Vast acreage is devoted to soybeans; introduced successfully into South Carolina in the 1940s, the crop has become a mainstay of the agricultural economy. Tobacco, for many years the state's leading crop, also remains central to the sector, despite a precipitous drop in production since the late 1990s.
Before rapidly industrializing in the 1950s, South Carolina primarily had an agricultural economy throughout its history. During the antebellum period, the state's economy was based almost solely on the exportation of cotton and rice cultivated using the labor of enslaved Africans. By the time of the American Revolution, the exportation of rice to Europe made the lowcountry the wealthiest region in North America. But, South Carolina's economic importance in the union began to decline following the Panic of 1819 and the expansion of cotton cultivation in the Old Southwest.
