages, naming practices, foodways, crafts (including sweetgrass basketry), and spiritual traditions to a degree impossible in more mixed populations. This cultural preservation was itself a form of resistance to the dehumanization of slavery, maintaining African identity across the Atlantic.

Maryland enacted a comprehensive slave code in 1692 consolidating and extending earlier laws. The code restricted enslaved people's movement, prohibited assembly, regulated the lives of free Black people, and codified punishments for various acts of resistance. It also established clearer procedures for the return of runaways and penalties for those who assisted escapees. The 1692 code was part of a colony-wide consolidation of racial slavery law in the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion across the Chesapeake.

Virginia's 1692 act established special county courts to try enslaved people accused of capital crimes, without juries and with expedited procedures. Enslaved defendants were denied the procedural protections available to free persons. The courts could condemn enslaved people to death, with the colony compensating slaveholders for the 'loss of property.' This legal infrastructure institutionalized the treatment of enslaved people as property in criminal proceedings while creating mechanisms for violent suppression of resistance.

When the Royal African Company's monopoly on the English slave trade was broken in 1698, Virginia and other colonies gained access to independent slave traders. The result was a dramatic expansion in the volume of enslaved Africans imported directly to the Chesapeake. Slave imports to Virginia more than tripled in the decade after 1698 compared to the prior decade. This liberalization of the slave trade massively expanded the enslaved population and entrenched the plantation economy.

By 1699, Virginia had accumulated decades of piecemeal slave legislation — laws on inheritance, movement, punishment, courts, and racial classification — that would be consolidated into the comprehensive 1705 Virginia Slave Code. Late 17th-century laws stripped free Black people of voting rights, prohibited interracial marriage, expanded punishments for resistance, and denied enslaved people any legal personhood. The accumulation of these laws over the 1660–1699 period constructed the full architecture of racial chattel slavery. The 1705 code was the formal codification of what had been built law by law across four decades.

Virginia's colonial assembly debated and imposed import duties on enslaved Africans in the 1690s, motivated partly by revenue needs and partly by concern among tobacco planters that rapid expansion of the enslaved population could destabilize the colony. However, the duties were politically contested and periodically lifted. The debate reveals how the slave trade was understood primarily as an economic question, with enslaved people treated purely as commodities whose import volumes were to be managed for plantation profitability.

Planters grow rich on rice grown with the tidal-farming expertise of enslaved West Africans from the Rice Coast — the foundation of Lowcountry wealth.

Virginia bars manumission and interracial marriage, sharpening the line between white and Black.