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Papers – Responsibility in Business, 2009– Part 1

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Early experiments with rice culture in Virginia faded with the prominence there of tobacco.  However, the early seventeenth-century experiments there and brief failed attempts in northern Carolina, largely led to the growing prominence of rice culture in Southern Carolina. Experimentation with various techniques sought the best method for the American climate.  Scottish plantation manager, John Stewart claimed in 1690 to have successfully grown rice in twenty-two different locations of Virginia.    Furthermore, the rice grown in Virginia appeared to be of the upland, or dryer-grown variety, yet the South Carolina crop clearly grew in tidal marshes.  This indicated two varieties in the two locales.  Since Ozyra Sativa and Ozyra Glabberima, the African variety, remain the two distinctive types grown in the early experiments, indeed, throughout historical time, glabberima had to have come to the American shores at some early point.  Considering the level of experimentation that took place in America, and the fact that slaves enduring the “middle passage” ate the red variety of un-husked rice en route, some of that rice certainly had to land in the New World.  Whether experimented with in Brazil, Virginia, or Carolina, O. glaberrima, was undoubtedly employed in those experiments.  O. sativa simply proved more valuable and sturdy (important with the advent of mechanical husking techniques) in the mass-production employment in America.

Tidal rice cultivation on Carolina rice plantations settled upon the “mangrove system” of irrigation, probably first observed in West Africa as well.  This technique required the construction of huge embankments to prevent intrusion of the marine waters, ridging for soil aeration, as well as an intricate system of canals and dikes to control water flow.  This required heavy slave labor, first clearing the marshy fields of brush, then building “bunts,” or levees around the intended field to capture rainwater and hold it for future use.  Planters constructed locks to release the water reserves at the proper time.  Fields had to be kept clean of grass and weeds, periodically drained and then re-flooded, using tidal flows.  Planting usually occurred in late April or May and harvested by late fall.  The winter months would be spent threshing the rice and polishing it.  Henry Dethloff gives a good description of the colonial method:

The tidal system utilized the ocean tides, which when rising forced the fresh water in the coastal rivers to back up-river, and raised the water levels. The incoming tide pushed open a series of water-gates or locks and when the tides changed the gates or lock automatically closed, capturing the fresh water for irrigation until the next high tide. By the late eighteenth century this remarkable system would be used to provide "tidal power" for rice mills.

 These advanced methods of rice production had been conducted in the Niger River Valley and as far east as Lake Chad in Africa for centuries.  In 1594, almost a century before colonization of Carolina, Andre Alvares de Almada, a Luso-African trader based in Santiago, Cape Verde, described such a system in great detail among the estuaries from the Gambia River to Guinea Conakry.  “The residents were growing their crops on the riverain deposits, and by a system of dikes had harnessed the tides to their own advantage.”  Carolina also had similar climatic patterns to those regions of West Africa and the same harvesting times as African rice growers.  As might be expected, similar levees and locks were employed in Carolina.

Altogether, British ships brought just fewer than 400,000 Africans to the Americas between 1662 and 1713, and carried just over 500,000 from the African continent.  In 1999, researcher David Eltis created a CD-ROM database based on W.E.B. Dubois data at Harvard University, including data from over 26,000 voyages specifically made for slaves.  This data estimates an 11 million total number of slaves involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade.  Some estimates go higher, to 15 million. 

David Eltis’ figures for American slave imports show an alarming increase from the period 1701-1707 to 1708-1713, in which the number of slaves from the Gold Coast more than doubled.  Other areas do not show this activity.  Ironically, the Dutch owned the Gold Coast since 1642.  As previously demonstrated, coastal trade often operated independent of sovereign control (barely within legalities as well), contributing greatly to many European systems of trade, the British colonial trade as well.  The Asante also sold their brethren to the highest bidder.  Specifically concerning the British trade, English historian, Paul Monod, points out that “eighteenth-century crime and commerce were often interdependent.”  Remarkably, the “closed” trade loop of the British-American mercantile system gathered most of its slaves from a Dutch-controlled region on the West African coast.  The Asante became middlemen, dealing in African slaves, trading for European goods, and maintaining British influence on the coast.  Historian Ronald Bailey indicated “stiff competition from other slave-trading vessels in the ‘Road,’ as the coast of Africa was called.”  According to Littlefield, “Whether a slaving captain went ashore at one point or another had a direct bearing upon matters of profit or loss.” 

Certainly a glaring example of modern monopoly, British authorities declared a “hands-off” approach to the American side of the demand, while garnering the maximum supply from another nation’s resources.  The British Navigation Acts of 1660 and the succeeding amendments of 1661 and 1663 effectively halted Dutch competition to America and attempted to monopolize the profit.  “The 1661 amendment added the ‘enumerated articles clause’ which required that certain goods and commodities including sugar, tobacco, indigo, and cotton must be exported from the colonies only to England.”  Rice and molasses were added to the lists in 1704 and naval stores in 1705. 

