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

Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff's In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World situates Africa as the origin of food crops, plants, and animals that spread from the continent through the Atlantic slave trade into the New World. This work stretches beyond the boundaries of initial contact between Europeans and Africans in the coastal slave ports deep into the interior farming communities of West Africa and the Americas, revealing the degree to which the slave trade embroiled indigenous populations and diaspora communities of the New World. These scholars disprove notions of the African continent as botanically deficient and historically plagued with chronic food shortages.

Their examination of precolonial Africa's history of agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals highlights the expertise that African farmers developed from experimentation and adaptation to the ecological complexity of microregional conditions. They trace the journey of African plants, livestock, and pasture grasses, from the subsistence fields of Africa onto slave ships, to ports of call in the Americas and Caribbean, into slave plots and plantation fields in the New World. Accordingly, African foods fed crew and slaves on the ships throughout the Middle Passage and personnel in the colonial trading posts. African crops cultivated on New World plantation fields were profitable export commodities. African-cultivated food and plants provided the foundation on which the Atlantic economy flourished and profited.

These scholars celebrate the contributions of smallholder subsistence African farmers to the transference process. They unravel the intricate details of human and botanical movement from Africa to the Americas, uncovering patterns otherwise overlooked. Recounting the multilayered story of African agriculture illuminates the role of subsistence farmers in the history of the global food chain.

One of this work's main strengths is its reconceptualization of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, which clearly demonstrates the importance of African agricultural knowledge for the trade and the development of New World plantation economies. Considering the need for food opens a window to the inner workings of the slave trade. The micro-assessment of trading and exchanging food magnifies relations between Europeans and Africans. This fresh analysis brings compelling themes to light as participants in the trade and those effected by it responded to the need for food. One of the most interesting themes is the connection between precolonial subsistence agricultural production, slave subsistence in Africa and the New World, and European commercial production in New World plantation economies.

For example, while the forced removal of agricultural workers from Africa's interior destabilized agricultural production, the need to feed the mass of humans involved in the trade created a need for surplus food. That need led to increased production of traditional drought-resistant cereals and ultimately the restructuring of African agricultural systems to meet the increasing food demands of slave traders. This demand extended to New World plantations and cultivation of plots by slaves. A dynamic of independent production among the enslaved created opportunities to advance African methods of production. Europeans used specific crops like yams and plantains cultivated in slave subsistence plots to feed populations in the military garrisons. Manioc flour produced in Brazil replaced European cereals on the slave ships.

Another strength of this study is the reevaluation of sources and a critique of traditional Eurocentric scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade and the Columbian Exchange, which attributes the origin and transference of African food crops to Europeans. Carney and Rosomoff establish a strong case for the absence of a historiography on the origin of African crops and their role in sustaining the trade. They counter historical records that credit Europeans with the initial cultivation of traditional African foods in the New World. This work provides numerous examples illustrating the bias of classic Columbian Exchange scholarship. In one instance, traditional sources credit the Portuguese with introducing the banana...