Risky business: rice and inter-colonial dependencies in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans

Abstract

In this paper we are concerned with some issues of inter-colonial dependency, especially in food and with a focus on rice that both directly linked the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds and that highlight some structural issues of colonialism, globalization, and food security more generally. This paper examines rice as a staple commodity, one that both reflected and generated inter-colonial dependencies in both ocean worlds, and how that dependency was ultimately fraught. Because the rice trade did not operate in isolation, we also of necessity include some discussion of important non-food crops such as cotton and jute. In the Caribbean, to greater or lesser extents, the colonial plantation economies relied on imported rice and other foodstuffs, needs supplied by other “knots” in the web, especially in the Carolina low country. Other British colonial possessions, too, were developed as “rice bowls” critical to the sustenance of colonized peoples and the support of commercial crops. One of these newer service colonies was British Burma, the formerly sparsely settled delta of the Irrawaddy River. No matter which ocean we center our focus on, and indeed across the “recentered” empire at large, in the Early Modern period rice was a risky business. By making this point we hope to frame a larger conversation about inter-colonial dependencies and the scales at which it is best realized.

Keywords:

• rice
• food systems
• Indian Ocean
• Burma
• Caribbean
• colonialism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Gayatri A. Menon, Kenneth G. Kelly, Timothy K. Earle, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen D. Morrison is the Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology, Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Chair of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the historical ecology of Southern Asia, work that integrates paleoenvironmental analysis, archaeology, and the analysis of texts and architecture. She is author of Fields of Victory: Vijayanagara and the Course of Intensification; Daroji Valley: Landscape, Place, and the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System, co-author of The Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey, and co-editor of The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence; Forager-Traders in South and Southeast Asia; and Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.

Mark W. Hauser is an associate professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Mark is a historical archaeologist who specializes in materiality, slavery and inequality. These key themes intersect in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries Atlantic and Indian Oceans and form a foundation on his research on the African Diaspora and colonial contexts. He is author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Local Economies in Eighteenth-century Jamaica and has co-edited several volumes including Out Of Many, One: Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica and Islands At The Crossroads: Interisland And Continental Interaction In The Caribbean. He received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 2001.

Notes

1 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 1.

2 Solar, “Opening to the East.”

3 Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 7–8.

4 O'Gráda, “Ripple that Drowns?”

5 Greene, Hemispheric History.

6 For a discussion of how food security was closely linked with the American Revolution, its casualties and possibilities, see Smith, “Food rioters and the American Revolution.” Similarly see, Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War.

7 Kurlansky, Salt; Kurlansky, Cod; Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Moss and Badenoch, Chocolate.

8 Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 75.

9 Carney, Black Rice.

10 Smith, “Lord Killearn,” 1.

11 Carney, “Rice and Memory”; Carney, “African Rice and Slaves”; Carney, “‘With Grains in Her Hair’”; Carney and Voeks, “Landscape Legacies.”

12 Eltis et al., “Black, Brown, or White?”

13 Eltis et al., “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History,” 1334.

14 Ibid., 1345.

15 Hawthorne, “From “Black Rice’,” 152.

16 Coclanis, “Distant Thunder,” 1051.

17 Adas, Burma Delta, 22.

18 “Hill rice” or “dry rice” is typically sown in more humid upland regions and integrated into systems of swidden agriculture. This form of production is almost exclusively organized by households, as its labor and scheduling requirements are significant different from those of “wet” or paddy rice. This is not to say that “dry” rice was never commercially produced, however. Entirely different cultivars are typically used for different modes of farming. See Morrison, Rice.

19 For recent periods, see Mencher, Agriculture and Social Structure. This same point is made for pre-colonial contexts by Stein, Peasant State. Both are discussed in Morrison, “Daroji Valley.”

20 Biggs, Aerial Photography; Biggs, Quagmire.

21 Higman, Slave Populations; Higman, Plantation Maps.

22 Although both India and Burma were part of the British Empire, they had distinct administrative apparatus.

23 Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire,” 1409–1410.

