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

Some thirty-five years after Alfred Crosby called attention to the biological consequences of the “Columbian exchange,” the authors of this book document the roles played by Africans (primarily enslaved) in introducing new cultigens to the Americas. They argue that the keys to understanding the botanical legacy of Africa in the Americas are to be found in the dynamics of the Middle Passage and the never-ending need to subsist under trying conditions.

After a set-up chapter that includes a useful table detailing more than four dozen major food crops of African origin, the book focuses on the historical movements of African plants. The authors call attention to the need to provision slave ships for transatlantic journeys that could last months, which not only stimulated new forms of cultivation (including New World domesticates like maize and manioc) near coastal slave “factories,” but also provided the means by which seeds and tubers reached the Americas. Although some slave ships carried European foodstuffs for their crews, the 35,000 documented slave vessels that left the coast of Africa (17,000 alone in the eighteenth century!) required more provisioning. The slaves subsisted on a largely African diet during the Middle Passage, eating foods such as millets, cowpeas, yams, palm oil, peppers, and plantains prepared by African women. Upon arriving in an American port, leftover grains and other foodstuffs became a potential source of seed stock that would enable slaves to cultivate familiar crops.

Throughout the book, the authors call attention to the importance of subsistence, arguing that a bias in the historiography toward export production has served to obscure the botanical novelties found in slave communities. Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff point out that European slave masters and naturalists frequently acknowledged the agency of slaves in introducing foods (pp. 123–26). Although scholars continue to debate the meanings of slave subsistence plots—did they heighten the exploitation of slaves or serve as a site of petty accumulation?—In the Shadow of Slavery reminds us that African crop assemblages were central to the food production that sustained plantation workforces.

The book is most dynamic when describing the actual transfer of food plants via the slave trade. The discussion of the crops’ long-term importance and potential transformations in their new settings is less complete, no doubt a reflection of both source limitations and the authors’ justifiable desire to offer a geographically broad synthesis. There is also a tendency to focus on the plants themselves and less on cultivation practices, with the exception of an intriguing but all-too-brief discussion of the centrality of African hoe agriculture (instead of plows or spades) in the Caribbean (p. 117).

The authors acknowledge, but tend to downplay, how slaves and others integrated crops of African origin with those of Native Americans and Europeans. In this sense, the book’s main contribution, as suggested by the subtitle, is to establish firmly the African botanical legacy in the New World. However, a “legacy” can be interpreted as something that is static and able to be viewed in isolation. In this regard, the authors’ otherwise laudable decision to challenge the Eurocentric perspective implicit in the Columbian exchange may come at the expense of engaging more recent scholarship that questions the rigidity of white/black and free/slave dichotomies that did not harden until the 1700s. In other words, the fullest expression of African slaves’ agency may lie in their efforts to fashion “creole” agricultures by drawing on cultural resources old and new.

The book is clearly organized, well written, and nicely illustrated with reproductions of engravings, photographs, maps, and paintings, including seven pages of beautiful color plates. Although it may lack the kind of compelling narrative necessary to sustain the attention of most undergraduates, anyone who lectures on the Atlantic world or global history will find this work an invaluable scholarly reference. Moreover...