| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Judith A. Carney. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xiv, 240. $37.50.

This book seeks, through an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on the history of rice cultivation in the Atlantic basin, to recover "a significant African contribution to the agricultural history of the Americas" (p. 1). Rejecting the conventional interpretation that "assigns Europeans the role of ingeniously adapting a crop of Asian origin to New World conditions," Judith A. Carney argues instead for the "transfer of rice as the diffusion of an indigenous [African] knowledge system" (pp. 1–2). West Africa was a site of independent domestication of a separate rice species, Oryza glaberrima, by A.D. 300. Carney convincingly demonstrates that complex systems of tidal floodplain, irrigated coastal estuarine, and upland rainfed rice cultivation were already established between the Senegal River and present-day Ivory Coast before the arrival of Europeans. 1

In the Americas, enslaved Africans grew rice of the Asian sativa as well as glaberrima strains in terrains similar to those of West Africa, both for their own subsistence in provision grounds and as plantation crops in places as diverse as Brazil, Peru, the Guianas, Surinam, El Salvador, Louisiana, and South Carolina. In South Carolina, to the end of the American Revolution, all aspects of rice cultivation, from land preparation through sowing, weeding, threshing, milling, winnowing, and cooking, bore a strong imprint of African practices. The only people familiar with rice culture were slaves; European settlers as yet possessed no detailed understanding of Asian systems. Hence it was Africans who supplied the critical knowledge that enabled planters to shift from initial rainfed production on uplands to wetland cultivation in inland swamps, and eventually to irrigated floodplains. Slaves used their expertise, Carney argues, to mitigate the conditions of their enslavement. . . .

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