In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic WorldThe transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods—millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example—are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots—"botanical gardens of the dispossessed"—became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 Food and the African Past | 6 |
2 African Plants on the Move | 27 |
3 African Food Crops and the Guinea Trade | 46 |
4 African Food and the Atlantic Crossing | 65 |
5 Maroon Subsistence Strategies | 80 |
6 The Africanization of Plantation Food Systems | 100 |
7 Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed | 123 |
Other editions - View all
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World Judith Carney Limited preview - 2011 |
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World Judith Carney,Richard Nicholas Rosomoff No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
African crops African food African foodstaples African plants African slaves agricultural Amerindian Angola animals Archaeology Atlantic slave trade Bambara groundnut banana Barbados bean botanical Brazil Cambridge University Press candomblé Caribbean Carolina cattle cereals colony Columbian Exchange continent cooking cultivation Culture diaspora dietary staple domestication Dutch Dutch Brazil early eighteenth century English enslaved Africans European figure food crops food fields food plants food plots foodways fruit Fula Gold Coast grain Guiana guinea fowl History important indigenous introduction Islands Jamaica kola nut labor land Ligon livestock London maize manioc Maroon Minas Gerais Negroes peanut pearl millet pigeon pea plantain plantation societies planters population Portuguese production Provision Ground quilombo quoted region rice São Paulo Saramaka savanna seeds Senegambia sesame settlement seventeenth century sheep slave ships slave voyages Slavery sorghum South Spanish species sugar Suriname transatlantic slave trade tropical America tubers vegetable vols West African West Indies women World tropics yams York