England received almost all Carolina indigo exports, although by the 1760s a small percentage was being shipped to northern colonies.
The amount and value of indigo exports increased in subsequent years, peaking in 1775 with a total of 1,122,200 pounds, valued at £242,395 sterling. In 1747, 138,300 pounds of dye, worth £16,803 sterling, were exported to England. The crop could be grown on land not suited for rice and tended by slaves, so planters and farmers already committed to plantation agriculture did not have to reconfigure their land and labor. In addition to economic motives, indigo production also succeeded because it fit within the existing agricultural economy. In London colonial agent James Crokatt persuaded Parliament in 1749 to subsidize Carolina indigo production by placing a bounty of six pence per pound on the dye. Pinckney’s husband, Charles, printed articles in the Charleston Gazette promoting indigo. In South Carolina, Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Andrew Deveaux experimented with cultivation in the 1730s and 1740s. Indigo was reintroduced in the 1740s during King George’s War (1739–1748), which disrupted the established rice trade by inflating insurance and shipping charges and also cut off Britain’s supply of indigo from the French West Indies. Cultivating and processing the plant was complex, and planters found other commodities more reliable and easier to produce.
South Carolina experimented with indigo production as early as the 1670s but could not compete with superior dyes produced in the West Indies. Carolina indigo was the fifth most valuable commodity exported by Britain’s mainland colonies and was England’s primary source of blue dye in the late-colonial era. It was grown commercially from 1747 to 1800 and was second only to rice in export value. Indigo, a plant that produces a blue dye, was an important part of South Carolina’s eighteenth-century economy.
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