Agency and diaspora in atlantic history: Reassessing the african contribution to rice cultivation in the Americas

American Historical Review

Volumn 112, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 1329-1358

  Eltis, David ^a   Morgan, Philip ^b   Richardson, David ^c,d  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c Department of Economic History ^*

^d UNIVERSITY OF HULL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 40949160145     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.5.1329     Document Type: Review

References (124)

1. Herbert Baxter Adams, The Germanic Origin of New England Towns (Baltimore, Md., 1882);
2. Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1901);
3. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920). For modern work compatible with Turner, one emphasizing resources, the other culture,
4. see, e.g., Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1999),
5. and Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, N.C., 2002), 361-364, and the literature cited therein.
6. For creolization, see Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, Pa., 1976);
7. Richard Price, "On the Miracle of Creolization," in Kelvin A. Yelvington, ed., Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora (Santa Fe, N. Mex., 2006), 113-145;
8. Stephan Palmié, "Creolization and Its Discontents," Annual Reviews in Anthropology 35 (2006): 433-456;
9. and Charles Stewart, ed., Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory (Walnut Creek, Calif., 2007).
10. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 5, 896,
11. and Fischer, 'Albion and the Critics: Further Evidence and Reflection," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (1991): 260-308.
12. "Forum: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America-A Symposium," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48 (1991): 224-259.
13. Fischer's lack of attention to the role of Africans is to be rectified in a forthcoming volume, to be titled American Plantations: African and European Folkways in the New World, in his multivolume series "America: A Cultural History."
14. Fischer, "Albion and the Critics," 260-308.
15. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 11, 38, 150;
16. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), xv, 49, 55-79, 168-169.
17. For other examples, see John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (1992; repr., New York, 1998);
18. Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London, 2000);
19. Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (New York, 2003);
20. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, N. Y., 2004);
21. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington, Ind., 2004);
22. and José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France, eds., Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade (Trenton, N.J., 2005).
23. Stephan Bühnen, "Ethnic Origins of Peruvian Slaves (1548-1650): Figures for Upper Guinea," Paideuma 39 (1993): 57-110;
24. James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), esp. 119-188;
25. Ray A. Kea, " 'When I die, I shall return to my own land': An 'Amina' Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies, 1733-1734," in John Hunwick and Nancy Lawler, eds., The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: Papers on History and Society Ghanaian and Islamic in Honor of Ivor Wilks (Evanston, Ill., 1996), 159-193;
26. John K. Thornton, "African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion," American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1101-1113;
27. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1992), 41-55, 97-118;
28. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 15-92;
29. Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1600 (New York, 2007).
30. For recent work on the African diaspora, see Emmanuel Akyeampong, "Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africa," African Affairs 99 (2000): 183-215;
31. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali A. Mazrui, eds., The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Bloomington, Ind., 2001);
32. Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (London, 2001);
33. and Patrick Manning, "Africa and the African Diaspora: New Directions of Study," Journal of African History 44 (2003): 487-506.
34. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974);
35. Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, La., 1981);
36. Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), xii (quote). In subsequent publications, Carney has extended her analysis of the African origins of American risiculture;
37. see her " 'With Grains in Her Hair': Rice in Colonial Brazil," Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 1 (2004): 1-27,
38. and "Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Atlantic Passages to Suriname," Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 3 (2005): 325-349.
39. For a discussion of the historiographical currents in which Carney's book is favorably mentioned, see Barry Gewen, "Forget the Founding Fathers," New York Times Book Review, June 5, 2005, 30-33, esp. 31.
40. For another endorsement, see Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas, 66-68, 93-94.
41. Carney, "Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement," 332-339, makes the case for the western Gold Coast, but rice growing was highly localized there. Upper Guinea encompassed the three slavetrading regions of Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and Sierra Leone.
42. Carney, Black Rice, 38-39;
43. Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003), 36-39;
44. Roland Portères, "African Cereals: Eleusine, Fonio, Black Fonio, Teff, Brachiaria, Paspalum, Pennisetum, and African Rice," in Jack R. Harlan et al., eds., Origins of African Plant Domestication (Paris, 1976), 409-452;
45. A. J. Carpenter, "The History of Rice in Africa," in I. W. Buddenhagen and G. J. Persley, eds., Rice in Africa (New York, 1978), 3-10.
