Black Rice

2 Pages 432 Words

“ Grains of Knowledge ”

Judith Carney, a historical geographer at UCLA, builds on
and extends the work of Peter Wood (Black Majority: Negroes in
Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion,
New York, Knopf, 1974) and Daniel Littlefield (Rice and Slaves:
Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina, Baton
Rouge, LSU Press, 1981)and other folklorist and anthropologist
to demonstrate that the rice industry of the colonial low country
was built by slaves using technologies developed in West Africa.
Carney is persuasive, and her book should put to rest forever the
notion that the only thing Africans contributed to the early
American economy was unskilled labor.

The big question is why would a slave want to help his
master. Slaves were treated bad and received just what was
needed to survive. Carney states that slaves used it as a
bargaining chip, by trading knowledge for less work. While
others received more time to do things for the family. The
Africans still ended up with the worst end of the deal because
they still ended up doing the work anyway.

Economic historians who turn to Carney for a
comprehensive account of the origins of the South Carolina rice
industry will be disappointed, for in her enthusiasm to
demonstrate her main point, that without the knowledge
provided by their slaves, the planters and merchants of South
Carolina would have been unable to supply European consumers
with so much rice. She focuses almost exclusively on issues of
supply and ignores the demand side of the industry. Thus, we
are told nothing about the prices rice commanded, or about the
marketing process.
She is particularly concerned to demonstrate the contribution of slave women to the colonial rice industry. So concerned that she asserts that planter demand for slave women led to shipments in which women outnumbered men. Although the bulk of the evidence indi...