Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas

Abstract

In a provisions plot in South Carolina, some time after 1670, an African farmer probably sowed the colony'first rice seed. Planting a familiar food crop was an act that reverberated with unforeseen power to shape one of colonial British America'most productive and oppressive plantation economies. Judith A. Carney's Black Rice reconstructs the journey by which west African cultivators transferred “indigenous knowledge systems” centered on the production of rice to provide the material foundation for plantation slavery in the coastal lower South. It is a project that relies by necessity on reading against the grain of documentary sources and scholarly conclusions that have dismissed African agricultural expertise on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The striking variety of soil and water features in West Africa'diverse riverine terrains inspired rice growers to develop techniques precisely adapted to local environments. For subsistence societies impelled to secure reliable harvests despite volatile environmental conditions, insulating crops against floods, droughts, and salinity focused farmers' attention on the careful management of water. Low-country rice plantations, carved out of inland swamps and situated alongside overflowing tidal rivers, adapted several key principles of west African rice growing to ensure, in the planters' lexicon, a sufficient command of water. By detailing with new rigor the clear analogues between those farming systems, Carney builds on the insights of Peter H. Wood'Black Majority (1974) and Daniel C. Littlefield'Rice and Slaves (1981) to offer an unequivocal demonstration of the African sources for American rice production and processing techniques.