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Rice today is food to half the world's population. Its history is inextricably entangled with the emergence of colonialism, the global networks of industrial capitalism, and the modern world economy. The history of rice is currently a vital and innovative field of research attracting serious attention, but no attempt has yet been made to write a history of rice and its place in the rise of capitalism from a global and comparative perspective. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories is a first step toward such a history. The fifteen chapters, written by specialists on Africa, the Americas, and Asia, are premised on the utility of a truly international approach to history. Each brings a new approach that unsettles prevailing narratives and suggests new connections. Together they cast new light on the significant roles of rice as crop, food, and commodity and shape historical trajectories and interregional linkages in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Foreword Giorgio Riello
Preface: global networks and new histories of rice Francesca Bray
Part I. Purity and Promiscuity: Introduction Francesca Bray
1. Global visions vs local complexity: experts wrestle with the problem of development Jonathan Harwood
2. Rice, sugar, and livestock in Java, 1820–1940: Geertz's Agricultural Involution 50 years on Peter Boomgaard and Pieter M. Kroonenberg
3. A desire to eat well: rice and the market in eighteenth-century China Sui-wai Cheung
4. Rice and maritime modernity: the modern Chinese state and the South China Sea rice trade Seung-Joon Lee
5. Promiscuous transmission and encapsulated knowledge: a material-semiotic approach to modern rice in the Mekong David Biggs
6. Red and white rice in the vicinity of Sierra Leone: linked histories of slavery, emancipation and seed selection Bruce Mouser, Edwin Nuijten, Florent Okry and Paul Richards
Part II. Environmental Matters: Introduction Edda Fields-Black
7. Rice on the Upper Guinea Coast: a regional perspective based on interdisciplinary sources and methods Edda Fields-Black
8. Reserving water: environmental and technological relationships with colonial South Carolina inland rice plantations Hayden Smith
9. Asian rice in Africa: plant genetics and crop history Erik Gilbert
10. When Jola granaries were full Olga F. Linares
11. Of health and harvests: seasonal mortality and commercial rice cultivation in the Punjab and Bengal regions of South Asia Lauren Minsky
Part III. Power and Control: Introduction Peter Coclanis
12. The cultural meaning of work: the 'Black Rice Debate' reconsidered Walter Hawthorne
13. White rice: the Midwestern origins of the modern rice industry in the United States Peter Coclanis
14. Rice and the path of economic development in Japan Penelope Francks
15. Commodities and anti-commodities: rice on Sumatra 1915–25 Harro Maat
Index
Bibliography
Francesca Bray is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1994); Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997); Technology and Society in Ming China, 1368–1644 (2000); and Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (2013).
Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (1989) and Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Globalization in South East Asia over la Longue Durée (2006) and the co-editor of Environmental Change and Agricultural Sustainability in the Mekong Delta (2011).
Edda L. Fields-Black is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (2008).
Dagmar Schaefer is director of the Centre for Chinese Studies and Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Emperor's Silk Clothes: State-Run Silk Manufacturing in the Ming Period, 1368–1644 (1998) and The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in 17th-Century China (2011) and the co-author of Weaving an Economic Pattern in Ming Times, 1368–1644 (2002).
Contributors:
- Giorgio Riello
- Francesca Bray
- Jonathan Harwood
- Peter Boomgaard
- Pieter M. Kroonenberg
- Sui-wai Cheung
- Seung-Joon Lee
- David Biggs
- Bruce Mouser
- Edwin Nuijten
- Florent Okry
- Paul Richards
- Edda Fields-Black
- Hayden Smith
- Erik Gilbert
- Olga F. Linares
- Lauren Minsky
- Peter Coclanis
- Walter Hawthorne
- Penelope Francks
- Harro Maat
"To see the world in a grain of rice! Beyond mere matters of taste, rice is possibly the world's most important food crop. Its cultivation and consumption have affected vast areas of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, not to mention the billions who rely on it as their principal dietary staple. We reflexively think of rice as the food of Asia par excellence, but since the voyages of Columbus, the African contributions – with an ancient and independently domesticated rice species – have played no small part in the history of the Americas. This is a story of globalization: rice's geographical reach is worldwide, its histories complex and deep. Now, Rice: Global Networks and New Histories brings together scholarship that recovers in one peerless volume the modern history of a truly global crop."
– Judith Carney, University of California, Los Angeles
"The editors of this volume have gathered expert voices from across the spectrum of study, and together they have painted a dynamic portrait of the world's most important food. In so doing, they have shown us once again that rice is more than just rice. It is a powerful force that shapes societies and landscapes, a tool wielded across centuries and on every agricultural continent. Even as some of this book's histories reach into the deep past, their words are sharply relevant to the questions of food production and culture in the twenty-first century."
– Lisa M. Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness
"A stunningly sophisticated and comprehensive examination of the worldwide peregrinations of rice – its genes, its growers, its merchants, its consumers, and its cultural effects. As a model, or arguably the world's most important staple – both materially and symbolically – wheat and maize can only dream of a day when they too will have a volume that does them such justice."
– James C. Scott, Co-Director, Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University
"Reflecting a good balance of experts on rice production and consumption, the contributors incorporate innovative approaches and collaborations in their research, considering, for example, plant genetics, paleohydrology, and historical linguistics. Of benefit not only to those interested in environmental and economic history, this comprehensive book provides another tool for those making policy decisions around food security and sustainable development through its illumination of the social, environmental, and economic history of this vital grain. Summing up: essential."
– E. G. Harrington, Choice
"This substantial and informative work aims to construct and articulate a nuanced appreciation of rice, as traded commodity or local staple, connected across its diverse geophysical, ecological and human settings [...] I recommend the work to all who are practically concerned with rice or food security [...] It is often said that one cannot claim to be seriously engaged with a crop until one has woken up from dreaming that one was re-embodied as a crop plant in the ground. This book will provide much material to invigorate, contextualize and add vivid colour to such dreams."
– Food Security
"Rice features a dazzling variety of methodologies and employs them in an eclectic collection of case studies. Different essays consider quantitative correlations, compare DNA structures from different strains of rice, and make use of historical linguistics, in a truly interdisciplinary collection that includes the work of historians, anthropologists, agricultural scientists, historians of science, and area studies scholars."
– Agricultural History
