| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sub-Saharan Africa

James C. McCann. Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 289. $27.95.

Natural resources, minerals, and tropical crops have proven to be powerful vehicles for the exploration of global history. There have been a spate of monographs recently—on diamonds, salt, coal, petroleum, and rice, for example—charting the social life, the biography as it were, of a natural commodity in its historical journey into and across the world market. Tracking this journey from the point of production to the terminus of consumption has been more or less formalized as "commodity systems analysis" tracing the networks of exchange, the production of value and meaning, and the exercise of power along the length and breadth of the commodity chain. In his important new book on the social history of maize in Africa, James C. McCann does not attempt systematically to analyze the entire maize commodity system in Africa but instead takes a number of slices—themes, problems, and processes—that shed light on the remarkable African encounter with a New World crop over half a millennium. In this sense he follows the path blazed by Judith A. Carney's brilliant book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (1999), which charts the relation between rice and the modern history of the Black Atlantic, linking indigenous peasants in West Africa, the slave trade, and the rice-growing regions of the U.S. South.

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