Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable economies in the world.

Black Rice tells the story of the true provenance of rice in the Americas. It establishes, through agricultural and historical evidence, the vital significance of rice in West African society for a millennium before Europeans arrived and the slave trade began. The standard belief that Europeans introduced rice to West Africa and then brought the knowledge of its cultivation to the Americas is a fundamental fallacy, one which succeeds in effacing the origins of the crop and the role of Africans and African-American slaves in transferring the seed, the cultivation skills, and the cultural practices necessary for establishing it in the New World.

In this vivid interpretation of rice and slaves in the Atlantic world, Judith Carney reveals how racism has shaped our historical memory and neglected this critical African contribution to the making of the Americas.

This analysis of the market sector of the Chinese economy during the middle years of the Ch'ing period is based primarily on price data culled from memorials from government officials to the Ch'ing emperor. A discussion of the nature of inter-provincial rice trade and the transport and financial systems that were developed to support the market sector is preceded by a thorough estimation of the reliability of the Ch'ing price-reporting system. The authors discuss not only how these memorials containing price information were compiled and who was responsible for submitting them to the throne, but whether the prices reported in the memorials were representative of free market prices.