ABSTRACT
Plantation slavery and rice agriculture in the Carolina Lowcountry drew upon captive Africans from a wide area of the African continent, but particular note has been made of the contributions of enslaved Africans originating in the Upper Guinea coast region who had sophisticated knowledge of indigenous rice agriculture. The “Black Rice Hypotheses” argues that their knowledge was crucial to the successful plantation regimes. Papers collected in this issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents explore the consequences of that interaction during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries for the societies of the Carolina Lowcountry, as well as for the societies of coastal Guinea and Sierra Leone.