46. By about 1780, Maranhão's rice production met Portugal's entire import demand, and production attained its colonial peak in 1787, albeit at a volume less than one-tenth of that of the late colonial British American mainland.
47. Carney, " 'With Grains in Her Hair,' " 1-27;
48. Judith Carney, "Out of Africa: Colonial Rice History in the Black Atlantic," in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, Pa., 2005), 204-220, esp. 219;
49. Richard Price, "Subsistence on the Plantation Periphery: Crops, Cooking, and Labour among Eighteenth-Century Suriname Maroons," in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (London, 1991), 107-127, esp. 109, 117;
50. Richard Price, First- Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore, Md., 1983), 89-90, 129-134;
51. Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana, Ill., 1996), 54, 62.
52. For other places, see Carney, Black Rice, 75-78;
53. Hans Sloane, The Natural History of Jamaica . . . , 2 vols. (London, 1725), 1: 103;
54. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 10, 59, 122-124, 180. Actually, the so-called Maroon belief that African women came to Suriname with rice in their hair derived from a visitor who spoke not a word of any Maroon language; and the Saramaka Ur-woman who brought rice in her hair for the Maroons carried it from a plantation, not from Africa, and it was commercial rice she was cultivating (communication from Richard Price).
55. Carney, "Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement," 336-337. Some "geographical corridors" were transatlantic; others are claimed to be intercolonial, linking Brazil and Suriname or Barbados and South Carolina.
56. Carney, Black Rice, 107.
57. Of course, a subaltern role should be highlighted where it is attested, as in Barbados, where in 1627 about three dozen Arawaks brought from the Dutch colony of Guiana served to "instructe the English" in tobacco growing, and later apparently in cotton processing. Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660 (New York, 2003), 88, 95.
58. Similar acknowledgment from planters regarding their slaves' knowledge of rice derives from Virginia and Louisiana, but not South Carolina. See Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 100;
59. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 10, 59, 121-122.
60. The data for Table 1 are taken from a revised version of David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Manolo Florentino, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages. com [hereafter TSTD2], which contains records of 306,909 slaves who came directly from Africa into the territories that became the United States. Of these, some indication of the African coastal origins exists for 227,456-more than half of the total number of slaves estimated to have arrived in mainland North America by this route. This high proportion lends confidence to our findings. For the purposes of comparison, Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast can be treated as a single broad African region-Upper Guinea-where rice growing was quite prevalent (although by no means uniformly so), and contrasted with a second, even larger, grouping that includes all other known slave embarkation points in Africa, departure points that collectively were less likely to draw on rice-producing areas (indeed, they rarely did so). In this table, the Chesapeake is Virginia and Maryland, the lowcountry is South Carolina and Georgia, and New England, the Mississippi Delta, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and Florida are the "other regions."
61. Calculated from TSTD2 using the "Search the Database" function.
62. See also David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), 246.
63. Calculated from TSTD2;
64. and see also Gregory O'Malley, "The Intra-American Slave Trade: Forced African Migrations within the Caribbean and from Islands to the Mainland" (paper presented to the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pa., 2006). We thank Dr. O'Malley for making his new dataset available to us.
65. Wood, Black Majority, 13-34, 143-144. It is impossible to know how many "Negro slaves" were African (a minority, we assume). In the first decade of the eighteenth century, children (presumably native-born) were by far the fastest-growing component of the black slave population: their numbers doubled, while the number of adults rose by 20 percent.
66. Some Upper Guinea slaves knew indigo in their homelands, but the domestic production of the crop in West Africa was most unlike the plantation production of the dye crop in the lowcountry. Furthermore, even though some Africans were familiar with the crop, planters shifted land and labor to this new cultigen on the basis of changing conditions in the Atlantic economy and new market incentives.