24 Tarlo, Clothing Matters.

25 Still the best discussion of the economic critique of colonialism in South Asia is found in Chandra, India's Struggle for Independence. For a similar discussion on the impacts of rail see Goswami, Producing India.

26 Morrison, Great Transformations; Hazareesingh, “Cotton, Climate and Colonialism.”

27 In 1855 a firm located in Bharuch (Broach), Gujarat was the first industrial mill to spin cotton in India, although certainly cotton-spinning had long been a significant cottage industry. See Metha, Cotton Mills.

28 Chaloner, Industry and Innovation, 113.

29 Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule, 135.

30 Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire,” 1413.

31 Ray, “Struggling against Dundee.”

32 South Carolina's indigo trade in mid-1740s boomed because of the depression in Carolina rice at the same time, the Carolina plantation system producing an elastic supply of the two crops. See Nash, “South Carolina Indigo.” Starting in the seventeenth century, in Bengal indigo was grown on European-owned plantations staffed by “servile labor in various forms.” See Kumar, Indigo Plantations.

33 Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”

34 Latham and Neal, “The International Market,” 272.

35 Hauser and Curet, Islands at the Crossroads.

36 Dunn, “English Sugar Islands.” Dunn, Sugar and Slaves.

37 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves.

38 Dunn, “English Sugar Islands,” 82.

39 Baldwin, First Settlers of South Carolina.

40 Dethloff, “Colonial Rice Trade,” 234, figure 2.

41 Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 75.

42 Database, Voyages.

43 Dethloff, “Colonial Rice Trade,” 234.

44 Berlin and Morgan, Cultivation and Culture; Debien, Esclaves; Handler and Wallman, “Production Activities”; Hauser, Black Markets; Marshall, “Provision Ground”; Mintz and Douglas, Jamaican Internal Marketing System; Moitt, Women and Slavery; Tomich, Petite Guinée.

45 Britain, Papers Presented to the House of Commons; Britain, Respecting the Slave Trade; Dirks, Resource Fluctuations.

46 Marshall, “Provision Ground.”

47 Debien, Esclaves; Moitt, Women and Slavery. For a recent review of domestic economy of slaves in Martinique, see Handler and Wallman, “Production Activities.”

48 Sloane, A voyage to the islands Madera.

49 Carney, Black Rice, 75–77.

50 Long, History of Jamaica.

51 Sheridan, “Crisis of Slave Subsistence”; Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, 77–86; Sheridan, “Domestic Economy,” 629.

52 Sheridan, “Domestic Economy,” 629.

53 Ibid., 632.

54 Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, 80.

55 Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce, 50–57. Ifran Habib among others describes some of the interregional connections of Bengal under the Mughals, just prior to the establishment of British control. See Habib, Atlas of the Mughal Empire.

56 The primary source for the colonial history of Burma is Adas, Burma Delta.

57 Ibid., 30–31. On 1857 see Bhattacharya, Rethinking 1857.

58 Adas, Burma Delta, 31; Adas, Colonization, Commercial Agriculture, 1.

59 Proctor, Rice, 1.

60 Adas, Burma Delta; D'Souza, “Drowned and Damned”; Adas, Colonization, Commercial Agriculture.

61 Indian migrants to British Burma constituted 2% of the population in 1872 and 7% by 1901. See Adas, Burma Delta, 85.

62 Proctor, Rice, 37. Most nutrients in wet rice come from water rather than soil, so in places with silty, nutrient-rich soil there may be no need for fertilization.

63 Adas, Burma Delta, 109–110.

64 The flow of Indian laborers to Burma was large-scale and sustained, increasingly dramatically after the introduction of steamships. Note, too, that many of the British officers were themselves from subjugated places such as Ireland and Scotland. See Ibid., 96.

65 Sen, “Ingredients of famine analysis”; O'Gráda, “Ripple that drowns?”; Dasgupta, “Bengal famine.”

66 O'Gráda, “Ripple that drowns?,” Collingham further explores the role of food supply in the operation of World War II, See Collingham, Taste of War.

67 Roy, Alimentary Tracts.