Connecting Continents

Rice Cultivation in South Carolina and the Guinea Coast

Kenneth Kelly, Kenneth Kelly, Kenneth G. Kelly, Kenneth G. Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000297539
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This volume draws together richly textured and deeply empirical accounts of rice and how its cultivation in the Carolina low country stitch together a globe that maps colonial economies, displacement, and the creative solutions of enslaved people conscripted to cultivate its grain.

If sugar fueled the economic hegemony of North Europe in the 18th and 19th century, rice fed it. Nowhere has this story been a more integral part of the landscape than Low Country of the coasts of Georgia, South and North Carolina. Rice played a key role in the expansion of slavery in the Carolinas during the 18th century as West African captives were enslaved, in part for their expertise in growing rice. Contributors to this volume explore the varied genealogies of rice cultivation in the Low Country through archaeological, anthropological, and historical research. This multi-sited volume draws on case studies from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and South Carolina, the Caribbean and India to both compare and connect these disparate regions. Through these studies the reader will learn how the rice cultivation knowledge of untold numbers of captive Africans contributed to the development of the Carolinas and by extension, the United States and Europe.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

Rice and its consequences in the greater “Atlantic” world

Kenneth G. Kelly

Plantation slavery and rice agriculture in the Carolina Lowcountry drew upon captive Africans from a wide area of the African continent, but particular note has been made of the contributions of enslaved Africans originating in the Upper Guinea coast region who had sophisticated knowledge of indigenous rice agriculture. The “Black Rice Hypotheses” argues that their knowledge was crucial to the successful plantation regimes. Papers collected in this issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents explore the consequences of that interaction during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for the societies of the Carolina Lowcountry, as well as for the societies of coastal Guinea and Sierra Leone.

 

It is a truism that much as “all politics is local,” all history is global. It is harder and harder to justify a perspective that focuses too closely on a particular time or place, without acknowledging the links that area of study has to a wide web of people, places, and processes. The articles collected in this special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents expressly recognize that they are all addressing aspects of processes (the development of plantation slavery and rice agriculture) that had consequences for people from a wide range of places (Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas). Scholarship linking the Upper Guinea coast of present day Sierra Leone and Guinea with the rice growing plantation economies of South Carolina has had a profound impact on the way historical trajectories have been conceived of since the early 1980s, if not before. Research by Littlefield and others first pointed to the apparent links between enslaved captives from the Upper Guinea Coast and rice agriculture in the Carolinas.¹ Judith Carney built upon those insights to argue for the foundational and wholesale transfer of rice agriculture technology from the Upper Guinea coast to rice plantations, identified first in the Carolinas, and then elsewhere in the New World, in what became known as the “Black Rice Hypothesis.”²

While the specifics of the Black Rice Hypothesis have been criticized in various ways,³ the fundamental notion – that enslaved Africans were more than labor, and exerted their agency in important and transcendent ways – is now widely accepted in a range of mediums, from pottery, to food, to housing, to music.⁴ The Black Rice Hypothesis has gone a long way toward forcing scholars to question the role African agency may have played in many different practices. In keeping with the recent trends in microhistory, this has also compelled a recognition that specific histories – of places, of people, of events – matter in the way individuals behaved in novel situations. The articles in this issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents arose from a two day seminar held at the University of South Carolina and sponsored by the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies that brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines – including history, archaeology, anthropology, and geography – to explore the current range of scholarship that addresses the links between the Upper Guinea Coast and the Carolinas. From the very beginning of our workshop, it became clear that the connections we were seeking between the two regions as they related to slavery and rice were much stronger and longer, with linkages continuing well past the end of the slave trade and into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the papers here by Edda Fields-Black, Christopher R. DeCorse, Kenneth G. Kelly and ElHadj Ibrahima Fall, Andrew Agha, and Nemata Blyden, the original workshop had presentations by Judith Carney, Bruce Mouser, Edward Carr, and Leland Ferguson, who were regrettably unable to contribute to the current project. Given the role rice agriculture played either as prime focus of the contributions, or as contributing factor, we felt that bringing a non-Atlantic perspective on rice to the collection would be valuable, particularly as in the Americas, rice is such a dominant narrative through the end of the American Civil War, and then it rapidly disappears, without discussion of what replaced Carolina production. To that end, we added the article by Kathleen Morrison and Mark W. Hauser that discusses exactly what happens to the rice economy in the years following the American Civil War and the collapse of Carolina rice.

