Edward L. Cox, Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: the African Origin of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
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Book Reviews -Edward L. Cox, Judith A. Carney, Black rice: The African origin of rice cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv + 240 pp. -David Barry Gaspar, Brian Dyde, A history of Antigua: The unsuspected Isle. Oxford: Macmillan Education, 2000. xi + 320 pp. -Carolyn E. Fick, Stewart R. King, Blue coat or powdered wig: Free people of color in pre- revolutionary Saint Domingue. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. xxvi + 328 pp. -César J. Ayala, Birgit Sonesson, Puerto Rico's commerce, 1765-1865: From regional to worldwide market relations. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 200. xiii + 338 pp. -Nadine Lefaucheur, Bernard Moitt, Women and slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xviii + 217 pp. -Edward L. Cox, Roderick A. McDonald, Between slavery and freedom: Special magistrate John Anderson's journal of St. Vincent during the apprenticeship. Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. xviii + 309 pp. -Jaap Jacobs, Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence abroad: The Dutch imagination and the new world, 1570-1670. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxviii + 450 pp. -Wim Klooster, Johanna C. Prins ,The Low countries and the New World(s): Travel, Discovery, Early Relations. Lanham NY: University Press of America, 2000. 226 pp., Bettina Brandt, Timothy Stevens (eds) -Wouter Gortzak, Gert Oostindie ,Knellende koninkrijksbanden: Het Nederlandse dekolonisatiebeleid in de Caraïben, 1940-2000. Volume 1, 1940-1954; Volume 2, 1954-1975; Volume 3, 1975-2000. 668 pp. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001., Inge Klinkers (eds) -Richard Price, Ellen-Rose Kambel, Resource conflicts, gender and indigenous rights in Suriname: Local, national and global perspectives. Leiden, The Netherlands: self-published, 2002, iii + 266. -Peter Redfield, Richard Price ,Les Marrons. 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Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. xx + 253 pp. -Gérard Collomb, Peter Hulme, Remnants of conquest: The island Caribs and their visitors, 1877-1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 371 pp. -Chris Bongie, Jeannie Suk, Postcolonial paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 216 pp. -Marie-Hélène Laforest, Caroline Rody, The Daughter's return: African-American and Caribbean Women's fictions of history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. x + 267 pp. -Marie-Hélène Laforest, Isabel Hoving, In praise of new travelers: Reading Caribbean migrant women's writing. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ix + 374 pp. -Catherine Benoît, Franck Degoul, Le commerce diabolique: Une exploration de l'imaginaire du pacte maléfique en Martinique. Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2000. 207 pp. -Catherine Benoît, Margarite Fernández Olmos ,Healing cultures: Art and religion as curative practices in the Caribbean and its diaspora. New York: Palgrave, 2001. xxi + 236 pp., Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (eds) -Jorge Pérez Rolón, Charley Gerard, Music from Cuba: Mongo Santamaría, Chocolate Armenteros and Cuban musicians in the United States. Westport CT: Praeger, 2001. xi + 155 pp. -Ivelaw L. Griffith, Anthony Payne ,Charting Caribbean Development. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. xi + 284 pp., Paul Sutton (eds) -Ransford W. Palmer, Irma T. Alonso, Caribbean economies in the twenty-first century. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. 232 pp. -Glenn R. Smucker, Jennie Marcelle Smith, When the hands are many: Community organization and social change in rural Haiti. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. xii + 229 pp. -Kevin Birth, Nancy Foner, Islands in the city: West Indian migration to New York. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. viii + 304 pp. -Joy Mahabir, Viranjini Munasinghe, Callaloo or tossed salad? East Indians and the cultural politics of identity in Trinidad. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. xv + 315 pp. -Stéphane Goyette, Robert Chaudenson, Creolization of language and culture. Revised in collaboration with Salikoko S. Mufwene. London: Routledge, 2001. xxi + 340 pp. In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 77 (2003), no: 3/4, Leiden, 295-366 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 12:33:39PM via free access Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 12:33:39PM via free access BOOK REVIEWS Black Rice: The African Origin ofRice Cultivation in the Americas. JUDITH A. CARNEY. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv + 240 pp. (Cloth US$ 40.00) EDWARD L. COX Department of History Rice University HoustonTX 77251, U.S.A. <[email protected]> Studies on African contributions to the making of the Atlantic world have gathered momentum since at least the 1970s. Peter Wood (1974) and Daniel Littlefield (1981) showed the central role played by enslaved Africans in the development of colonial South Carolina's rice industry and the economie viability of the struggling colony. In this thought-provoking and wide- ranging study, historical geographer Judith Carney builds on their conceptual frameworks to demonstrate how crucially important Africa and enslaved Africans were in the transportation to and dissemination of rice cultivation in the Americas. While Wood and Littlefield largely limited their works to the involvement of Africans in the emerging rice culture of the South Carolina Low Country, Carney charts new ground by concentrating on the African origins of rice cultivation in the South. Central to her thesis is the notion that enslaved Africans brought with them a body of knowledge informed by prior exposure to rice cultivation in western Africa that enabled them to build a successful rice industry in the Carolinas during the colonial period. She persuasively argues that in the process Africans rather than Portuguese sailors transported not simply the knowledge of rice cultivation but also an entire culture. In her words, "rice cultivation in the Americas depended upon the diffusion of an entire cultural system, from production to consumption" (p. 165). Carney's study benefits from her ability to draw on several disciplines, including agricultural history, geography, botany, and anthropology, to inform us of the multifaceted nature of rice cultivation across two continents. It is informed by a rich array of secondary and primary sources that include Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 12:33:39PM via free access 296 New West Indian Guide I Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 77 no.3 &4 (2003) plantation records, travel accounts, planter memoirs, and slave-ship logs. She takes her readers deep into the distinct environments of the West African hinterland where rivers and wetlands provided the ideal circumstance for growing rice. The Africans capitalized upon these situations, at times using sophisticated labor-intensive irrigation methods along the floodplains that ensured that rice could be cultivated in distinctly different environments over a broad region in West Africa. Carney suggests that as part of the "Columbian Exchange," African rice probably entered the Americas in slave ships when traders transported foodstuffs to feed their slaves on the transatlantic voyage. This is contrary to the common notion that Europeans had introduced the erop into the Americas by way of Asia. In her estimation, the Cape Verde Islands had emerged as major grain producers during the height of the Atlantic slave trade when demand for local foods increased. Thereafter, the seeds were steadily diffused into South Carolina, Suriname, Brazil, and to a lesser extent, various other parts of Central and South America. However, Carney admits the limitations of her evidence on the precise nature of this diffusion of different strains of African rice into the Atlantic over varying periods. Recognizing the dangers of some of her speculations, she concedes that "more archival, botanical, and archaeological research is needed in the Americas" similar to the wonderful studies conducted in the Niger Delta by Roderick J. Mclntosh (1998). Archaeological work on early plantations would thus "confirm whether rice was grown in the early colonial period and perhaps even uncover samples of African rice" (p. 152). Viewing rice culture as a "knowledge system that informed both the cultivation and milling of rice," Carney contends that "slaves from West Africa's rice region tutored planters in growing the erop" (p. 81). Women were the important agents in the cultivation and harvesting of rice in both West Africa and the South Carolina Low Country. In West Africa, they remained virtually in charge of sowing, cultivating, reaping, and even cooking.