Customer Reviews

Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Blacks in the New World)

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In this thorough and readable study, Daniel C. Littlefield examines the African heritage of rice cultivation in colonial South Carolina. Littlefield discusses the choices rice planters made in securing workers from certain African regions; he also discusses the knowledge these Africans brought to the plantation economy. Littlefield argues that expertise in rice cultivation mostly came to South Carolina from Africa. Rice was grown by the Malagasy, the people of Madagascar, and by many peoples of Upper Guinea (a region encompassing the modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia). South Carolina planters, in fact, paid the highest prices for workers from Senegambia (the environs of the Senegal and Gambia rivers), a major center of rice cultivation in Africa. Littlefield argues that, throughout the era of the slave trade, South Carolina merchants and planters showed an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of African regions and ethnic groups. He also asserts that not only African labor, but African expertise helped generate the wealth of the opulent Carolina Lowcountry. This work should prove interesting to those interested in African-American history, Southern history, and colonial American demography. Particularly intriguing is Littlefield's research based on the newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves in South Carolina. That portion of the work includes a list of different African ethnic groups present in South Carolina.

It was honestly an okay book. I was expecting it to be a more of a food history than an economic history. But that should have been apparent from the introduction. I was more shocked that rice was only mentioned a handful of times before the second half of the book. With it being first in the title, there should have been a stronger emphasis on rice. What was even more shocking was that South Carolina was not heavily focused on. The locations that took up the majority of the book was Africa, South America, and the Atlantic Slave Trade. South Carolina seemed to be an afterthought. But during the Colonial Era, South Carolina was an afterthought when dealing with international matters. This is not to say that the book wasn't informative or well researched. By all means, it was. It could have been organized in a better way to be more effective. It was often difficult to find a thesis statement anywhere near the first paragraph, to any chapter. If you so happen to pick this book, be prepared to learn about European/African interactions, African farming methods, demand for slaves, and how (if at all) South Carolina took part in it.