Abstract
The decades following 1492 launched an era of European overseas expansion, which led to an unprecedented intercontinental exchange of plant and animal species. Literature on the Columbian Exchange emphasizes the New World and Asian crops that revolutionized the food systems of Africa but ignores the role of African crops in the New World tropics. This chapter draws attention to the neglected African components of the Columbian Exchange. The movement of African plant and food animals across the Atlantic Ocean in the initial period of plantation development depended on the transatlantic slave trade for their dispersal. Plants and animals arrived on slave ships together with African captives for whom the species were traditional dietary staples, medicinals, and food animals. A proper appreciation of African contributions to New World agricultural systems requires a new perspective on plantation societies, one that shifts standard research from the export commodities that slaves grew to the plants they cultivated for their own needs. This in turn draws attention to the significance of African species as a vital logistical support of the transatlantic slave trade and to the agency of enslaved Africans in pioneering cultivation of familiar dietary plants in their dooryard gardens and food fields.
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Notes
- 1.
Nearly 40% of the slaves traded to the Americas went to Brazil, which exceeded more than three million Africans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, which was decreed in 1888.
- 2.
A plant of South American origin, the peanut had not made it as far as mainland North America and parts of the Caribbean in pre-Columbian times. Established in Africa in the early sixteenth century, the peanut arrived in English plantation colonies as leftover provisions on slave ships. Slaveholders in these areas adopted the African names for a foodstaple with which slaves were quite familiar.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Michigan State University (2005), the University of Wisconsin (2006), the annual meetings of the Brazilian Studies Association (2008), and the Society for Economic Botany in May 2009. I wish to thank these audiences for raising provocative questions that guided this chapter’s evolution. I am grateful to Antoinette WinklerPrins for bringing my attention to Fig. 2.5, her father, who kindly sent the Eckhout exhibition book from the Netherlands, and to Chase Langford, the UCLA Geography Department cartographer, for scanning and enhancing that image. I wish to thank Michael O’Grady for assistance with fieldwork in Pará (1996); Rosa Acevedo, my collaborator on quilombo fieldwork in Maranhão and Pará (1996, 1997, 2002); Leonard Abrams, Seu Benedito, Dona Maria, and Ivã with research on quilombos near Itapecurú, Maranhão in 2002. Additional gratitude is extended to Jacque Chase, my collaborator in the Minas Gerais quilombo research in 2005.
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Carney, J. (2013). Seeds of Memory: Botanical Legacies of the African Diaspora. In: Voeks, R., Rashford, J. (eds) African Ethnobotany in the Americas. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0836-9_2
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