Black Rice: the African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas.

By Judith A. Carney. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 240. $37.50, ISBN 0-674-00452-3.)

Black Rice is an eye-opening book about the African knowledge behind America's agricultural success. Carney's investigative lens begins through the gaze of early European accounts of rice cultivation from Senegambia to Liberia and inland as far as the Niger River Delta. However, layers of racism, compounded over time, have explained away these indigenous and sophisticated rice systems observed in West Africa as simply Portuguese-introduced agricultural techniques, despite the fact that rice was not a major crop in Europe. Carney peels back these layers of deeply prejudiced scholarship. Her objective is to repatriate the appropriate role of African agricultural intellect, not merely unskilled black labor, to American history.

Carney's deft use of firsthand archival sources lends historical agency to Africans and Africa in the monumental rise of the New World rice economy. She argues for African primacy against the grain of traditional biases that credited agricultural success to European ingenuity alone. Carney lays out a critical review of the trajectory of scholarly attitudes toward Africa's role in the "Columbian Exchange," the transfer of seeds across the Atlantic in both directions, and rice development on a global scale.

Her search moves swiftly across the Atlantic in space and time to colonial and antebellum South Carolina and Georgia, where rice harvested rich profits from a global market demand for the fabled sativa rice, a strain of which was ultimately dubbed "Carolina Gold" (p. 144). At the heart of Carney's argument is the recognition that not only were commodities like rice and able-bodies traded across the sea, but indigenous African knowledge systems were part and parcel of that human cargo, a population made up largely of common farmers. These enslaved farmers brought with them what Carney refers to as "rice culture" (chap. 3), and she sees its continuation on New World plantations as an expression of sustained African identity across the sea.

Rice culture not only refers to knowledge of seeds and cultivation techniques; it also incorporates a sophisticated understanding of engineering (hydrology, soil mechanics, and civil engineering), processing, and storage. This rice culture was not exclusive to any single ethnic group; rather, it lay at the core of many West African agricultural communities. It was profoundly more than merely the staple crop; rice and its labor were the sustainers of cultural vitality. Furthermore, the core of West African rice culture was distinctly female. Carney clearly demonstrates this broad sweeping commonality across West Africa (today as in the past): that rice culture represented the labor of women, who were the generational curators of cultivation knowledge. "With the dawn of each day women's pounding of rice awakens millions of African villagers, the rhythmic striking of rice grains by the pestle providing the steady heartbeat of community life" (p. 31). Industrial-sized demands de-gendered rice cultivation in the New World, and the breadth of West African rice culture was pounded down to a matter of mere product and profit. What was part of the "heartbeat of community life" in its African context became in America a high-priced commodity that cost many laborers their lives every year at milling season.

Carney adopts an environmentally holistic and deep-time approach to understanding indigenous West African rice systems. A variety of land-use strategies had already been operating for more than a millennia in West Africa before they were transplanted onto American soil, from simple flood recession to complex irrigated farming like the mangrove system of the Diola. Carney's claim that indigenous African knowledge of rice cultivation enabled the success of the American colonies is thoroughly convincing because it draws upon a broad resource base from plant genetics, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and history. Her incorporation of famous characters like Thomas Jefferson and the Amistad captives lends personality to her narrative. The only shortcoming is that Carney's argument that slaves' possession of rice farming know-how allowed them some power to negotiate the terms of their labor is never clearly expounded, though it is a repeatedly emphasized theme. For a book about rice, Carney talks about a lot more than just sativa.

RAINA CROFF
Yale University