Cassava and colonialism: how a diasporic cultigen was reinvented in the world system

The process by which cassava became domesticated and cultivated by humans in northwest Amazonia, and by which it spread to other parts of tropical America took some thousands of years. It involved many opportunities for social and cultural practices to reinforce a distinctive co-evolutionary process. However, the socio-ecological collision between Old and New worlds that occurred 500 years ago released cassava into a world system with possibilities and consequences very different from those it had thus far encountered. Under the new dispensation, cassava became the sustaining food of first plantation workers, slaves, and thereafter the preferred crop of poor people living in arid and degraded environments, in addition to colonial regimes seeking to feed subject populations.

This chapter seeks to interpret this history. It additionally seeks to explain how the narrow germplasm base and social knowledge initially available to those who sort to take advantage of it was, over a much shorter period, reinvented and re-diversified in ways seldom reliably the same as those in the areas of endemism. This happened in new environments and socio-economic situations, where often cassava was replacing pre-existing crops with equally long local biocultural histories. I argue that the ethnobiological profile of a crop depends on a concatenation of ecological and socio-cultural circumstances rarely usefully distinguished by gross second order categories (e.g. grain vs tuber) convenient in polemical debate, and which bear little resemblance to how cultural adaptation and evolutionary biology work in complex social contexts.