Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice

Cultivation in the Americas

Judith A. Carney

Black Rice is an exceptionally well argued historical investigation into the relations
between the eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade and the rice-based boom
economy in the Carolinas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although
primarily a history of the transfer of an agricultural knowledge system from West
Africa to colonial South Carolina, this account also establishes rice as central to the
development of New World cultural identities of the enslaved West Africans who
were the agents of the transfer. This focus on cultural identity not only provides a
welcome depth to this agricultural history but also challenges colonial histories that
underplay the centrality of Africans in the economic development of the colonial
South.

It is in this sense that the central objective of the author, Judith Carney, a
professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is
historiographical. Carney explicitly calls her investigation "a narrative of the Atlantic
slave trade," intended to undermine the racist legacies of conventional histories.
These histories typically celebrate the ingenuity of the European plantation owners,
who were, they posit, entirely responsible for adapting an Asian crop to the New
World. In Black Rice, Carney develops a set of geographical associations that show
the limitations of this dialectic; her work provides material evidence that highlights
the ideological formation of these earlier accounts.

Carney argues that the considerable cultural and technological knowledge that West
Africans brought with them and applied to rice cultivation provided them with some
measure of agency in the Carolinas, whether they were actively enslaved, or had
escaped and were living in one of the many maroon settlements that existed
throughout the Americas. To begin, rice characterized most areas settled by slaves,
or runaway slaves in the Americas. Along with sugar cane and yams, rice was one
of the first crops to be transported across the Atlantic in the early sixteenth
century. It made up a great part of the diet of the Middle Passage, and it was
immediately cultivated in all areas settled by the Spanish and Portuguese, including
Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. Certainly in South Carolina, Carney's area of study, it was
being cultivated as an export crop within 20 years of the first European settlement
in 1670, when African slaves were already present. By the American Revolution,
rice had become the first globally traded cereal, and by the outbreak of the Civil
War, the plantation owners profiting from the Carolina rice economy, based entirely
on slave labour, were the wealthiest of the American South.

As a geographer, Carney pays close attention to the links between African methods
of rice cultivation in the regions where most of the slaves brought to South Carolina
originated and the methods employed by the slave-powered plantations across the
Atlantic. To this end, she discusses in detail the complex cultivation systems that
developed according to the micro-climates of Senegambia, or the Rice Coast of
West Africa, including the social factors such as gender that heavily influenced their
development. The two cultivation systems she identifies are tidal flood-plain
cultivation along rivers and mangrove cultivation on the coast. Equally, Carney
gives a comprehensive history of the co-presence in the Carolinas of the two most
widely cultivated species of rice, Oryza glaberrima, the reddish rice that originated
in Africa, and Oryza sativa, the tougher white variety from Asia that boasted higher
yields, and thus formed the basis of South Carolina's export crop.

One of the most valuable contributions of Black Rice, however, is the sophisticated
framework Carney develops for theorizing the role of crops in colonial New World
development. This is accomplished by "[shifting] research attention from rice as a
research crop to rice culture as a knowledge system." That is, she is concerned with
conceptualizing rice through an entire production-to-consumption trajectory, with
all the concomitant processes of the agrarian practices related to cultivation: water
control, sowing, harvesting, winnowing, milling, and cooking. In the final analysis,
Carney argues, the issue of cultivation is more significant than the identity of the
seed type, because regardless of whether the rice itself originated in Africa or Asia,
the crucial knowledge of how to adapt it to a new environment was fundamental to
the economic development of colonial South Carolina.

As an agricultural history, Black Rice represents a vital expansion of the literature

of the Columbian Exchange, which, following Alfred Crosby's influential book
(1972), examines the range of environmental transformations wrought by the
movement of biological organisms (germs, seeds, livestock) back and forth across
the Atlantic Ocean subsequent to Columbus' first journey. This literature tends to
privilege Western-derived knowledge of the movement of individual seeds across
the Atlantic and is more concerned with the plantation crops that created boom
economies than with the subsistence crops that sustained generations of displaced
Africans. This knowledge depends on the print medium and was codified with the
emergence of scientific societies in the eighteenth century that placed Europeans
firmly in the centre of agricultural knowledge development. Within this tradition
there is little or no consideration of indigenous knowledges, which were (and are)
often transmitted orally.

Most significantly, however, the interdisciplinary nature of the work makes Black
Rice useful not only to anthropologists, geographers, and historians, but also to
media and cultural studies scholars interested in issues of identity formation,
knowledge transfer, and the links between culture, political economy, technology,
and space.

REFERENCE
Crosby, Alfred W. (1972). The Colombian Exchange: Biological and cultural
consequences of 1992.Westport, CT: Greenwood.