Beyond “Black Rice”: Reconstructing Material and Cultural Contexts for Early Plantation Agriculture

• Published in: The American historical review 2010-02, Vol.115 (1), p.125-135
• Main Author: EDELSON, S. MAX
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African American culture; Agricultural history; Agricultural management; Agriculture; AHR Exchange: The Question of "Black Rice"; American history; Black people; Blacks; Commodities; Criticism; Crop economics; Crops; Eltis, David; Farm commodities; Farm economics; Food crops; Material culture; Morgan, Philip; Plantations; Rice; Richardson, David; Slavery; Slaves; Social history
• ISSN: 0002-8762; 1937-5239
• DOI: 10.1086/ahr.115.1.125

In pursuit of the idea that enslaved African farmers introduced rice agriculture to the Americas, scholars have constructed an elaborate argument to make the case for this transatlantic transfer of knowledge and practice. In the Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History, David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson mobilize statistics to refute this argument's claims about how rice farmers passed through the slave trade to reproduce an African agricultural system on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Here, Edelson agrees with Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson that the case for the African origin of rice in the American South is dubious. He finds that rice cultivation emerged as Africans and Europeans improvised ways to eat and work on a rough plantation frontier. Rice, and the plantation world based on this crop, resulted from responses to contingent material conditions rather than from a culturally specific contribution that generated a particular developmental course. He urges investigations of slaves' adaptive agricultural practices as a more promising path toward understanding black agency in plantation America.