In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Since the publication of David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson's “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” in the American Historical Review (Dec. 2007, pp. 1329–58), the historiographical pendulum has swung against African agency. As with all good historical debates, new research keeps the pendulum in motion. In the Shadow of Slavery by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff argues that African plants and animals are virtually invisible in the Columbian exchange literature. It focuses on the revolutionary roles played by enslaved Africans in shaping New World farming and animal husbandry systems. Surprisingly, given Carney's previous work, there is relatively little rice in In the Shadow of Slavery. Shifting their lens away from rice, power relations between planters and enslaved laborers, and commercial agriculture on antebellum plantations, Carney and Rosomoff reveal the importance of staple crops and subsistence in ensuring the survival of plantation societies and sustaining enslaved people's historical memory of their African homeland. Some crops, such as millet, sorghum, okra, yams, and cowpeas are indigenous to Africa. Others, such as manioc, bananas, plantains, and sesame had already become established as staples in Africa by the transatlantic slave trade period. Slave ships were the vectors that brought all the aforementioned staples to the New World—slaves, slave ships, and the transatlantic slave trade are also invisible in the Columbian exchange literature. Carney and Rosomoff argue that enslaved laborers, in particular enslaved women, resisted imposed diets and retained some modicum of control over their own bodies, culture, and identity by cultivating these African and Africanized staples in their provision grounds and using them to prepare “memory dishes.” In colonies where slaves were forced to provide or allowed to supplement their provisions, slaves’ marginal food fields were spaces within the oppressive social system where slaves could and did exercise agency.