Colonial Charles Towne, Slavery and Piracy, c. 1690–1720

Founded in 1670, Charles Towne developed through Atlantic commerce and plantation agriculture. Rice cultivation and the slave trade made the colony wealthy while imposing extreme violence on enslaved Africans and transforming the region’s population and environment.

The port also belonged to a maritime world of privateering, piracy and imperial competition. Merchants, sailors, captives and migrants moved between the Caribbean, mainland colonies and Europe, and the line between authorised private violence and piracy could shift with war and politics.

Charles Towne follows Rachelle Bailie’s search for her father through this world. The novel links family identity and romance to questions of Indigenous ancestry, enslavement and whether Christian conviction can resist the racial assumptions of colonial society.