In Black Rice, Judith Carney details the transfer of rice cultivation techniques from West African societies, across the Middle Passage, to the rice-growing regions of the New World. Although technically the commodity that she is highlighting is rice, the real “commodity” is the knowledge systems and farming techniques behind rice cultivation. The West African region where these techniques came from and were developed was incredibly unique. Carney defines this region in a diagram, in which rice was grown from Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east, and from the southern Ivory Coast to Mali in the north (39). The landscape across this vast swath of land varied greatly, and thus required a mastery of the environment by the indigenous population. Carney refers to this when she writes, “West Africans plant rice in a complex system of production, which occurs in distinct environments along a landscape gradient” (55). This “landscape gradient” describes the three main categories of rice production: “tidal floodplains, inland swamps... and rain-fed uplands” (57). This detailed knowledge was widespread, and thus when shipments of slaves across the Atlantic commenced, this knowledge came with those native to the rice-growing regions. The transfer Carney studies was mainly between West Africa and North America, however, Brazil was also a large recipient of West African slaves who brought rice and thus cultivation techniques with them. Most of the methods employed specifically by South Carolina planters were exact replicas of the traditional West African methods. However, over time these methods began to be “hybridized” and became part-African, part-European mixes.

One example of this hybridization is the evolution of sluice gates. These gates are used to control