By Judith A. Carney
Few american citizens establish slavery with the cultivation of rice, but rice was once an incredible plantation crop throughout the first 3 centuries of payment within the Americas. Rice observed African slaves around the heart Passage in the course of the New international to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern usa. by means of the center of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who labored them had created probably the most ecocnomic economies on the planet.
Black Rice tells the tale of the real provenance of rice within the Americas. It establishes, via agricultural and ancient proof, the important importance of rice in West African society for a millennium prior to Europeans arrived and the slave exchange all started. the normal trust that Europeans brought rice to West Africa after which introduced the information of its cultivation to the Americas is a primary fallacy, one that succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the position of Africans and African-American slaves in moving the seed, the cultivation talents, and the cultural practices useful for setting up it within the New international.
during this shiny interpretation of rice and slaves within the Atlantic global, Judith Carney finds how racism has formed our old reminiscence and overlooked this serious African contribution to the making of the Americas.
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Extra resources for Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
39 During his travels through Senegambia from 1749 to 1753 one correspondent of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Michael Adanson, noted the widespread technique of placing earthen embankments, or bunds, around the perimeters of inland swamps to retain water: “Rice is almost the only grain sown at Gambia in the lands overﬂown by the rains of the high season. The negroes cut all these lands with small causeys [causeways] which with-hold the waters in such a manner, that their rice is always moistened.
An independent conﬁrmation of de Almada’s description of mangrove rice cultivation in coastal estuaries came in 1685, when Sieur de la Courbe journeyed overland through Diola settlements from the Gambia to the Geba River in Guinea-Bissau. He remarked that “there was no house which did not have a rice nursery nearby, while along the river banks the landscape had been transformed into a pattern of causeways with rice plants appearing above the ﬂooded ﬁelds” and described the extensive system of dikes and rice paddies developed along river es- Encounters 19 tuaries: “It had already begun to rain and I saw the rice ﬁelds which are all along the river.
Journeying along the West African coast in 1479–80, Eustache de la Fosse observed the cultivation of rice along coastal estuaries as well as the active purchase of surpluses by Portuguese vessels. 15 Valentim Fernandes, a German of Moravian birth who worked in Lisbon with early Portuguese mariner accounts, recorded in the period 1506–1510 the active trade in rice, millet, milk, and meat among the Gambian Mandinka: “They eat rice, milk, and millet . . Poor people who don’t have sweet potatoes, have rice .
Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas by Judith A. Carney