67. Calculated from TSTD2.
68. Carney, Black Rice, 89-97:
69. S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 74-76.
70. For three excellent discussions of the forces shaping the direction of and fluctuations in the transatlantic slave trade, see Lorena S. Walsh, "Mercantile Strategies, Credit Networks, and Labor Supply in the Colonial Chesapeake in Trans-Atlantic Perspective," in David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and Kenneth Sokoloff, eds., Slavery in the Development of the Americas (New York, 2004), 89-119;
71. Stephen D. Behrendt, "Markets, Transaction Cycles and Profits: Merchant Decision-Making in the British Slave Trade," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 171-204;
72. and Behrendt, "Seasonality, African Trade and Atlantic History" (paper delivered to the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Harvard University, June 21, 2007).
73. If one is looking for food-based connections between the Chesapeake and South Carolina in the Americas and Upper Guinea in Africa, then animal protein would be a promising candidate. It was more available to slaves in North America than in the islands; and it was also a major feature of diets in Upper Guinea, which lay outside regions in sub-Saharan Africa where the animal-destroying tsetse fly lived. The Royal African Company's factors in Kingston noted as they resold a group of slaves recently arrived from the Gambia into the intra-American slave trade that Jamaican planters "have noe esteeme for those sorts of negroes [Gambia] who are used to eat soo much flesh in theire own countrey that they seldom proove well under a dyet except it be for house negroes." Hender Molesworth, Charles Penhallow, and Walter Riding, April 7, 1684, T70/16, fol. 80, British National Archives [hereafter BNA].
74. David Eltis and David Richardson, "Productivity in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995): 465-484.
75. Calculated from TSTD2.
76. South Carolina alone exported an average of 41 million pounds annually between 1785 and 1789;
77. calculated from Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D. C., 1976), pt. 2, 1192. Barrels converted to pounds at 525 pounds to the barrel.
78. José Jobson de A. Arruda, O Brasil no comércio colonial (São Paulo, 1980), Table 28. Valuations of exports survive only for 1796 and 1806.
79. See TSTD2, which confirms the earlier assessment of Colin M. MacLachlan, "African Slave Trade and Economic Development in Amazonia, 1700-1800," in Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, Conn., 1974), 112-145, esp. 115-120.
80. Dauril Alden, "Late Colonial Brazil, 1750-1808," in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, 11 vols., vol. 2: Colonial Latin America (Cambridge, 1984), 601-660.
81. Ibid, 639.
82. Manuel Nunes Dias, Fomento e mercantilismo: A Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão (1755-1778), 2 vols. (Belém, 1970), 1: 433-434.
83. Carney, "Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement," 325-348.
84. António de Almeida Mendes, "The Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Reassessment," in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, Conn., forthcoming), chap. 2;
85. and Daniel Barros Dominguez da Silva and David Eltis, "The Volume, Organizational Base, and Coastal Origins of Transatlantic Slave Arrivals into Pernambuco," ibid., chap. 3.
86. Carney, "Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement," 338 (quote), 339 (reliance on Kea).
87. From the many dozens of references to corn as provisions for vessels, forts, and African communities in the correspondence from the factors of the Royal African Company in both the T70 series of the BNA and the Rawlinson Papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, we will cite just four: Richard Thelwall, Annamaboe, May 1683, c745, 190;
88. James Nightingale, Anamabo, February 23, 1688, c747, fol. 185;
89. RAC to Nich Buckeridge, Howsley Freeman, and Sam Willis, Cape Coast Castle, September 21, 1699, T70/51, fol. 25;
90. and the account book T70/958, 19-24, which contains accounts for ships leaving Cape Coast and Whydah in 1723 with corn "for use of negroes." Albert van Dantzig, ed., The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 1674-1742: A Collection of Documents from the General State Archive at the Hague (Accra, 1978), 26, 29, 47, refers to "milhio" or millet, but not to rice.
91. Carney, "Rice and Memory in the Age of Enslavement," 343. Rice continued to have little impact on the Gold and Ivory Coasts. In the mid-1790s, with the new settlement of Sierra Leone highly dependent on a coastal trade for provisions, the commercial agent of the Sierra Leone Company compiled a detailed list of places of trade and the produce they offered between Cape Mount and Gabon. Rice was available only on the Windward Coast. See Philip Misevich, "The Sierra Leone Hinterland and the Provisioning of Early Freetown, 1792-1803" (forthcoming).
92. Ibid., 327-329, 337. The slave trade data from 1730-1775 is calculated from TSTD2.
93. James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700-1860 (Cambridge, 1993), 50-52, 60-61, 79-87, 119, 134-138, 140;
94. George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 89.
95. Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, 36, 152-154.
