Commodity Systems, Agency, and Ownership

Commodity Systems, Agency, and Ownership

I found Judith Carney’s Black Rice an extremely interesting work when considering all the topics we have talked about in class as well as all the discussions we have had regarding the definition of a commodity and how a true “commodity history” is defined. Through Carney’s book I kept thinking about the different “systems” we have discussed in class on how a commodity affects the fabric of history and also I had the idea of agency constantly in mind as I was reading. In terms of the idea of a commodity system, I found Carney’s view extremely interesting. Carney used Alfred Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange” system as a sort of framework to her own scholarship. Her expansion of Crosby’s system to include not only crops and seeds from other parts of the world than the European-dominated view of the world, but also to add the significant agency and ownership of the people, at least in Carney’s view, responsible for the spread of the crop. Obviously in Carney’s case, the crop is rice and she assigns near full agency for the spread of rice to Americas to the African slaves who were brought here to work the fields, and even more specifically, Carney pushes the ownership of the spread and success of American rice crops to the hands of enslaved African women. This specific agency assignment to such a group, who is traditional historic accounts were rarely mentioned and certainly even more rarely mentioned as having the agency of such a major economic change is a bold and fascinating suggestion by Carney.

Even though Carney’s book is supposed to be about rice and the spread of it to the Americas, it really is about the African slave labor, and women in particular, who were the reasons for the successful rice trade. However this change of focus by Carney does not change the fact that this book is certainly a “commodity history” in my opinion. Carney’s commodity system incorporates the elements of rice as a physical commodity, but the labor, knowledge, and experience of African slaves are all also commodities that were traded.