Reviews of Books

Carolina Rice: African Origins, New World Crop

Reviewed by Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University

Africans actively shaped the early modern Atlantic world. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean in greater numbers than Europeans (at least through 1820), they were central to the economic and cultural development of the Americas for roughly three centuries. Their role in forging the plantation economies of the New World was fundamental. Building on the pioneering work of Alfred W. Crosby on transatlantic plant exchanges and more specifically of Peter H. Wood and Daniel C. Littlefield on the African contribution to the agricultural history of South Carolina, Judith A. Carney emphasizes African agency in New World rice cultivation.1 She extends the work of these forerunners in arguing that Africans transferred an entire "knowledge system"—everything from production to consumption, from methods of water control to forms of food preparation—for growing and processing rice. For Carney, the origin of rice cultivation in South Carolina was African, and "slaves from West Africa's rice region tutored planters in growing the crop" (p. 81).	1
Carney is a geographer, and her work is particularly effective in drawing spatial connections between the Upper Guinea Coast—that part of the African littoral stretching from present-day Senegal to Liberia, encompassing three slave trading regions, Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and Sierra Leone—and the Americas, especially lowcountry South Carolina. The author has done fieldwork in West Africa and knows rice production firsthand. She puts this knowledge to good effect in astutely analyzing early descriptions of rice culture along the Upper Guinea Coast, discriminating among different forms of production (tidal floodplain, mangrove swamp, inland swamp, and rain-fed). She makes the case that Africans introduced sophisticated soil and water management techniques to lowcountry South Carolina. The hollow cypress logs known as "trunks" or "plugs," used to control water flow in embankments, were an African innovation. Likewise, the red-colored rice found in early South Carolina, was probably Oryza glaberrima, an African, not an Asian, variety. Interestingly, so-called Carolina gold, a prized strain of Oryza sativa, the Asian variety, made its way to Sierra Leone, probably with freed African Americans and Christian missionaries.	2
Gender analysis is an important feature of this study. Carney notes that rice was largely a women's crop in Africa, although in mangrove rice systems men played a larger role than elsewhere and tasks tended to be gender specific. Key aspects of "female knowledge systems" (p. 111) were transferred from Africa to South Carolina: the sheer predominance of women sowers, the practice of encasing seeds in clay before planting and covering the seed on the ground by foot, milling rice with a mortar and pestle and winnowing it with baskets of African design, and cooking rice in distinctively African-influenced ways. Carney accepts that slavery changed the gender dynamics of rice production, with men, for example, put to milling; ironically, white masters made that alteration at a loss, since it resulted in much more breakage of the grain than would have occurred in Africa. Furthermore, a task performed daily by women in Africa in less than an hour demanded perhaps as many as six hours of arduous labor by slave men and women in capitalist-driven South Carolina.	. . .