Wildania Brito
African Rice In The Columbian Exchange
Historians have greatly denigrated the importance of African culture in what we now know and recognize as the Columbian Exchange. Judith A. Carney wrote a scholarly article on how she believed African indigenous rice cultivation shaped the New World food systems. She uses evidence to prove her point, they vary from primary to secondary sources. The sources we will explore in this analyzation of the article are from Jack R. Harlan ( 1900s ), Vaughan and Greissler ( 1983 ), A.S. Salley ( 1919 ), and others. We will explore what type of sources these are and how they support or refute the author’s initial thesis.
The Columbian Exchange brought new ideas, new concepts, new food, and new civilizations to the New World as we classified it. There were so many exchanges in ideas and material things that it is difficult to know exactly where they came from. For example, the exchange of crops, pathogens, animals, the idea of domesticating animals, even religion ideologies. Carney used the source of Jack R. Harlan (1900s) as her first source, introducing her argument. This source tried to prove the point of how Africa had not been highlighted on the successful growth of indigenous crop and plant life that helped humans survive and keep sustained for hundreds if not thousands of years. This evidence was a well-picked source by the author because it started her work very strong, this as a primary source helped Carney display to the reader that she knows what she is talking about. This tells the reader that she has enough sufficient, useful evidence that she started with a primary source.
Carney also goes on to using Vaughn and Grissler (1983) as a secondary source. This source tried to help prove her point about the rapid and extensive trade going from Africa out into the world. The fact that she started off strong with a primary source and went on to use this secondary source various times in the same section, impacted her writing in a negative way. The excessive use of the secondary source ‘ Vaughn and Grissler (1983) ’ at the beginning of her argument, only demonstrated to us that most of her sources from this point forward will be secondary ones and that her scholarly article was not as strong as we thought at the beginning. Choosing to use a secondary source so many times at the beginning of her work was not a wise choice.
Carney claims that Africans have not been given the credit they deserve for their hard work on the domestication of rice and how they developed an irrigation system within their society. The author uses source A.S. Salley (1919) to support the idea of how glaberrima a type of rice originating from West Africa got to South Carolina and used it as an export economy. This source, a secondary source again weakening her thesis. Within the paragraph that this source is reinstated the word probably was used. The misuse of the word, probably, led the reader to believe that this fact was not an assured one, the information was not guaranteed. Again, we see poor decision making when choosing which sources to present in her article.
To bounce back, Carney used R.J. and S.K McIntosh (1981) a primary source to demonstrate how glaberrima was originally domesticated in West Africa. She introduces this source for just one sentence, the sentence that gives sense to the entire argument. The source says that glaberrima rice was cultivated and domesticated long before Sativa rice even arrived in Africa. After the excessive use of secondary sources, at this point, she proves that she also has thorough, explored sources. She begins to make better decisions on including more primary sources than questionable secondary ones.
Elizabeth Donnan (1900s, Vol 4) was used as a primary source to add the evidence of ships purchasing crops native to cities in Africa. This table enforced Carney’s writing because it demonstrated how many crops and goods were brought to the New World from Africa compared to Asia’s contribution. This source brings up the question if there were many more crops coming from Africa than Asia how probable is it that African Rice made it to the West first? The author used this source to her full potential if she wanted to spark questions and start a debate, she did a great job with including this primary source.
Carney uses the source of P.Collins (1766) which was a men’s magazine. It automatically makes her argument a little weaker, it leaves questions out in the open for example, the trustworthiness of the source. The reliability of this source is very ineffective and vague, Carney adds a source that could have been documenting Thomas Jefferson’s attempt at rice cultivation. The source John Drayton ( 1972, 1802 ) was a secondary source used to try and demonstrate Jefferson’s interest in riziculture, it failed. This source was in 1972 after Thomas Jefferson’s attempts, I do not believe this is a reliable source. This was a weak attempt by Carney to try and make her argument stronger, but this did not turn out that way. Towards the end we see that Carney sources herself as a reference, this is an absolute mess. We see she becomes desperate for more sources and includes herself to make the list even longer or maybe even demonstrate how bias she is. Wrong move for Carney at this stage of the scholarly article.
To conclude, Judith A. Carney started a strong argument, she used primary sources to her fullest extent. However, sadly, she used too many secondary sources as well and this weakened her thesis statement. We get to a point where her secondary sources don’t add as much to her thesis and in some ways defies it. Adding herself as a source towards the end of the scholarly article did not add anything to her case, on the contrary, this weakened her argument. The secondary sources she introduced left space for questions and misinterpretations like, can we trust this source? How can a source so recent prove to us something that happened thousands of years ago? Carney should have picked her sources more carefully, adding less imprecise secondary sources to her argument.
