The trustees seriously underestimated the gulf between New World and Old World environments and seemed to have learned little from past colonial mistakes. This, in part, reflected their desire to embark on an entirely new and humanitarian experiment that demanded that they spurn the imitation of patterns that already had emerged in North America (and particularly the lower South). Georgia was not to be an offshoot of the Carolina lowcountry but rather was to establish a new type of colony. Yet a study of the population of Georgia highlights the contribution of the trustees’ ignorance of colonial conditions, as well...

The economic fortunes of the women of early Georgia, as the trustees expected, more often than not were closely intertwined with those of their husbands and fathers. As in England, Europe, and colonial America, for the most part women’s conventional responsibilities as workers within the household dictated their everyday employment. But although domesticity was the nucleus of their work, the unfamiliar circumstances gave rise to new permutations of women’s work within and outside the household. The frontier required a range of tasks and occupations that made the activities of early Georgia women literally groundbreaking. In addition to bringing unforeseen encumbrances,...

On 23 November 1744 the Board of President and Assistants met in Savannah, and all the members trudged off to the house of Margaret Avery. This was the second time they had seen her in two weeks, and the atmosphere was tense. She had in her possession a detailed map of the province, compiled by her husband, Joseph, that would be extremely dangerous if it fell into Spanish hands, and it was imperative that she relinquish it to the proper authorities. They appreciated her state of distress—for she had been widowed just four weeks earlier—but in the face...

In 1752 the dwindling number of trustees surrendered their charter of government for the colony of Georgia to the king after twenty years of failing to stimulate substantial demographic or economic growth in the province. Once again utopianism had proved to be an inept midwife for the birth of a British American colony. Prohibitions on landholding and slavery had undermined the kinds of economic incentives that stimulated migration to the Chesapeake in its early years. The social, gender, and age composition of the Georgia settlers had hampered the kind of rapid population growth that the colonies of New England attained...

The new waves of settlers that rolled into Georgia’s lowcountry swept aside much of the occupational flexibility that had characterized women’s extradomestic work during the trusteeship. Diversity of opportunity began to ebb away from the settled seaboard, as normalization contracted the scope of individual women’s activities. The rapid growth in the population sated the hunger for white women’s labor. The proliferation of slavery now meant that the most menial, marginal, and emergency work was foisted upon bondspeople—on the plantations and, gradually, in the cattle pens, stables, and larger kitchens too. In part, this was simply a case of black...

Each gossamer thread of a spider’s web is intrinsically fine and imperfect. Only when it is artfully overlapped with countless others do the threads constitute a truly strong system, holding a form and substance that is captivating in its complexity—and capable of gripping all manner of unwary prey. Lashing the threads together is really the easy part—most spiders can do it in about an hour. Starting the web is more awkward: a floating thread is attached to a branch or a leaf, and the spider must move away—walking, jumping, and dangling until it can anchor its first...