Feeding a Colony: African Subsistence Agricultural Practices and the Business of Empire in Panama

• In Event: Place, Space, and Black Life

Description for Program

This paper explores the foundational role of African subsistence agricultural practices and culinary traditions in sustaining the Spanish Empire, with a focus on 16th and 17th-century Panama. Moving beyond the “Gold, Glory, and God” narrative that privileges extractive economies and European conquest, this work focuses on Panama beyond outside of its role as a linchpin in global commerce and trade by focusing on its rich agricultural and ecological history, which has been shaped largely by Afro-descendant populations. Drawing on archival records and historical accounts, this paper examines how African ecological knowledge, labor, and foodscapes were instrumental in developing Panama’s economy, provisioning the galleons and sustaining the Spanish empire, particularly through its main port cities of Panama City, Nombre de Dios, and Portobello. This paper argues that African innovations—such as rice irrigation farming, crop rotation, cattle herding, and other subsistence agricultural practices—enabled Panama to thrive despite being dismissed as an inhospitable and sickly tropical environment. By recontextualizing Panama’s history through the lens of food and labor, this work challenges Eurocentric narratives of empire, emphasizing how African ingenuity fed both colonies and imperial ambitions while remaining ghosted in the historical record.

Author

• Traveon Rogers, UC Berkeley