S.C. Encyclopedia | South Carolina’s origins are so closely tied to the British West Indian colony of Barbados that it has been called a “Colony of a Colony.” The historian Jack Greene has called Barbados the “culture hearth” of the southeastern, slavery-dominated plantation economy. Surprisingly little is yet known of the origins of South Carolina’s early leaders. Although the Barbadian influence has probably been overstated and South Carolina’s plantation owners never became absentee landlords to the degree of the West Indian sugar planters, South Carolina did come to more closely resemble the West Indies than did any of the other English mainland colonies.