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Book Review
Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. By Judith A. Carney. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvi, 240 pp. $37.50, ISBN 0-674-00452-3.)
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In a provisions plot in South Carolina, some time after 1670, an African farmer probably sowed the colony's first rice seed. Planting a familiar food crop was an act that reverberated with unforeseen power to shape one of colonial British America's most productive and oppressive plantation economies. Judith A. Carney's Black Rice reconstructs the journey by which west African cultivators transferred "indigenous knowledge systems" centered on the production of rice to provide the material foundation for plantation slavery in the coastal lower South. It is a project that relies by necessity on reading against the grain of documentary sources and scholarly conclusions that have dismissed African agricultural expertise on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. |
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