Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (review)

In Black Rice, Judith Carney, professor of geography at UCLA, brilliantly argues that the origin and development of rice cultivation in South Carolina is due to the knowledge and work of African slaves transplanted for this very specific purpose.

The methodological and theoretical strengths of Carney's book lie in the multidisciplinary approach that she has constructed by relying on different fields such as botany, agriculture, geography, history, and anthropology. In doing so she demonstrates convincingly that the transfer of rice cultivation to South Carolina was not merely the transfer of a plant but the wholesale importation of an entire African cultural system encompassing agricultural and technological knowledge, food habits, a gender division of labor, ethnic skills, and time-work organization. Her analysis gives voice and agency to the slave population still too often described as an unskilled labor force arriving from cultureless countries.

The heart of Carney's argument lies in the comparison of the development of African rice cultivation since the fifteenth century, and the development of rice cultivation in South Carolina since the seventeenth century. The cultivation of rice in Africa has been based for centuries on sophisticated and diverse technologies created to specifically capitalize on each of the many varying environments. The different cultivation systems developed around four main criteria: the position of a landscape gradient from tidal floodplains to uplands, the water regime, agricultural technologies, and variety of rice best adapted to these three considerations. Carney distinguishes three broad categories of rice production that flourished in West Africa: the upland or rain-fed system, where cultivation relies on precipitation; the inland swamp system using either high groundwater tables, subterranean streams, or moisture-holding soils; and finally the tidal floodplain system on river and coastal estuaries, requiring either "no environmental manipulation" or irrigation as in the case of coastal mangrove estuaries. These three categories of production were also found in colonial South Carolina following some disastrous attempts at production based only on European knowledge before the introduction of African slaves. Carney argues that American planters researched and imported West African ethnic groups for their sophisticated technologies, furthermore preferring female laborers.

There has been a persistent perception of African agriculture as a poor system, although European travelers were eager to report these technologies in the fifteenth century. This perception encouraged scholars to consider that the variety of rice cultivated in Africa was of Asian origin (Oryza sativa) and had been brought to Africa by Portuguese merchants. Eventually the prevailing theory was questioned through the pioneering works of Peter Wood and Daniel Littlefield, to which Carney often refers. Although historical accounts from the fourteenth century mentioned the flourishing presence of rice in West Africa when Portuguese arrived, it is still only with Auguste Chevalier and Roland Porteres' work at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle that the African origin of the rice (Oryza glaberrima) was eventually determined.

While investigating the roots of South Carolina rice cultivation, this books is also a re-examination of the Columbian exchange, in the vein of Alfred Crosby—that is, the joint upheaval of people and environment due to the European colonization of the Americas and the following migrations of people and plants all over the world. The standard narrative of the Columbian exchange focused on plants that were of any use to Europeans, and put an exclusive emphasis on Europeans as being at the heart of the global exchange. If we know about the circulation of plants among European and American elites and the role that botanical gardens played in the diffusion of plants, we do not know nearly as much about plants used by the servile population on an everyday basis. Carney introduces the too-often forgotten but fundamental role played by slave gardens as places for the development of biodiversity and horticultural...