Technology and Culture

Technology and Culture 44.1 (2003) 162-163

Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. By Judith A. Carney. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+240. $37.50.

Until the early 1970s, the prevailing view among historians of slavery in the United States was that Africans who were brought to this country contributed little but their brute labor to the development of its agricultural systems. With the appearance of historian Peter Wood's 1974 study of the centrality of rice cultivation to the development of the coastal South Carolina plantation economy and the critical role that African slaves played in the development of that economy, this view was significantly modified. Wood persuasively demonstrated that the emergence of rice cultivation in South Carolina was not due solely to the ingenuity of Europeans, who had little if any experience with it prior to their arrival in the American colonies. Rather, rice emerged as a dominant crop in the region because of the knowledge brought by slaves from the west coast of Africa, who had long experience with its cultivation.

Other historians soon followed Wood's lead and expanded our knowledge of the history of this important agricultural system, showing that planters preferred slaves from the ethnic groups in West Africa that were familiar with rice cultivation. Yet, despite the emphasis this historical work placed on the contributions of slaves to the development of the complex system of rice cultivation that emerged in South Carolina, it did not completely overturn the misconception that Africans contributed little to the development of technology and agriculture in the United States.

Now Judith Carney, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, again challenges this misconception in her excellent history of rice cultivation in the Americas. Carney argues that rice cultivation is an indigenous knowledge system involving human agency and specific social structures and agricultural innovations. By looking beyond the mere exchange of seeds, she renders visible the practices and techniques of water control, winnowing, milling, and cooking that West African slaves introduced to the Americas, practices and techniques that made the entire system of rice production possible. In this way, Carney shows us that rice is a "knowledge system that represents ingenuity, as well as enormous toil." Her book is a significant contribution to our understanding of the agricultural history of the Americas and of African contributions to the technological and economic development of an important crop in the New World.

Carney first examines the origins of rice cultivation in the Near East and in Africa, specifically in the Upper Guinea coastal region. Mining the accounts of European travelers, she shows that traders were well aware of the sophisticated system of rice cultivation that existed in that region. This system included a complex set of techniques for seeding and transplanting [End Page 162] rice, the use of canals for irrigation, and specialized implements for preparing the soil. Drawing upon recent research in botany, Carney also argues that a unique species of rice, Oryza glaberrima, originated and was cultivated in Africa prior to the introduction of Oryza sativa from Asia.

Another of Carney's important contributions lies in her analysis of the role of gender in the cultivation of rice in West Africa. She shows that the involvement of women extended far beyond seed selection, milling, and cooking to include hoeing, sowing, weeding, and transplanting. By looking closely at rice cultivation in the region today, Carney has identified three types of gendered production systems. Indeed, one of the horrible consequences of the enslavement of Africans in the New World was the disruption of these gendered systems of labor, which in turn increased the cultural dislocation and disruption that slavery brought about.

 

Evelynn Hammonds

Dr. Hammonds teaches in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.

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