ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Dry Rice Mirage: Imperial Acclimatization, Knowledge Appropriation, and Food Solutionism in the Colonial Enlightenment

• In Event: Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 3

English Abstract

This presentation traces the emergence of imperial acclimatization science through the case-study of “dry rice”, the 18th-century European denomination of modern upland rice. First observed by French missionary and future intendant of Isle-de-France Pierre Poivre in Cochinchina 1750, dry rice became the focus of experimental trials both in Indian Ocean colonies and at the Jardin du Roi in Paris. It was promoted not only as a reliable subsistence crop for enslaved plantation workers, but also as a solution for disease issues associated with traditional rice irrigation. Rice cultivation, in fact, was held to be responsible of fevers and severely restricted by public authorities. In the following decades, agronomic experiments multiplied across Mediterranean Europe, in oversea colonies, as well as in the early United States, where it was promoted by Thomas Jefferson himself. Although these attempts consistently produced disappointing yields and repeated failures, dry rice rapidly became an object of imperial competition and a test bench for colonial science. Its diffusion sparked crucial debates on the reform of plantation regimes, the relationship between staple crops and world civilizations, and the modalities of appropriation of Indigenous knowledge by European agronomists. Drawing on recent historiography highlighting the entanglements between agronomy, acclimatization and empire during the Enlightenment period, the paper argues that the race for dry rice represents a defining instance of food solutionism.

Author

• Gilles Narcy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / Università degli Studi di Milano