In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World
Description
The 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.
Praise for In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World
“Carney and Rosomoff’s volume now takes its place as essential reading for anyone trying to understand the long-ignored interaction between environmental change, global commerce, natural knowledge, and slavery.”
— Times Higher Education
“In the Shadow of Slavery is thorough, cogent, creative in its use of scarce historical materials, and beautifully illustrated with color plates.”
— International Journal of African Historical Studies
“Professor Moykr has presented us with a useful, entertaining, and exacting analysis of those theories and debates that have engaged economic historians for the last quarter-century.”
— Technology qnd Culture
“Groundbreaking. . . . Carney and Rosomoff present clear evidence and forceful arguments. . . . This informative and enjoyable book offers not your regular meat and potatoes, but collard greens, cornbread, and gumbo.”
— Journal of African American History
“Carney and Rosomoff have written a book that is essential to any environmentally informed study of slavery in the Americas.”
— Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
“Carney and Rosomoff have crafted an engaging and compelling narrative that opens our eyes and awakens our palates to the multiple ways in which our American foodways have been fundamentally shaped by Africa and Africans. . . . highly recommend[ed].”
— Economic Botany
“An important contribution to literature on the Columbian Exchange . . . . Carney and Rosomoff provide the first step in a needed revision of Columbian Exchange historiography.”
— Agricultural History Review
“A very readable account that envelops a sobering look at [the] slave trade.”
— American Herb Association Newsletter