Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change

Abstract

Wild rice might have become the consummate alternative foodstuff of the British Empire. This edible native North American plant was the subject of significant, if subsequently forgotten, investigation between the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars. During this period of ongoing military conflict, imperial expansion, and subsistence crises, colonists, naturalists, and officials also grappled with the possibility that climates were undergoing continuous, perhaps permanent, transformation. They envisioned wild rice as the pioneer plant of a responsive imperial ecology, uniquely suited to weathering all political seasons and untold natural upheavals. Neglecting Native American horticultural practice, they wrote about exploiting wild rice on a larger scale as the realization of a biblical and imperial dream of guaranteed abundance: a self-reproducing, prodigious staple impervious to unexpected developments, including “inexplicable” changes in the climate.