A peculiar American expression colloquially holds that rules were meant to be broken.  “British law became essentially supportive of the colonial rice trade, and when the law seemed to conflict with the necessities of commerce, the law was changed or its enforcement ignored.”  Dethloff’s statement, like Monod’s, agrees with the early British capitalist tendency to ignore the rules where profit was concerned.  Moreover, rice agriculture in Carolina appears to be the reason for the enormous increase of the Atlantic Slave Trade to mainland America, specifically at the turn of the eighteenth century. 

A direct African exchange on the American mainland developed about the same time as the Barbadian immigration to Carolina.  Indeed, Barbadian capital influence extended beyond Carolina.  Recent studies for the importation of slaves to Virginia show that direct African contact began in the 1670s, not long after the Royal African Company, apparently responsible for the initial connection, was founded.  As rice productivity increased, Carolinian thirst for the slave trade could only be quenched through imports directly from Africa, specifically from rice-producing regions of West Africa.  Daniel C. Littlefield gives significant figures in this regard:

It is immediately clear that slave cargoes derived from Africa were much larger than those originating in the New World. The average cargo from Africa for the years 1717-19 was seventy-two whereas West Indian cargoes averaged fourteen. In the 1720s, the average was 172 for Africa and six for the West Indies… under 20 percent, and perhaps as little as 15 percent, of black South Carolinians were imported from the West Indies over the course of the eighteenth century, and no more than 1 percent came from its continental neighbors in the same era.

Significantly, the first three decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a 400% growth in the overall slave trade.  Still, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Carolina remained a relatively minor importer of African slaves compared with Jamaica, Barbados,and Virginia.  Historian Marcus Rediker remarks that 70% of all slaves purchased by British American merchants were purchased in the “British sugar islands.”  Between 1710 and 1719, Jamaica imported an average of 2,896 slaves yearly and Barbados 4,152.  Still, the earliest available naval office records for Charleston, which begin in the eighteenth century, show that most slaves arriving in Carolina came directly from Africa, not the West Indies.  “Fifty-six ships which entered Charleston between February 1717 and September 1719 brought 1,519 slaves, of which 931 or almost two-thirds (61 percent) were transported from Africa by thirteen carriers.”

English ships exclusively carried African slaves to the American colonies while Carolina, Georgia, and the Cape Fear of northern Carolina produced and sold increasingly large quantities of rice. Rice became “king” before the invention of the cotton gin in 1790 altered the agricultural picture to favor cotton.  Carolina exports increased dramatically from 10,000 pounds of rice in 1698, 131,000 pounds in 1699, and 394,000 in 1700. Increasing world demand, probably encouraged by British advertisements, and lucrative rice prices continued the growth with exports doubling each year between 1726 and 1730. 

 However, capitalistic enthusiasm often meets the constraints of supply and demand, which often demonstrates a noticeable response lag.  Barbadians, having left Barbados because they impoverished the soil with overzealous agricultural practices, should have been aware of the consequences.  However, the wide-open territory of mainland America arguably gave these “supreme” imperialists a carte blanche.  Carolinian zeal for the rice/slave trade and its high levels of production economically threatened itself during the decade of 1721 to1731, after which the Board of Trade complained of a “mere” £46,71l profit:

Account of rice shipped to Great Britain from S. Carolina in 1721 and 1731. In 1721, 22,000 barrels of 4 cwt. each, sold at a medium of 18/per cwt. 10,000 negros computed in the Province at £20 sterl. per head. In 1731, 50,000 barrels at 14/6 per cwt. 20,000 negroes. The fall in price is so great that the 50,000 barrels of 1731 yielded clear of all expenses in Great Britain only £4671l. 13s. 4d. more than the 22,000 of 1721 …

Rice productivity began as South Carolina emerged from the phase of a "trading post" stage of economic development into a phase of near anarchy.   Unanticipated factors like the disruption of colonial authority and the flourishing of piracy characterized and catalyzed economic instability in the beginning of the eighteenth century.  A third phase developed, infused with economic stability and order, with “… authority vested largely in the colonial government.”  The emergence of a profitable rice industry brought an end to the "frontier stage" of economic development and a transition of control from royal to colonial in the Carolinas. This set the stage for further conflict between political forces in England and America and resulted in the Lords Proprietors losing control of, first, the southern half of Carolina in 1719 and second, North Carolina in 1729.  Royal control consolidated itself. 

Whig or more controlled capitalistic evidence looms significant.  England’s Glorious Revolution brought an end to the Tory power of the monarchy in favor of Parliament.  The introduction of the Bank of England in 1694, the union of England and Scotland in 1707, and the accession of the German House of Hanover to the British throne in 1714, all opened the door to capitalistic control.  Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, and the Duke of Newcastle consolidated Whig victories over Tory leaders.  The Atlantic Slave Trade paralleled the Whig domination of Parliament, which became a positive capital mechanism, resulting in greater economic demand and higher levels of slave importation in the early eighteenth century. 

