The Culture of a City-State
CHARLESTON, like Venice in its heyday, was a city‐ state ; ruled by an intelligent and cultivated oligarchy of great families who managed to monopolize control, generation after generation. Perhaps it is only coincidental that the Prioleau family, one of Charleston's oldest, traced its ancestry to the princely Venetian house of Priuli. The origins of most of the Charleston aristocracy, however, were less pretentious. Most of the great families who rose to prominence by the mid-eighteenth century owed their eminence to money earned as planters or merchants, or a combination of the two. Whatever their beginnings, the rich and powerful very early gained control of the colonial government; and for more than a century they concentrated all political power of the colony in Charleston.
Again like Venice, Charleston, the only town worthy of designation as a city until long after the War of Independence, extended its political and economic power far beyond its own precincts. A few outlying communities served as satellites as Charleston drew trade from distant Indian nations, from the whole back country, and from all the plantation area.
As Venice had extended its influence over Verona, for example, so Charleston made a financial and social tributary of Georgetown. As Verona erected in its market place a marble