from Part IV - Cultivating Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2023
Part IV, “Cultivating Knowledge: Agricultural Improvement in the French Caribbean,” shows how Enlightenment and agriculture were as intertwined for colonists as for metropolitan improvers. It reveals the often considerable ingenuity of Caribbean agriculturalists as they appropriated scientific advances, staged trials, developed new technology, circulated manuscripts, and published their findings in letters to the editor and freestanding treatises. As with political economy (Part II), their discourse of agricultural improvement merged with those of patriotism and civic-mindedness, utility and emulation. Caribbean agricultural texts and images also reveal a disconnect between metropolitan and colonial intellectual agendas; they challenged the efficacy of the existing intellectual infrastructure, such as the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, which was supposed to secure useful knowledge, promote improvement, and arbiter competing claims to intellectual authority. Finally, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, which demanded the consideration of slavery as a moral, not a management problem, compelled Caribbean responses. These included the promotion of the “Enlightened planter,” an agriculturalist whose estate flourished precisely because he harmonized humanity and interest.
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