In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (review)

In the Shadow of Slavery earned Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff a share of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded annually for the best book to study the African American experience as judged by a panel appointed by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. For years scholars have been aware that Alfred Crosby’s pathbreaking Columbian Exchange (1972) did not do justice to the roles of African people, plants, animals, and diseases in remaking ecosystems and societies around the Atlantic. When Crosby wrote, in the late 1960s, African history in general and African environmental history especially were far less developed than they are today. Now Carney and Rosomoff have fi lled a part of the hole left by Crosby with this study of the translation of African crops and African farming skills to the Americas in the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. Where Crosby adopted a tone of wry detachment except in his fi nal pages, Carney and Rosomoff present their fi ndings like crusading journalists, eager to uncover neglected truths, and indeed to lay bare conspiracies of silence.

The gist of the book is that several useful food crops of African origin contributed to the sustenance of populations in the Americas, mainly but not only those of African descent. Rice, pearl millet, sorghum, guinea yams, cowpeas, pigeon peas, okra, watermelon, plantains, taro, and a few others were introduced to the Americas from Africa and by Africans, according to the authors. Carney and Rosomoff are interested in the skills needed to cultivate these crops as well as in the crops themselves, so their list includes crops of Asian origin (e.g., plantains) that they believe came to the New World via Africa and prospered in American soils thanks to African expertise. In eff ect, the authors extend the arguments Carney made in her 2001 book, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, to a wider range of African cultigens. A serious critique of Carney’s arguments about rice appeared in the December 2007 issue of the American Historical Review,¹ though she and Rosomoff make no reference to it here.

Carney and Rosomoff claim that the African role in the botanical history of the Atlantic world is “unacknowledged” (138). They write that “the classic literature on the Columbian Exchange unwittingly contributes to the perception that Africa and its peoples were inconsequential in botanical history” (44). This claim appears many times in the book, sometimes in reference to unspecifi ed scholars, sometimes in reference to popular perceptions. It often struck me as an unnecessary self-justifi cation for a topic the importance of which for historians and geographers is manifest. In any case, over the past forty years several scholars have written about the transfers of African crops and farming skills to the Americas. None, however, have done so as comprehensively as Carney and Rosomoff do here.

The evidence they assemble comes mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century published books in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch. They also use some linguistic data, as is normal in Africanist history, some archeological studies, and a tiny bit of genetic evidence. The latter promises important new information about the provenance and geographical pathways of various crops (not to mention weeds, animals, and pathogens), but the painstaking work involved has only just begun. Carney and Rosomoff do an especially good job with Portuguese sources and Brazil. The weakest link is French sources and Saint-Domingue. The book does not use archival holdings as cardcarrying historians might wish, but in this case I think they apportioned their research time appropriately. Archives tend to say very little about their subjects. The old books say surprisingly much. Many are slavers’ accounts of their experiences. They often mention crops and foods, and often credit Africans with knowing how to cultivate and process them, as...