African Crops in the Environmental History of New World Plantation Societies

Abstract

The literature on the Columbian Exchange emphasizes the New World and Asian crops that transformed the food systems of Africa but ignores the role of African introductions in the environmental history of tropical America. This paper addresses the research lacunae by identifying the neglected African components of the Columbian Exchange. Next, it situates African crop transfers historically, drawing attention to the transatlantic slave trade and their importance as provisions on slave ships. This consideration leads to a research emphasis on subsistence, namely the foodstaples that underpinned the transatlantic commerce in human beings and plantation commodity production. The paper illustrates the agency of enslaved Africans in instigating the cultivation of Old World tropical staples. It is hypothesized that from seeds and rootstock occasionally remaining from slave-ship voyages, enslaved Africans accessed familiar dietary staples. They established them in the yards around their humble dwellings and in plantation provision grounds, where European naturalists and slaveholders reported first encountering the novel plants. As inadvertent introductions, African food crops depended upon slave ships for their circulation and African slaves for pioneering them as subsistence staples on slave food plots. The paper’s emphasis on subsistence and the tropical crops that diffused from Africa to plantation societies underscores the role of enslaved Africans in shaping the foodways and environmental history of tropical America.