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• W4385371572 abstract "Reviewed by: Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia by Luke Manget T. R. C. Hutton Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia. By Luke Manget. ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2022. Pp. [viii], 296. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-8381-7.) The ginseng root has long served as a peculiar commercial connection between continents, with North America's Appalachian Mountains feeding a centuries-old demand for the medicinal plant in China. As esoteric as it may seem, this transpacific trade is older and more enduring, if more obscure, than the exchange of mass staples like tobacco and cotton. Luke Manget's Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia joins a recent bumper crop of commodity histories that trace an arc from the mercantilist eighteenth century to the globalist twenty-first, visiting many points in between. Ginseng is a curative root valued by Native Americans (particularly the Cherokees) as well as practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and therapeutics. Its strict biological requirements make it difficult to cultivate domestically, so it has long been gathered where it grows wild in the cool sylvan shadows of the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Plateau. Harvesters infiltrated larger commercial markets, selling or bartering ginseng to wholesalers, as early as the 1730s, and the frequency of this trade increased after the American Revolution freed the former colonies from British trade barriers. After the Civil War, the root's availability became a lifeline for mountain farmers ruined by the conflict and forced to fall back on the forest for subsistence (p. 158). Their labor, and the bounty they harvested, nurtured a nineteenth-century pharmaceutical business in North Carolina's Piedmont and foothill towns. As upland rural poverty created lowland town wealth, ginseng horticulture became fixed in the American mind as an integral feature of Appalachian life in the twentieth century. The history of ginseng is a story of the Appalachian commons, a subject tackled recently by historians Kathryn Newfont and Steven Stoll (following the leads of E. P. Thompson and the anthropologist James C. Scott, who both wrote about similar settings elsewhere in the world). Manget argues that root-gathering was central to the long-standing belief that open access to mountain forests was a natural right even after most of the land had become claimed, commodified, and fenced behind no trespassing signs. Even in the twenty-first century, Manget concludes, roots are dug on absentee-owned land that, for lack of direct surveillance, has returned to commons status. Ginseng—both the plant and its market—fell victim to the same environmental degradation that affected so many other elements of mountain political economy. Extraction of coal and timber and the outside ownership of residential property have made ginseng extraction in the twenty-first century a shadow of what it was during the days of the forest commons. But Manget believes the present and future of ginseng production provide us with alternatives to our unsustainable global economy. The story of roots and herbs, he concludes, injects contingency back into the narrative of capitalism, a narrative that is otherwise often heavily determinist and tunnel-visioned (p. 230). Past histories of Appalachia with analogous subjects mourn the ending of a bygone way of life, while Ginseng Diggers demonstrates that people find [End Page 619] small avenues for persistence, just as ginseng and other threatened plants somehow do themselves. Compared with most dour environmental histories written in preparation for the Anthropocene epoch, this one ends on a relatively optimistic note. Manget's book, centered on a humble (but medically efficacious) plant, is a fine Appalachian history, albeit one with solemn ecological implications. The only flaws in Ginseng Diggers are omissions rather than commissions; the subject of slavery is noticeably absent in the first four chapters (perhaps it was ancillary to the ginseng trade, but it bears mention since so much of this story takes place in a society with slaves). Also, China's immense importance in this story is not reflected in the index as well as it is (splendidly) in the text. These are small oversights in an overall important contribution. T. R. C. Hutton Glenville..." @default.
• W4385371572 created "2023-07-29" @default.
• W4385371572 date "2023-08-01" @default.
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• W4385371572 title "Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia by Luke Manget (review)" @default.
• W4385371572 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a903247" @default.
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