USA HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Early Carolina planters must have learned how to cultivate rice in swamps from their African slaves, some scholars have argued. West Africans, after all, had grown rice for thousands of years.

Detailed explanation-2: -Although South Carolina planters grew a little tobacco in the early years, rice became the colony’s most important staple, and in the years prior to the Revolutionary War, a full-scale plantation culture worked by African slaves emerged along the rivers of the Carolina lowcountry.

Detailed explanation-3: -They came to work the rice, sugar, indigo, coffee, tobacco, and cotton plantations of the British, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies. These slaves were bought at a premium to work on a South Carolina rice plantation because they brought with them specific knowledge of rice production from West Africa.

Detailed explanation-4: -African women brought three rice cultivation techniques to the Carolina plantations: sowing in trenched ground, open trench planting and tidal rice cultivation.

Detailed explanation-5: -Until relatively recently historians accorded Europeans primary credit for originating rice production in South Carolina. During the past few decades, however, some scholars have amassed evidence suggesting instead that Africans were the prime movers in the earliest days of rice cultivation in South Carolina.