This is, in short and without exception, the best environmental history of an agricultural landscape that I have read. Mart A. Stewart has an eye not only for details of a place, but also for the complex web of interactions, natural and social, that go into its creation. He has so linked the social history of the peoples of coastal Georgia with their construction of the land that only the most obtuse historian would attempt to separate them again.

—Richard White, University of Washington

Scholars in disciplines from colonial studies to agricultural history to landscape studies will find it a stunning achievement . . . Sumptuously rich in detail woven by its author into many larger arguments that demonstrate the enduring power of place, and especially what ecologists call 'natural systems,' through gradual and traumatic social change.

—American Historical Review

Establishes Stewart's credentials as a leading authority on the history of the southern lowcountry and a leading practitioner of the craft of environmental history.

—Florida Historical Quarterly

The impressive way in which North American historians, following such luminaries as Donald Worster and Bill Cronon, have started to engage with the land is shown in this book. . . . There are two audiences for this book: the 'local', who will be fascinated by the detail of what exactly happened when and to whom, and the wider group, for whom the general conclusions fit into a wider construction of the main types of relationship between the material and the ideational. But as an example of detailed scholarship on what produced for various times a sense of place, this book will have an honourable place on the shelves of historians and of historical geographers whose interests extend beyond the purely social and political.

—ECUMENE

A pleasure to read . . . By bringing the techniques of environmental history to bear upon lowcountry Georgia, Mart Stewart has performed a valuable service.

—Slavery and Abolition

A nuanced and meticulously researched account . . . This is a landscape that has undergone extraordinary transformations and retransformations in the past 300 years. Mart Stewart has described and analyzed them with great skill and subtlety.

—Geographical Review

There is much to like in this volume. The prose is consistently enviable. The author's exposition of the intricate workings of the wet-rice plantations is deft as well.

—Journal of Southern History

A detailed and thoroughly readable case study of some important themes in a particularly appropriate local setting . . . Many more such books are needed.

—Southern Cultures