IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v62y2002i01p247-248_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. By Judith A. Carney. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 240. $37.95

Author

Listed:
  • Coclanis, Peter A.

Abstract

The subtitle of this important book captures the author's key theme very well: the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. According to Carney, for a variety of reasons—racism, most notably—many contemporary observers and most scholars over the centuries have overlooked or willfully denied the fact that the origins of rice production in the Americas lay in Africa rather than in Asia or Europe. The unsurprising concomitant of this argument about origins is that Africans and African Americans were primarily responsible both for the introduction of rice seed to the Americas and for the transfer and diffusion of an “indigenous knowledge system†pertaining to the cultivation and processing of the cereal (p. 2). This knowledge system, once expropriated from Africans and African Americans and appropriated by Europeans and Euro-Americans, created the basis for great wealth in parts of the New World, particularly in South Carolina and Georgia. The larger implication of this argument—hardly surprising in light of the foregoing—is that until recently Western scholars, in promoting the view that Africans and African Americans contributed nothing to risiculture in the New World except their labor, have supported and legitimized the imperial project through an egregious case of cultural dispossession and expropriation.

Suggested Citation

  • Coclanis, Peter A., 2002. "Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. By Judith A. Carney. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 240. $37.95," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 62(1), pages 247-248, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:62:y:2002:i:01:p:247-248_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050702006186/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:62:y:2002:i:01:p:247-248_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.