ABSTRACT
The knowledge and expertise required for rice cultivation, however, did not exist among Barbadian planters who transferred a slave-based economy to South Carolina, nor did it come with the successive waves of British and French colonists who expanded the plantation system. Wood challenged this perspective by arguing that Africans contributed more than mere muscle to South Carolina’s rice economy: the agronomic knowledge critical to the crop’s development in South Carolina originated with slaves. Educated descendants of planters dominated writing on the South Carolina rice economy into the twentieth century and provided glowing accounts of the accomplishments of their forebears. The West African rice production systems that predate the Atlantic Slave Trade are still cultivated in the region today. The low-lying Senegambian region is dotted with numerous inland swamps, of limited areal extent, which form another important microenvironment for rice cultivation.
