2024 the best white rice review
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Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world.
Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World.
In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.
ASIN : 0674008340
Publisher : Harvard University Press; First Edition (March 1, 2002)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 9780674008342
ISBN-13 : 978-0674008342
Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
Dimensions : 6.12 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
Reviewer: E.G.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The history of rice cultivation in the Americas. I love this book.
Review: If you want to know about the history of rice cultivation in the Americas, then I highly recommend this book. You have to give enslaved Africans credit for introducing rice and the knowledge how to cultivate and grow the crop in the New World. Another book that I highly recommend when it comes to the history of West African knowledge and history with growing and cultivating rice is "Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora." Get these two books to learn about West Africans and their history with growing and cultivating rice.
Reviewer: B. White
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Important history
Review: Planning to buy another copy of this book to a friend of mine whose family worked on rice plantations. I think he will appreciate the history of how Africans from certain regions were captured and brought here for the sole purpose of cultivating the rice fields. It puts the lie to rest that Africans had no skills when they were enslaved in the Americas.
Reviewer: Bob Newman
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The African Connection
Review: Not long ago, it was common belief that rice was domesticated in Asia and brought to other parts of the world either by Muslims or European traders. Thus, if rice were cultivated in the Carolinas from the late 17th century on, the presence of that crop was due to some European intervention. Carney explodes this myth. Showing the existence of rice cultivation in West Africa for at least two thousand years and proving that a) the variety of rice plant is not the same as the one in Asia and b) that a vast body of knowledge about rice growing existed in West Africa when the Portuguese first arrived there, she lays firm groundwork on which to build her idea that it was African slaves who taught the English planters in the Carolinas how to grow rice, built all the waterworks and field irrigation systems, passed on knowledge about milling the crop, and cooking the rice as well. She concludes that a whole system of knowledge was transferred from West Africa to North America's southeast coastal swamps (and to Brazil and Suriname too). This knowledge belonged especially to women of certain peoples who lived in the coastal rice growing zones of the area between Senegal and the Ivory Coast (and also in the interior [...] delta area of Mali). It was appropriated, just like the bodies of the slaves, and falsely said to originate with the white planters. How a bunch of ship captains and slave traders would have time to master the art of rice cultivation and bring it to the Americas was never explained by traditional historians. And the rice paddies of England somehow do not loom large in British legend. Africans---again---were erased from history. Carney has re-written them into the record in a very interesting book. The transfer of rice from Africa resulted in South Carolina being the richest of the colonies; it resulted in a black majority population for some time with the concommitant fear of rebellion among the white slave owners; and just for a short time, it allowed slaves to bargain with their owners to get some free time to attend small gardens of their own. Husking the rice by pounding it, a daily task for West African women, became a day-long, exhausting job for slaves in the Carolinas, part of the reason for the high death rate. In terms of breadth of research and the very topic of research, this is a five star book.There is one fly in the ointment. I think this book could have been cut, or at least, more carefully edited. There is a very large amount of repetition. The same ideas, even the same phrases, appear many times and it becomes tiresome to be told the same thing yet again. Many times I felt like exclaiming, "OK, OK ! I get it." This aside, BLACK RICE is a fine book. If you are interested in American history or African/American connections, if the tranfer of agricultural knowledge systems intrigue you, you can't afford to miss it.
Reviewer: Tom Cooper
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Wonderful Resource
Review: Story of rice in Africa and America and the people who grew it. Very readable.
Reviewer: D. McGraw
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: An instant classic
Review: An eye-opening history revealing that the roots of American liberty are to be found in the skills of West African rice farmers. to say they were unappreciated understates it hugely. Professor Carney has done a great service in bringing this story to light.
Reviewer: Jose R. Ramos
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Wonderful Book!
Review: I got this book as reference for a class. After reading it, I have to say..."I love it." Recommended it to my professor at college too.
Reviewer: kawokabiosile
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great Read
Review: Great Read
Reviewer: Harry Eagar
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The richest output of US slavery
Review: When I first encountered Judith Carneyâs argument about African origins of rice in the Americas in a magazine article in 2000 I was unpersuaded. Her book, âBlack Rice,â is more persuasive but carries more than a whiff of special pleading.The difficulty is her contention that Europeans (in this case, the Portuguese, French and English) did not cultivate rice and therefore could not have done it. However, European travelers in the Age of Discovery were deeply interested in what they found â thatâs why they were out to make discoveries, not to mention money. The English had close contacts with Italy and the Levant, rice-growing areas.Carneyâs interest is in South Carolina and West Africa, with tangential attention to rice in Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua. Carolina was settled by Europeans in 1670 and by Africans at the same time.The Africans, many of them, were from areas of West Africa where three distinct agronomies for rice had existed for centuries. Carney makes excellent evidence for their profound influence on the wet rice cultivation along the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and part of North Carolina. But she elides the certain fact that English colonists were trying to grow rice in Virginia from their earliest settlement.They were successful, too, although with dry or upland rice. They apparently had some method of âwhiteningâ (hulling) the grain, a problem Carney makes much of. The Virginia rice was probably Asian, less difficult to process than African rice, but still, it had to be milled.I think she makes her case that the white post-Reconstructionist historians who attributed the skill in Carolina rice cultivation entirely to Europeans were fantasizing, but I do not think she quite proves her case that the skills were entirely African.Her case has many threads. One is cooking styles. Asian rice is sticky (except when it isnât) while African rice properly cooked stays in distinct, long grains. As you find in gumbo. Gumbo is African in inspiration but Southerners also eat a lot of rice and gravy, which is not African-inspired.She is also concerned to discern the gendered division of rice labor in Africa and in Carolina, privileging womenâs role. Letâs just say that her descriptions tending to show that women were dominant in African rice cultivationâ based on her fieldwork â are contradicted by other observers.There are surprising controversies regarding agriculture in what became the United States and not just about whether slave labor was or was not more efficient (in the peculiar sense that economists use that word) than free labor. If you read Northern-oriented historians you learn that Lancaster County, Pa., had the highest farm receipts of any county for hundreds of years, while Southern-oriented historians say Georgetown County, S.C., the hub of Low Country rice, was the richest county in the country.Some authorities say most slaves in the US were imported from the Caribbean, others say the majority were imported direct from Africa.Carney had a good case but overplayed it. She also lengthened it by about twice by endless repetitions.
Reviewer: MT
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Fascinating history, outstanding scholarship.The writing is very lucid for an academic text. Very readable for most people.This work brings together Environmental History and the history of slavery in the Americas (especially South Carolina). It is a fascinating consideration of the intertwined histories of technology, ecology, gender, race, power, and economy.Highly recommended.
Reviewer: David Miller
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This is one of the best books written on the growth of rice. It allows you to understand the economical and cultural impact of rice on the world stage. An informative and well written volume. It brings to life the world of rice in Africa and the grate nation behind it. Well worth the read. Fantastic book!
Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Very informative book.