The history of colonial South Carolina has been the subject of critical academic study for over four decades. While historians continue to revise and examine their understanding of this period in South Carolina's history, it is understood that the cultural life of the elite planter and merchant classes was not solely the product of European influences, but also those brought to the New World by African slaves and the dynamic relationship between the two classes. It was during the colonial period that many of the state's cultural and economic patterns that were to direct the state through the eighteenth century and into the antebellum period were set in place. In A New World Gentry, Richard Waterhouse examines the early history of South Carolina's development, closely following the establishment and economic growth of the colony in correlation with the cultural development of the elite planter and merchant classes.