96. The role of European iron should not be underestimated. In 1729, William Charles, a Royal African Company factor in Sierra Leone, visited an area after a long absence and noted that people were complaining of having had no trade in months. The reason: "The natives of the country have most need for Iron, to make Axes, Hoes & other tools for cutting down the Woods & Cleaning the Grounds to make Lugares for rice." "Abstract of Most Occurrences in the District of Sierra Leone," March 25, 1729, T70/1465, fol. 104, BNA.
97. Olga F. Linares, "Deferring to Trade in Slaves: The Jola of Casamance, Senegal in Historical Perspective," History in Africa 14 (1987): 113-139;
98. and see also Linares, "From Tidal Swamp to Inland Valley: On the Social Organization of Wet Rice Cultivation among the Diola of Senegal, "Africa 51, no. 2 (1981): 557-595;
99. Robert M. Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York, 1999), 28-29, 108-129;
100. Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, 96:
101. Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 (Oxford, 1970), 20-22, 112;
102. Bruce L. Mouser, "Who and Where Were the Baga? European Perceptions from 1793 to 1821," History in Africa 29 (2002): 337-364;
103. Mouser, ed., A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 75-76;
104. Carney, Black Rice, 29.
105. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce, 121-122. For the suggestion that women milled rice on the Atlantic crossing,
106. see Carney, Black Rice, 142-143. 146-147. and Carney, "Out of Africa," 212-214. For the RAC ships, see T70/938, 15, 101: T70/939, 38fr, 106; f 70/941, 15b, 32b, 47fr, 53f, 89; T70/942, 61, 61b, 62; T70/943, 8, 20, 35, 53; T70/944, 9, 10, 23; T70/960, 68, BNA.
107. The per capita amount in these twenty cases ranged from about a third to three-quarters of a hundredweight, with the average at half a hundredweight, or about 56 pounds per slave. Admittedly, it would be good to have more than twenty cases, but these are more numerous than the few scattered references in Carney, Black Rice, 72.
108. In addition to the four references mentioned by Carney (not all of which are to actual slave shipments), Edelson in Plantation Enterprise, 62-63,
109. mentions the testimony of Captain Robert Heatley, who traded slaves from the Gambia during the 1780s and provisioned his slave ships with "Guinea Corn, Rice, and Cuss-Cuss." Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council . . . (London, 1789), n.p., image 123, ECCO.
110. William Stone, South Carolina Gazette [hereafter SCG], May 11, 1752;
111. Austin and Laurens, ibid., August 11, 1758;
112. Da Costa and Farr, ibid., October 18, 1760;
113. News, ibid., September 12, 1761,
114. as cited in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1935), 4: 379;
115. Thomas Loughton and Roger Smith, SCG, March 23, 1769;
116. Brewton, Doyley, and Brewton, ibid., May 4, 1769;
117. Andrew Lord, ibid., September 5, 1771.
118. For a description of rice growing around Cape Mount in the 1640s, see Paul Richards, "Culture and Community Values in the Selection and Maintenance of African Rice," in Stephen B. Brush and Doreen Stabinsky, eds., Valuing Local Knowledge: Indigenous People and Intellectual Property Rights (Washington, D.C., 1996), 209-229, esp. 213-216.
119. Sketch of a plan that Richard Oswald proposed to follow in settling a plantation in East Florida, May 24, 1764, bundle 517, papers of James Grant of Ballindalloch, Ballindalloch Castle, Scotland.
120. George Garner, Gazette of the State of South Carolina, May 6, 1784;
121. James and Edward Penman, SCG, September 18, 1784;
122. Robert Hazlehurst and Co., South Carolina Weekly Gazette, May 30, 1785;
123. A. Pleym, ibid., July 7 and August 25, 1785.
124. See also W. Macleod & Co., ibid., July 12, 1785, who described their Gambia slaves in the following way: "The superiority of those negroes to any imported into this State (being accustomed to the planting of rice in their own country) is so well known as to render it unnecessary to enumerate any of their qualifications." Newspaper advertisements for African sales in 1804-1807 reveal none of the earlier marketing gambits.