In a nutshell, it boils down to the kind of crop that could be grown in South Carolina. The geography and climate of the State mean that it was ideally suited to growing rice, which was a particularly intense crop to farm and one that could be highly profitable - which also meant that planters were less deterred from investing in new slaves at times when slave prices were high, given the sizeable wealth generated by rice farming. Due to the labour intense nature of the crop, large numbers of slaves could be employed on any given plantation involved in harvesting rice; access to such large quantities of labour was further made possible by the fact that the State was well connected for both the emerging internal and transatlantic slave trades. More than one-third of all slaves imported from Africa arrived in the Carolinas region pre-1800, and South Carolina was an early end destination for the domestic trade developing between the Upper South and the Lower South in the face of restrictions on the transatlantic trade.