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Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast,1400-1900 (Social History of Africa Series)

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Employing evidence from African oral traditions and European archival sources, this book looks at the slave trade in and from Africa in a new and unique way. Casting an eye toward the continent's decentralized societies, and most especially at the Balanta of the Upper Guinea Coast, Hawthorne demonstrates that those living outside states were not mere victims of enslavement and often found ways to produce slaves themselves. The book also challenges our view of precolonial women's history by arguing that in some places African men's work increased as a result of women being exported into the Atlantic. In the Balanta case, as the society turned to paddy rice production in the eighteenth century, young men assumed a much more central role in agricultural production. The book is mandatory reading from anyone interested in environmental, agricultural, gender, African or slave studies. It is well written and argued and might be considered alongside of the works of Walter Rodney, John Thornton, Joseph Miller, Martin Klein, Richard Roberts, and Paul Lovejoy.