September 7, 2001

How Africans Brought Rice to the Americas

By PETER MONAGHAN

Enslaved Africans brought much more than forced labor to the New World, including agricultural know-how that shapes the American diet even today, says Judith A. Carney. In Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press), Ms. Carney, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, corrects the misconception that Europeans carried Asian rice to Africa and then brought it to the Americas with slaves. In fact, rice was part