A long-running persistent debate concerns the amount of direct African contribution that has been made to the success of Carolina’s rice plantations, conceivably a subtle nuance in the argument.  Still, it has been a difficult question to answer for lack of written records from the African slave perspective.  Circumstantial evidence derived from the needs of plantation owners and the physical outcome of events must suffice.  Consequently, the historiographical debate has proven quite the contest.  While some historians believe that African slaves transported to Carolina (some by way of Barbados) may have exercised more control over their own living conditions, some disagree.  Some argue for a greater contribution of technical knowledge.  Some do not.  The truth will find itself somewhere in the middle.Historian Daniel C. Littlefield stated, “Carolinians may well have gone to Gambia as students and brought Africans back as teachers, making the African influence on the development of rice cultivation in Carolina a decisive one.”  Geographer Judith A. Carney, in her book Black Rice, argues from a geographical perspective that “the origin of rice cultivation in South Carolina is indeed African, and that slaves from West Africa’s rice region tutored planters in growing the crop.”  While Carney and Littlefield argue for a stronger, more direct influence, Historian S. Max Edelson does not.  “Planters did not need African knowledge to initiate commercial rice planting in South Carolina… They did so, however, with an established labor force of experienced African-American farmers.”  Evidence certainly exists to show that these techniques, this African knowledge, already became available to the English long before planting the Carolina colony.  However, nothing really suggests that Africans taught them how to grow rice once they were in America or that planters purchased them as “educators” in their techniques.  They most certainly relied on skilled labor from Africa and sought it fervently.  After all, this pattern resembled the Barbados sugar plantation labor model they brought with them to Carolina.  Still, Carolinians skillfully disguised their slaves’ abilities, taking the maximum credit for the successful implementation of rice agriculture. 

South Carolinians recognized and cultivated this African talent before the profitability of rice in the mid-1700’s and began purchasing higher levels of slave labor from the rice-producing regions of West Africa.  Another suggestion by Carney, is that these slaves, being more valuable to the plantation owners in South Carolina, might have enjoyed more allowances than most slaves in America.  “In South Carolina where slaves’ endeavors succeeded, knowledge of rice cultivation likely afforded them some leverage to negotiate the conditions of their labor.” Gullah, or Geechee, an ethnic group of slaves known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African American community, speak a unique language.  Thought to have originated in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, the “Gullah” dialect resulted from African demographic superiority and relative isolation in that location.  As Karen Hess, author of The Carolina Rice Kitchen, observes, “… slaves in South Carolina Low Country remained more African than elsewhere in the colonies; the very existence of Gullah bears testimony to that fact.” 

Carney states “slaves would attempt to renegotiate” the terms of their enslavement.  Again, Edelson disagrees with Carney.  While he allows that the South Carolinian slaves did have a greater amount of autonomy, he attributes this fact to something other than an exclusive knowledge withheld for negotiation purposes.  “This quid pro quo exchange would have been unlikely for three reasons.”  First, rice culture technology was neither exclusive nor proprietary.  Second, while a few slaves may have become the Low-country’s first drivers and helped to choose land and direct cultivation, it does not mean that all slaves gained privilege as a result.   Third, since negotiations between slaves and planters took place on individual plantations, under isolated conditions, no collective bargaining process could have developed. 

“The Barbados experience was somewhat different… [slaves] were fed from their masters’ stocks… imported salt meat and plantation-grown grain were allocated to slaves by their overseers…”  Why, then, would a “task labor system” (also of African origins says Carney) develop in South Carolina when it had not done so in Barbados?  As rice cultivation grew in importance in South Carolina, the distinction between a trade product and a subsistence profit became greatly defined, according to Edelson.  The extended “freedom” of the slaves, in so far as producing their own subsistence crops, was exploited by the planters.  It became an excuse to avoid providing them with provisions.  Therefore, slaves lived further from their masters, closer to the fields, where they grew their own food, and where their labor was maximized; in many cases, exploited even more harshly.  “After producing their own food for more than half a century, the custom of independent provisioning endured as the material foundation for a distinctive and autonomous African-American culture.”

Although Carolina, before 1700, encouraged innovations in techniques of “husking” rice (removing the grain’s outer hull) and in “polishing” (scouring its inner cuticle) it, the problem persisted.  Specifically African techniques, admits Edelson, were instrumental in surmounting this difficulty.  African techniques of using a hollowed out log and a pole as a mortar and pestle to pound the husk from the grain as well as separating the chaff from the grain by tossing the rice in the air from wide mouth baskets were both employed.  These techniques, Edelson claims, were “African technology.”  Moreover, a practiced touch (African women being more adept at this technique) proved essential to prevent damage to the rice.  However, the labor involved became nearly unbearable, causing great resentment and “lying out,” or feigning illness to avoid the work.  Edelson attributes the slave revolt on the Stono River in 1739 to the harsh labor practices of the Low-country planters.  As Edelson sees it, slaves in South Carolina did not have the social power that Carney alludes to.

 

Continue to Part 3