The current collection presents a range of perspectives on the connections between the Upper Guinea Coast and the Carolina Lowcountry. The cultural consequences for Diasporic societies are explored both through the discussion by Fields-Black concerning the impacts of rice cultivation on commercial and subsistence scales for Africans enslaved in the Carolinas, as well as for Africans on the Upper Guinea coast. Two articles discuss the archaeological implications of the slave trade on the Upper Guinea coast, with one exploration of the slave trading establishments in coastal Sierra Leone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (DeCorse), and the other reporting on the first excavations of “illegal” slave trading posts in Guinea that were active during the nineteenth century (Kelly and Fall). These contributions acknowledge the impacts of slave trading in the immediate area of the trading posts through the creation of new Atlantic identities, as well as the consequences to more distant societies. The material traces of the consequences of the Atlantic trade between the Upper Guinea coast and the present day USA is discussed in Agha’s contribution which highlights the materialization of the labor of African agents who reshaped the Carolina landscape with the strength of their arms. To remind us that the connections between the Carolinas and the Upper Guinea Coast endured in significant ways following the end of the slave trade and plantation slavery, Blyden describes the personal connections that tied Sierra Leone to the USA, particularly the Southeast, in the decades following the American Civil War. Morrison and Hauser, in their contribution, demonstrate that the Atlantic world that united the Guinea Coast and the Carolinas with Europe extended beyond the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia.

It is our hope that the contributions to this volume will help to reinforce an appreciation of the extensive web of links that have connected these regions over the past four centuries, and that the role of individuals in influencing the direction of history will become apparent. I wish to thank all the participants in the Walker Workshop, whether their papers appear here or not, as all the current contributions have benefited from the exciting discussions we shared over the course of our two days together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves; Wood, Black Majority.

2. Carney, Black Rice.

3. Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora,”; Edelson, “Beyond ‘Black Rice’,” Hawthorne, “From ‘Black Rice’ to ‘Brown’,” Eltis, Morgan, and Richardson, “Black, Brown or White.”

4. Ferguson, Uncommon Ground.

References

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Edelson, S. Max. “Beyond “Black Rice”: Reconstructing Material and Cultural Contexts for Early Plantation Agriculture” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 125–135.

Eltis, David, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas.” The American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1329–1358.

Eltis, David, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. “Black, Brown or White? Color-Coding American Commercial Rice Cultivation with Slave Labor.” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 164–171.

Ferguson, Leland. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650–1800. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1992.

Hawthorne, Walter. “From “Black Rice” to “Brown”: Rethinking the History of Risiculture in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Atlantic.” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 151–163.

Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.

Atlantic rice and rice farmers: rising from debate, engaging new sources, methods, and modes of inquiry, and asking new questions

Edda L. Fields-Black iD

For the past 40 years, scholars of the US South and West Africa have been engaged in a robust debate about the agency of enslaved laborers in the origins and evolution of the commercial rice industry in the colonial South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Though the debate has been contentious at times, scholars studying Atlantic rice farmers have come to agree on a few points: enslaved Africans’ provision grounds were probably important in Carolina colonists’ experimentation with rice as a staple crop; enslaved Africans continued to practice “heel–toe” sowing techniques until the nineteenth century; African water control and processing techniques served as prototypes for mechanized irrigation and processing machinery. This article suggests the time has come to explore additional questions, particularly in what different ways did subsistence and commercial production shape the lives of African peasants and enslaved Africans? An analysis of the evolution of mangrove rice production in West Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast and the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry reveals overlap between these two artificial categories. However, the different impacts of intensive mangrove and tidal rice production on the health of African peasants in early modern Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved Africans in the antebellum South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry are stark indeed.

For the past 40 years, scholars of the US South and West Africa have been engaged in a robust debate about the agency of enslaved laborers in the origins and evolution of the commercial rice industry in the colonial South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. At the end of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Rice and its consequences in the greater “Atlantic” world
• 2 Atlantic rice and rice farmers: rising from debate, engaging new sources, methods, and modes of inquiry, and asking new questions
• 3 Sierra Leone in the Atlantic World: concepts, contours, and exchange
• 4 Employing archaeology to (dis)entangle the nineteenth-century illegal slave trade on the Rio Pongo, Guinea
• 5 Standing the test of time: embankment investigations, their implications for African technology transfer and effect on African American archaeology in South Carolina
• 6 “This na true story of our history”: South Carolina in Sierra Leone’s historical memory
• 7 Risky business: rice and inter-colonial dependencies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans
• Index