The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

In a scene that could have been transposed from Africa, a family gathered in the moonlight around the open hearth in front of their cabin on the Middleburg plantation. Tasty food at the end of the day was their principal source of comfort after working in the rice fields since first light.¹ The father was a good hunter and had found an opossum in one of his traps the previous evening; the animal was now roasting on a stick stuck in the ground next to the fire.² Squatting on their haunches, the family each tore a piece of maize ‘porridge’ off the mass in the big iron pot, rolled it into a ball and dipped it into a small clay jar of sauce. This evening the family’s relish was made of sorrel and watercress, which the children had collected from the edges of the rice fields. It was delicately flavoured with sesame, which grew in the small garden they were allowed to cultivate next to their cabin. Sesame, brought over from Africa, was a favourite seasoning among those enslaved on Carolina’s rice plantations.³

After they had eaten, the father went off to plant peas in their garden patch. A Carolina slave proverb that made a virtue out of a necessity said that only the pods of peas planted at full moon would fill.⁴ Throughout the American South, the hours of darkness were a busy time for the slaves, as this was when they carried out their own chores after the slog of working all day for their masters. South Carolina slave life was lived almost entirely in the open. The family only retired to their cabin to sleep on a pile of palm fronds, wrapped up in blankets. While the father worked in the garden, the rest of the family huddled closer to the fire. The mother was sewing a patchwork quilt out of rags to provide a warm covering at night. The children were fashioning seagrass baskets that the family would sell in exchange for a little sugar or some bottles of porter. One of them told a Buh Rabbit story to keep everyone awake. Buh Rabbit was up to his usual tricks trying to deceive a more powerful animal. That evening he managed to trick Buh Bear out of a large fish.⁵

These sketches of work on a South Carolina rice plantation were drawn after the civil war and the emancipation of the slaves but the work of rice production had changed little since rice was first introduced in the eighteenth century.⁴

African slaves outnumbered their white masters by four to one in South Carolina.⁶ For at least half the year, the planters and their families fled from the unhealthy malarial stench of the stagnant water in the rice paddies, leaving a few white overseers to supervise the slaves on the plantations. The Africans therefore lived in relative isolation and these conditions fostered the development of a distinctive slave culture heavily influenced by memories of their homeland. They developed their own language, Gullah, a mix of African languages and English; lived in African-style windowless cob-wall huts with palmetto-leaf thatched roofs; decorated their few possessions with traditional African patterns and symbols; and in their gardens planted a wide variety of African vegetables – okra, cowpeas, groundnuts, West African red pepper, and sesame – alongside American squashes and pumpkins and European turnips, collards and cabbage.⁷

In the 1980s, a team of archaeologists located the remains of the cabins where Middleburg plantation’s slave workforce had lived in the eighteenth century. Beneath layers of wind-blown sand, they discovered the charcoal that had built up from years of open fires in the yards in front of the cabins, and a series of refuse pits from which they unearthed pieces of glass, buttons, broken clay tobacco pipes decorated with African designs, small animal bones and hundreds of fire-charred shards from earthenware jars and bowls.⁸ Many of these bore abrasion marks made when the contents of the pot was stirred; some were scorched on the outside where they had been balanced on stones over a fire; others contained charred food. These were the remains of many decades of slave meals.⁹ For years it had been assumed that the slaves had bought their cooking pots from Native American potters. But the team excavating Middleburg noticed that the archaeological trace of Carolina slave meals was almost identical to that found by their colleagues working in West Africa.¹⁰ Indeed, the cooking pots the eighteenth-century Carolina slaves had used were indistinguishable from the flat-bottomed grit- or sand-tempered vessels that were still being made and used in twentieth-century Ghana.¹¹ The slaves had brought not only their eating habits with them from Africa but also their potting skills.¹²

Earthenware jars were the best vessels in which to prepare the pulpy vegetable relishes Africans made to accompany the staple starchy porridge. Moisture evaporated through the clay walls, allowing the mixture to cook slowly at a low temperature.¹³ The slaves also taught their white masters how to make these African stews. Among the recipes collected in the 1840s from the women of Charleston and published in The Carolina Housewife were a range of gumba, okra, peanut and sesame soups. And a good Carolina housewife knew that these dishes were best prepared in African cookware. A group of ladies interviewed by a journalist for The Magnolia: or Southern Monthly declared that ‘Okra soup was always inferior if cooked in any but an earthenware pot.’¹⁴ Cooking techniques and recipes were not all that Carolina whites learned from their African slaves. The plantation economies of the Americas rested on the slaves’ hard labour, growing the tobacco, sugar and rice that made the planters’ fortunes. But the Carolinas were particularly indebted to their black workforce, for it was the Africans who taught the Carolina planters how to grow the colony’s cash crop, rice.

