Rice: Global Networks and New Histories

by Francesca Bray (editor), Peter A. Coclanis (Editor), Edda L. Fields-Black (Editor)

Rice today is food to half the world's population. Its history is inextricably entangled with the emergence of colonialism, the global networks of industrial capitalism, and the modern world economy. The history of rice is currently a vital and innovative field of research attracting serious attention, but no attempt has yet been made to write a history of rice and its place in the rise of capitalism from a global and comparative perspective. Rice is a first step toward such a history. The fifteen chapters, written by specialists on Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia, are premised on the utility of a truly international approach to history. Each one brings a new approach that unsettles prevailing narratives and suggests new connections. Together they cast new light on the significant roles of rice as crop, food, and commodity and shape historical trajectories and interregional linkages in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Genres: History, World History, Nonfiction

445 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 2014

About the author

Francesca Bray is a historian and anthropologist of science, technology and medicine, specialising in China. Bray is particularly interested in how politics are expressed and enacted through everyday technologies (with lots of work on technology, gender and the state), and in the politics underpinning different narratives about technology in national, comparative and global history. Bray has worked at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, UCLA, the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, then UC Santa Barbara and, since 2005, the University of Edinburgh.

Reviews

[Thom DeLair]

This delicious book provides flavorful descriptions about rice production from a smorgasbord of scholars. Although the topics and perspectives vary as much as different species of rice, the main themes surround environmental factors and social structures that shape the production and in some cases success in commodification of rice.

Geographically, the book can be divided between the Atlantic (mainly around the "black-rice debate") and Pacific (East Asian) rice systems. Personally, I thought the book was interesting from understanding agricultural and economic development for non-western nations, although there is some discussion of places like Germany and the United States, the book is global with a non-Western focus.