Rice During the Antebellum Era
West Africa, groups between Cape Verde and the Gold Coast cultivated so much rice that they became known as the people of the Rice Coast. The African slave trade introduced rice cultivation to the British controlled Carolinas and Georgia. From their rice exports sent the cash crop around the world before the American Revolution. European imperialism in the nineteenth century resulted in the spread rice culture from the Far East to different parts of the world. In addition the migration of Caribbean people to Latin America to work in the Panama Canal Zone, and the railroad, banana, sugar, and oil industries starting about 1870 resulted in the further proliferation of regionally distinctive rice and rice and beans dishes around the globe.