Cut up, in small pieces, a quarter of a peck of okra; skin half a peck of tomatoes, and put them, with a shin or leg of beef, into ten quarts of cold water. Boil it gently for seven hours, skimming it well. Season with cayenne or black pepper and salt.

A ham-bone, boiled with the other ingredients is thought an improvement by some persons.¹⁵

This recipe was included in The Carolina Housewife, but the African origins of the dish can be seen in the recipe below. This is a more elaborate version of the soup that was presented to Ghanaian schoolgirls in the 1960s as belonging to the West African culinary heritage.

1. Wash and cut the meat into pieces. Put into a saucepan with chopped onions and salt. Place on the fire for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Wash okroes, gardeneggs, tomatoes, pepper and add to the soup. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Remove the vegetables from the soup.

The story of the development of Middleburg plantation encapsulates the story of the colony of South Carolina. The slaves eating their meal in the 1730s were the property of Benjamin Simons. We know only that he owned slaves; there is no record of their names or how they came to live in the Carolinas. In contrast, the lives of the Simonses are well documented. Benjamin was the son of a Huguenot (the first Benjamin Simons) who had escaped France to come to the Americas in the 1680s via the Dutch port after which the plantation was named. In 1692, he was granted 100 acres of land on the eastern bank of the Cooper River, about 25 miles north of Charleston, and he moved there with his wife, Esther, and their infant son.¹⁷ Benjamin arrived in the colony when it was only a couple of decades old. In 1663, a band of adventurers and bankrupt pirates, sponsored by eight English noblemen known as the Lords Proprietors, had established the first settlement in the area of Charleston. One of the Proprietors and many of the first settlers came from Barbados, and these men brought slaves with them whom they set to work clearing the land of trees and scrub and planting food crops.¹⁸

Benjamin would eventually have bought himself some slaves to help with the back-breaking work of clearing the land, but it is likely that initially he and his wife felled the trees and burned the brushwood themselves. Another Huguenot immigrant, Judith Manigault, who arrived in the colony around the same time, described how for the first six months after they had laid claim to their land she had ‘worked the ground like a slave’.¹⁹ The Simons family Bible records the couple’s next three children as having been born ‘at Maptica’, which was in all likelihood the Native American name for their patch of land. Six years later, however, Benjamin wrote that their first daughter had been born at ‘6 o’clock in the evening in the house at Middleburg Plantation’. Benjamin Simons had succeeded in transforming the wilderness into a house and farm with a respectable European name. The house was simple: two storeys, each with two rooms on either side of a central chimney and with wide porches to the front and back to afford shade. Later on he added another room to each floor to accommodate his growing family of fourteen children.²⁰

The first priority was to plant food crops to feed his family. The early Carolina settlers were unperturbed by New England-style notions of improving the land and expediently planted maize and beans Native American style in among the burnt tree stumps.²¹ Maize-flour hominy, milk and baked sweet potatoes were the staple foods on their tables, supplemented by game and wild fruits, which could be foraged in the woods.²² The early settler John Lawson relished the opportunities the colony afforded him to hunt, remarking with satisfaction that even the ‘poor Labourer, that is Master of his Gun … hath as good a Claim to have continu’d Coarses of Delicacies crouded upon his Table, as he [that] is Master of a greater Purse’.²³ Early colonial woods abounded in deer, but much of the game would have been unfamiliar to European settlers. Lawson considered beaver tail ‘choice Food’, and Mark Catesby, a naturalist who visited South Carolina in the 1720s, noted that the colonists considered ‘a young bear fed with Autumn’s plenty … an exquisite dish’.²⁴ Another visitor, the Reverend Charles Woodmason, was disturbed by these ‘irregular and unchaste’ consumption habits.²⁵ To him, wild foods gleaned from the American wilderness carried a whiff of danger and impropriety, unlike tame, domesticated crops and animals.²⁶ But most settlers in the Carolinas cheerfully adapted to their new surroundings without a care for whether their fields were properly ploughed or whether their food replicated that of the English yeoman.

