Traces the persecution of Huguenots in France and the eventual emigration of a small bloc of the French Calvinist population to colonial South Carolina. In a volume devoted to the first generation of Carolina Huguenots, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke describes in detail their gradual transformation from French refugees to South Carolina planters.

Bertrand Van Ruymbeke is a professor of American civilization at the Universitè de Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris VIII) and a former visiting professor at the College of Charleston. He is the coeditor of Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora and has published in the fields of Huguenot history, early American history, and Atlantic history.