What kind of economic opportunities existed in colonial Georgia?
Georgia originally was heavily forested, offered colonists wood products. As land cleared for agriculture proliferated, Georgia focused on crops amenable to slave labor. These included tobacco, flax (for linen), and indigo. Also rice. One of the reasons early Georgia was so favorable for slavery is that a lot of it was swampy and full of malarial mosquitoes. Negroes from certain parts of Africa have a genetic defect, called “sickle cell,” which makes them resistant to malaria; they could work in these regions when others could not. Savannah became the second largest port in the South, after Charleston, so its economy would be oriented toward the export and import trade.