These colonists were not chasing the dream of becoming self-sufficient mixed farmers. The Barbadians who founded the colony had planned to expand sugar production onto the North American mainland. They were disappointed to find that sugar would not grow in the sandy coastal swamplands of Carolina.²⁷ All the early colony could muster to export were deer skins, timber and naval stores. As Benjamin Simons felled the trees on his land, he sold the good-quality timber and transformed the lower-quality pine into pitch by burning the resin in clay-lined pits.²⁸ With the proceeds he was able to stock up on supplies of sugar and British manufactures from the stores just beginning to spring up in Charleston.

The fortunes of Benjamin’s plantation mirrored those of South Carolina. He spent most of his profit on acquiring more slaves. When he died in 1717, he had expanded his plantation from its initial 100 acres to 1,545.²⁹ By then the slaves living at Middleburg would have outnumbered his large family, just as in South Carolina as a whole the African slaves outnumbered the white population.³⁰ From about 1700, ships began to make their way directly from West Africa to Charleston, where slaves from the Gambia, renowned for their cattle-herding skills, were in particular demand.³¹ The Lords Proprietors had supplied Carolina with cattle and hogs from Virginia, and these animals thrived by foraging in the savannahs and woodlands. The colony was soon dotted with cow pens and hog crawls into which the slaves herded the animals at night to protect them from wild predators. Thousands of barrels of salt beef and pork became the colony’s main export. But the colonists had not come to Carolina to become graziers. Looking for a cash crop, they experimented with ginger, silk, vines, olive and citrus trees.³²

The first planter to be credited with trying to grow rice was Nathaniel Johnson, who had been governor of the Leeward Islands. Forced out of his position by the Glorious Revolution, he arrived in South Carolina in 1689 with 100 African slaves. On his Silk Hope plantation (15 miles further north along the Cooper River from Middleburg), he began by growing silk but soon gave up on planting mulberry bushes in favour of upland rice. He had no previous experience with rice cultivation. White planters later claimed that a passing East Indiaman first introduced rice into Carolina. But the rice species that the settlers first cultivated was red rice – Orzya glaberrima, domesticated in the Niger River region around AD 300.³³ Thus the allegorical story the African slaves told of one of their ancestors bringing seed rice with her on the middle passage, hidden in the curls of her hair, seems to have more than a grain of truth in it.

The meal that la Courbe and la Belinguere shared at around this time on Africa’s west coast was a demonstration that the exchange of foodstuffs between Africa and the Americas was well established. The Portuguese were active agents in this botanical exchange, and there is a record of a Portuguese slave vessel calling at Charleston in the 1690s carrying supplies of rice.³⁴ We also know from the records of European forts on the West African coast that African rice was a favoured provision for slave ships, and if some of it was carried on the ships unmilled, then it could have served as seed rice. Rice probably arrived in the Carolinas on many different occasions and was eagerly seized upon by the slaves as a favoured food that they could grow on their private plots of land.³⁵

No matter the means by which rice was introduced into Carolina, it would have been the African slaves who knew how to cultivate it. In Senegambia, cattle herding went hand in hand with upland rice cultivation. Rainwater was conserved in reservoirs at the top of upland fields and channelled via a series of dams onto the crops when it was needed. Once the rice had been harvested, pastoralists herded their cattle onto the fields to graze on the rice stubble and manure the ground in preparation for the next sowing. The upland rice-and-cattle farming that emerged in early South Carolina followed precisely this West African style of farming. By the end of the seventeenth century, rice cultivation had spread to a number of plantations, and in 1700, Edward Randolph, Collector of Customs for the Southern Department of North America, reported that more than 300 tons had been shipped to England and more than 30 to the Caribbean, while the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations crowed that the colony ‘hath made more rice … then we have Ships to Transport’.³⁶ When in the same year John Lawson called at a plantation as part of a hunting party seeking provisions, the old African slave looking after the property sold them rice rather than maize.³⁷ The Carolina settlers had acquired a taste for rice.

Apart from a few old India hands, the British rarely ate rice, but in South Carolina it became ‘a constant article of food’. In 1758, the wife of a planter sent a large barrel to her sons, who were at school in England, explaining to the headmaster that ‘the children love it boiled dry to eat with their meat instead of bread’.³⁸ The colonists often treated it as they would wheat and baked an array of breads, cakes, biscuits and muffins using rice flour.³⁹ But their slaves taught them to appreciate African-style dishes such as ‘Hoppin’ John’, which consists of rice and beans boiled together and is still widely eaten for luck on New Year’s Day throughout the American South. Good slave cooks fetched high prices, and one Virginia colonist mentioned in a letter to her sister that her cook was so accomplished that ‘a great many wealthy gentlemen’ had offered to buy him ‘at any price’.⁴⁰ Nowadays, when Southerners use slabs of cornbread to mop up the ‘pot likkor’ at the bottom of a pan of leafy greens slow-cooked with fatback, they are relishing the culinary legacy of the African slaves.⁴¹

