The African Connection and the Landscape

For the past thirty years, many historians including Peter H. Wood, Daniel C. Littlefield and Judith A. Carney have argued that the success of the rice culture in the Low Country was the creation of Africans.

Their research and work also posits that rice planters expressed specific preferences for slaves from rice growing regions in Africa.

The emphasis on African agency and their role in the cultivation and production of rice was part of the new social history, which highlighted the important role played by blacks in shaping our nations history.

In 1999, the publication of the computerized Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database inspired a new generation of increasingly sophisticated studies of the slave trade and slavery and rise of the “Atlantic System.” The Atlantic historians, David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson were collaborators on the data base.

They published an essay The African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas, which argues that there is no evidence to support the contention that the rice culture of South Carolina was shaped by skills imported from Africa.

Instead, African slaves contributed to the rice culture in the Low Country through manual labor as opposed to actual skills and knowledge involved in rice cultivation.

Looking at the slave trade from an Atlantic World perspective, with the transatlantic connections that evolved, the age and sex of the slaves, the broad shifts over time in slaving patterns, the fluctuations in slaves prices are all explained without reference to a supposed desire on the part of the Low Country planter elite for slaves with rice-growing expertise developed in Africa.

Images courtesy of The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in America.