Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., eminent field biologist and lowcountry
South Carolina native, has brought all of his skills as a botanist,
historian, photographer, and conservationist to bear in a
multidisciplinary study of the rice industry in South Carolina from
its beginnings in the 1670s to its demise in the twentieth century.
Using the tools of the geographer, civil engineer, draftsman and
close readings of many primary and secondary sources on the history
of rice culture in the colony and state, Porcher and coauthor
William Robert Judd have amassed a great body of previously unknown
information on rice history.
Detailed illustrations and descriptions of the implements and
machines featuring technology used to prepare Carolina rice for
overseas markets, The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice includes
161 illustrations, most of them meticulously hand-drafted by Judd
expressly for this edition. The book begins with the preindustrial
implements and techniques used by African and African American
slaves and workers in the late 1600s and early 1700s and concludes
with the water- and steam-powered machines that drove rice
threshing and milling until the end of the industry in 1911. In
great detail the authors reveal the immense, continually evolving
technological innovations of an agricultural industry that spanned
the Industrial Revolution and much of the history of the colony and
state.
With this rich body of knowledge in hand, Porcher stands at odds
with theories held by most historians of rice culture who generally
assert that the plantation culture of rice was in unrecoverable
decline as the South hastened to civil war. Porcher believes that
decline was retarded by continuous technological innovation and
increasing investment in land, labor, and mechanization as local
planters sought to sustain profits in a globally expanding market.
Porcher asserts that the post-Civil War loss of slave labor and
destruction of infrastructure, a series of hurricanes, competition
from rice grown in the American Southwest starting in 1880, and
financial restraints that led to the cessation of rice culture in
lowcountry South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia.
Impoverished and unable to adapt to new technologies and market
demands, rice planters left the commercial rice enterprise to
others.
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