When the meal that began this chapter took place in the 1730s, rice had become Middleburg’s main crop. Although the family sitting round the campfire would surely have preferred it, rice was now too valuable to be given to slaves; their standard ration was cornmeal. By the 1730s, the rice paddies they would have been working during the day were no longer in the uplands. A Dutch geographer, Olfert Dapper, described in the 1640s how West African farmers would ‘sow the first rice on low ground, the second a little higher and the third … on the high ground, each a month after the previous one, in order not to have all the rice ripe at the same time’.⁴² This spread not only labour requirements but also the risk of crop failure. One of the first men to experiment with growing rice in the lowlands was John Stewart, the manager of Governor James Colleton’s plantation on the western branch of the Cooper River.⁴³ Rice grown in swamps required a lot less weeding, and the alluvial soil produced a better yield.⁴⁴ By the 1710s, the success of Stewart’s experiment was apparent, and other planters began to follow suit.

In 1717, Benjamin Simons père died and his sons Peter and Simon took over the management of the plantation. They immediately followed John Stewart’s example and set the slaves to work transforming the swamp lands into rice paddies.⁴⁵ It was a hard slog. First the gum and cypress trees needed to be felled and their roots grubbed out of the earth. A five-foot-deep ditch then had to be dug all the way around the field before it was, in turn, crossed by smaller ditches every quarter of an acre.⁴⁶ The slaves dug these ditches and built up embankments, equipped only with shovels and baskets, standing up to their knees in the soft Carolina mud, often up to their waists in water, amid clouds of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.⁴⁷ A verse from a slave song conveyed rather mildly how unpleasant it was to work in the stinking stagnant water of the rice fields:

Come listen, all you darkies, come listen to my song,

It am about ole Massa, who use me bery wrong:

In de cole, frosty mornin’, it ain’t so bery nice,

Wid de water to de middle to hoe among de rice.⁴⁸

South Carolina had found its cash crop. By the 1720s, rice was the colony’s leading export and the pioneering John Stewart proudly proclaimed that in Jamaica, Carolina rice was ‘better esteem’d … than that from Europe’.⁴⁹ Between 1750 and 1770, the number of slaves in the colony doubled from 39,000 to 75,000.⁵⁰ The Carolina landscape was ‘transformed into a pattern of causeways with rice plants appearing above the flooded fields’, which was how Sieur de la Courbe described the landscape along the Geba River in Guinea-Bissau when he travelled there in 1685.⁵¹ It was as if a piece of the West African countryside had been transported to North America.

In 1772, the third Benjamin Simons inherited Middleburg, by then a modest rice plantation with 59 slaves.⁵² At this time, rice cultivation in Carolina was undergoing its third revolutionary change. Innovative planters upgraded their flood-prone systems of irrigation to a more sophisticated tidal flooding-and-drainage arrangement whereby the movement of the tides up and down the rivers was harnessed to irrigate the fields by means of a series of dykes. André Alvares de Almada, a Luso-African trader based in Santiago, Cape Verde, described in the 1590s how all along the African coast from the Gambia River south to Guinea Conakry, the Africans had built huge embankments for miles to keep back overspill from marine tides and constructed a complex network of canals and dykes that enabled them to flood and drain their rice fields.⁵³ During his seventeen years of ownership, the third Benjamin introduced this tidal system to Middleburg’s rice fields.⁵⁴

Sloshing about in the mud, the slaves built more than 55 miles of banks along a 12-mile stretch of the Cooper River. To do this they shovelled and worked into shape more than 6.4 million cubic feet of earth, in the process installing a complicated network of ‘trunk gates’ into the banks that controlled the flow of water (so called because they were made out of hollow tree trunks).⁵⁵ Tidal rice cultivation increased the amount of land each slave could work, from three to five acres.⁵⁶ The 89 slaves living at Middleburg would have been able to cultivate 445 acres. No wonder rice was the third most valuable export from all the North American colonies at the time of the revolution, after tobacco and flour.⁵⁷

