African knowledge transfer in Early Modern Portugal: Enslaved people and rice cultivation in Tagus and Sado rivers

The origins of rice cultivation on the margins of the rivers Sado and Tagus, and the accompanying agroecological and technological changes have not been studied hitherto. Little is known about the dynamics of the salt-fresh water frontiers in those rivers, namely the conversion of marshes into rice or salt paddies, or the role of Black people brought from West Africa and enslaved along the Sado and Tagus rivers. This article presents exploratory research on the links between these newcomers, arriving from places where such transformations were common, and the production of rice during Early Modern Portugal. Over-simplified historiographies have (re)dispossessed enslaved people and their descendants from any historical transformative role. Yet, studies by Judith Carney, Edda Fields-Black, Peter Wood, Daniel Littlefield, and others place enslaved people from West Africa at the core of technology transfer and agroecological change in the Americas. On the European side of the Atlantic, this line of inquiry has yet to be followed. Our study contributes to a more enduring critical approach to the socioenvironmental history of the subaltern in enslaving societies. We propose a research hypothesis reaching beyond the colonial nature-society divide and its implied, further objectification of the enslaved Black person as limited to their metabolic condition. The largely unknown history of rice in the Sado and the Tagus is connected to the untold history of enslaved Black people in Portugal and this article offers a preliminary formulation of these connections.