Peter H. Wood

Peter Hutchins Wood (born 1943 in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American historian and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. He is a professor at Duke University in North Carolina.

The son of Barry Wood and Mary Lee Wood, Peter H. Wood was educated at the Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland, and Harvard University. He studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and returned to Harvard for a Ph.D. He played lacrosse while an undergraduate at Harvard and later at Oxford.

Wood wrote the original version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion as his PhD dissertation, which was awarded a prize. Published in 1974, it was part of major revisions in the ways historians studied African-American history. At around the same time, a dozen major books were published on American slavery.

In Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), Wood showed that South Carolina rice planters during the Colonial Era chose enslaved Africans specifically from the “Rice Coast” of West Africa because of their expertise in rice cultivation and its technology. The African region stretched between what is now Senegal and Gambia in the north to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south. African farmers in that region had been growing indigenous African rice for thousands of years and were experts in cultivating the difficult crop. They were also familiar with Asian rice, having obtained it via the Trans-Saharan trade or through contact with early Portuguese shippers. Wood demonstrated that Africans from the Rice Coast brought the knowledge and technical skills to develop extensive cultivation that made rice one of the most lucrative industries in early America. They knew how to design and build the major earthworks: dams and irrigation systems for flooding and draining fields, that supported rice culture, as well as techniques for cultivation, harvesting and processing.

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