RICE

Rice is a cereal grass grown in warm, moist climates. The native inhabitants of Southeast Asia probably began cultivating rice for food seven thousand years ago. The crop spread northward into China and Japan, and westward into India, where it was observed in about 325 b.c. by Greek soldiers under the command of Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.). Like sugar, which was also observed in India by the Greeks about 325 b.c., rice did not reach Europe until Moors (North African Muslims) invaded the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal) in a.d. 711. When Spaniards colonized the islands of the West Indies and lands in South America in the late 1400s and throughout the 1500s, they introduced rice in the Western Hemisphere. There rice joined sugar, indigo, and tobacco as a profitable export item for the better part of the 1600s. Rice was among the enumerated articles in the British Parliament's Second Navigation Act (1660) which prevented colonies from exporting its products to anywhere except the British Isles. In 1671 rice was introduced into the North American mainland at South Carolina. By 1685 it became a commercial crop. Cultivation and production spread to North Carolina and Georgia. Because rice is a labor-intensive crop, rice plantations required numerous slaves for production. That way, along with tobacco and indigo, rice helped define the plantation economy of the South. After the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the abolition of slavery, southern growers could no longer support the crop. Production of rice moved westward. By 1900 Louisiana was supplying 70 percent of the U.S. rice production. In the early 1900s it was also introduced as a crop into California.

See also: Agriculture, Georgia, Indigo, Navigation Acts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Slavery, Sugar, Tobacco