The knowledge of rice cultivation, which historian Judith Carney labels an “indigenous knowledge system,” was the knowledge of both how to grow the plant but also where it would grow (Carney 2001). Rice requires a distinctive balance between saline and alkali water, and aridity. Rice and the knowledge for growing it transplanted to the coastal regions in the Americas, where slaves in Georgia and South Carolina cultivated rice for their own use in small plots provided to supplement their nutrition. Planters recognized the potential value of this knowledge, and over time grew to understand that particular Africans knew how to grow this lucrative crop. Linguistic analysis and economic data confirms that a vast majority of slaves transported to rice-growing regions of North America came from the same regions in Africa (Fields-Black 2008).
Eventually, as with other forced knowledge transfers, white planters erased the African indigenous origins of their knowledge and instead emphasized their ability to manage large hydraulic systems for growing rice in economies of scale. Nevertheless, the story of the transference of rice mētis to North America was the story of particular indigenous groups carefully controlling the transmission of knowledge within the parameters of white supremacy. Africans tried to limit the transfer of knowledge to other Africans, who did not know how to cultivate rice, who in turn passed it on in turn to other Africans. The forced knowledge transfer aspect, was that the usage of this knowledge was done within the brutalizing system of chattel slavery and as the means of carving out a more autonomous existence (Carney 2001). In cases when slaves were able to free themselves, their agricultural knowledge became the means of adaptation and survival as studies of maroon communities has demonstrated (J. Carney and Rosomoff 2011; Norton 2017).
Tracing the origins of forced knowledge transfers can be tricky, as with the case of tobacco, which became the basis on which Great Britain built Virginia into a profitable venture. Every history of Jamestown acknowledges that tobacco was an indigenous crop. Yet, tobacco is a finicky plant that requires careful cultivation and very specialized treatment to have value as a drug (Hahn 2011). William Tatham hunted for “the first Knowledge of the Tobacco Plant” in the late eighteenth-century, and had traveled widely in North America. He stated that he could “not recollect one single instance where [he] met with tobacco growing wild … [though he had] found a few spontaneous plants about the arable and trodden grounds of deserted habitations” (Tatham 1800). Tatham credits the Spanish in Florida with the first usage of the plant, which local people had gifted them. The most common first gift of tobacco was when Arawak diplomats met Christopher Columbus in 1492 in the Bahamas. Thomas Harriot, who visited Secoton with John White in 1585, reported that an herb precious to the Algonquian People called uppowoc, was customarily “fowne apart by itfelf” and “the leaves … being dried and brought into powder [the Algonquians] ufe to take the fume or fmoke thereof, by fucking it through pipes made of clay.” In his recent Master’s thesis, Cole Hawkins explores how Haudenosaunee diplomats taught white colonials how to use tobacco and the tobacco pipe effectively in political negotiations (Hawkins 2020). Of significant further importance, it is thought that a slave in Tidewater Virginia perfected the method of “brightening” tobacco, that is curing it in smoke for maximum flavor and potency (Hahn 2011). Thus, it is clear that to Indigenous Americans tobacco was a plant worthy of reverence. Yet, its very uniqueness made it highly unlikely that Algonquians or other Indigenes would have parted with their knowledge of how to cultivate and use it with colonials.
Is it really possible that the origins of the transfer of an agricultural technology of such complexity and great importance to British imperial power as tobacco, could be an historical mystery? The archival silence on the subject of tobacco knowledge transfer might be itself the evidence of a purposeful erasure. Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us that gaps, lacunae, and absences are themselves the evidence of intention and the making of archives (Trouillot 1995). Take, as another possible example of this phenomenon, cannabis. Africans carried the knowledge (and possibly the seeds) of cannabis cultivation, refining, and use with them through the fearsome Middle Passage. Passed down from person to person, cannabis metis enabled the drug to survive, spread, and eventually become a global phenomenon. Yet, while its control and regulation are a primary objective of governments, and even though it has shaped the lives and impacted the destinies of hundreds of thousands (and even millions) of people in the United States, it has garnered almost no attention from the historical profession, according to geographer Chris S. Duvall (Duvall 2019). The reason for this disjuncture in Duvall’s opinion is simple: “Africa is ignored in the collective historical narrative” even though “African knowledge is foundational to the now global use of cannabis as a smoked drug.” Indeed, Duvall demonstrates that we perceive every aspect of cannabis, the knowledge of its cultivation, its effects, how to use it, as well as who uses it, through a racialized lens. Marcy Norton explains there has been a desire in colonialism to “appropriate ‘resources’ and leave behind the cultural baggage” of the brown people who have produced them. The obverse is also true. Colonizers have tried to erase the baggage of their own dependence on and enmeshment in indigenous knowledge and technologies, and simply enjoy the high (Norton 2017).
Unearthing this secret history of agriculture may be the particular charge of the agricultural history discipline, for it possesses an intimate awareness of how the history and practice of agriculture has reified European ways of engaging with nature and extracting resources: part of a teleological pathway toward societal development. Grounded in Eurocentrism and white supremacy, the assumption that sedentary agriculture was a sign of progress still holds sway in many corners, and keeps agricultural history mired in a nostalgic false consciousness. This chapter has sought to challenge that mystification.
The most accurate way to see these forced agricultural knowledge transfers in colonial settings was as unidirectional. European colonizers were in indigenous spaces for the purpose of gain, not to make equal exchanges. They extracted whatever they could find of value, including the know-how from Native American, African, and/or other Indigenous Peoples from other colonial locations. Market exchanges, cultural cross-fertilization, or the collaboration of local populations with colonizers, even as they gave the colonized some latitude for ameliorating the imbalance of the relationship, did not reverse the one-way aggressive intentions of colonizers. While it is possible that in some instances indigenous populations freely shared their knowledge with colonizers, the overall motivation for these knowledge transfers was larcenous intent on the part of the colonizers.
In 1973, the then president of the Agricultural History Society, Clarence Danhof, made the case for a tighter, more restrictive definition of agricultural history: “Should not our small guild be able to make a greater contribution if we could agree on a set of boundaries less inclusive in character and more sharply defining the end products we seek for our efforts” (quoted in Hurt 2004). This chapter proposes one way of limiting the scope of agricultural history by restricting it to studies that directly focus on the violence of imperialism and colonialism, as well as the ways that agriculture practices served indigenous resistance to colonization. There are certainly others, but, while Sterling Evans is correct when he says scholars must “continue crossing national and disciplinary boundaries” in order to reveal the hidden dependencies created by interconnected pathways of extraction and production, the transnational peregrinations have their limits, which was the “total social fact” of colonization and empire (Evans 2007).
As agricultural historians continue to demystify the underlying deceit often inherent in the evolution of the most fundamental of practices for human sustenance, agriculture, the discipline will be called to serve current and ongoing efforts to recompense the forced expropriation of the agricultural knowledge of the colonized in service to empire and nation. Agricultural history should play a central role in ongoing efforts for reparations and truth and reconciliation (Hawkins 2020).
Chapter 3 EARLY NATIONAL AMERICA, 1789–1830: LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR NINETEENTH- CENTURY AGRICULTURAL GROWTH
James L. Huston
In the years 1789 to 1830, the foundation of the nation’s economic strength