By the nineteenth century, the sophisticated rice cultivation that Europeans had observed on the West African coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had all but died out. Labour-intensive rice cultivation fell victim to the loss of manpower to the slave trade. Ignorant of West Africa’s rice-cultivating history, the Carolina planters arrogantly assumed that the ancestors of the Africans who laboured on their rice fields could not possibly have been the progenitors of the sophisticated cultivation system that had made them so rich. But it is difficult to see who else would have been in a position to teach the early Carolina planters how to cultivate rice. Italian rice-growers were not among the Europeans who emigrated to Carolina, and the East India Company ships’ captains, who did eventually bring Asian rice varieties into the colony, were in no position to show the planters how to farm it.⁵⁸

Once rice was established, Carolina planters did study papers and reports about Asiatic rice cultivation, and some employed Dutch engineers knowledgeable about the construction of dykes and drainage systems.⁵⁹ However, the planters’ involvement in the day-to-day practicalities of rice cultivation was limited. Both the white proprietor and the white overseer ‘defer[red] to the … more experienced judgement’ of the African slave drivers, who were the ‘de facto managers of the plantations … managing the work of the other slaves, allotting their tasks for the day, and deciding when and for how long to flood or drain the rice fields’.⁶⁰ The slave drivers were allowed to use their initiative to an extent that would have been unthinkable on the West Indian sugar plantations. Despite their enslaved status, this undoubtedly gave them a sense of ownership over the fields they worked. Indeed, J. Motte Alston, the master of a rice plantation at Woodbourne, claimed that his ‘head man’, Cudjo, ‘looked upon my property as belonging to him’.⁶¹

The plantations produced more rice than they were able to process. Throughout the colonial period, labour-intensive West African techniques were used. The sheaves of rice were threshed manually with a flail; winnowing was done using hand-made seagrass baskets, and the rice was polished using hand-held pestle-and-mortars with pestles that weighed between seven and ten pounds. It was slow and gruelling work. Men were assigned 66 lb of rice to pound each day, women 44 lb. Even an accomplished slave would have had to pound rice for at least five hours each day to process their allotted quantity. Tired or less skilled workers ran the risk of damaging the rice and rendering a proportion of the crop unmarketable.⁶²

It was not until after the American Revolution that Jonathan Lucas, the English son of a mill owner, was shipwrecked off South Carolina and stayed to invent the first steam-powered rice mill. Milling revolutionised rice processing and allowed production to increase, enriching the planters even further. The fourth owner of Middleburg plantation was Lucas’s son, who had married one of Benjamin Simon III’s daughters. Under his management, the fortunes of the plantation no longer simply mirrored those of rice production in South Carolina: it became a site of innovation when he built South Carolina’s first public toll rice mill.⁶³

The Carolina planters, like the West Indian sugar planters, were proto-industrialists, running their plantations as capital-intensive agricultural factories according to the principle of maximising profit.⁶⁴ Most of the rice they produced was exported. About 18 per cent went to the West Indies to feed the sugar planters and their slaves. In 1714, the planters managed to negotiate with Parliament to allow the 18 per cent that went to southern Europe to be shipped there directly. The bulk of the crop, however, went to London in order to satisfy the rules of the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that colonial goods had to be transported to Britain, where entry duties were charged. The rice was then re-exported to the Netherlands and the German states, where it tided the peasants over the winter months when supplies of dried peas and barley ran short.⁶⁵ A number of Jamaican planters had moved into coffee growing, and this also found favour on the Continent. Along with West Indian coffee and Chinese tea, Carolina rice contributed to a boom in Britain’s re-export sector in the late eighteenth century.⁶⁶

The first planters failed in their attempt to transplant sugar cane to the North American continent. Instead, the slave trade supplied them with the means to expropriate an entire agricultural system from the west coast of Africa. While the West African mangrove rice fields fell into disrepair, erstwhile African rice farmers rebuilt them on North America’s eastern seaboard. Rice made the Carolina planters fabulously wealthy, and as white Carolina society saw itself as an extension of English polite society, it spent its money on imports from Britain. No sooner had tea become a fashionable drink in 1690s London than tea-drinking was taken up by the Carolina gentry; in the Chesapeake, tea-drinking did not become fashionable until the 1730s.⁶⁷ There was a craze for mahogany furniture in 1730s London, and by the 1740s, mahogany tables and chairs had begun to find their way into the fine town houses of Charleston.⁶⁸ On the eve of the revolution, rice had made Carolina planters by far the wealthiest of all the American colonists. A comparison of probate records shows that South Carolinians left estates worth on average four times as much as those left by Virginians and ten times more valuable than the fortunes left by the inhabitants of Massachusetts.⁶⁹

In which a slave family eat maize mush and possum on Middleburg plantation, South Carolina (1730s)

How the American colony of South Carolina was built on African rice