Drawing on his experience as a planter, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663–1738) disentangled details about sugar cultivation and production from the limited discussions found in natural histories and travel accounts to create a full-fledged planters manual in Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1722). Elie Monnereau did the same for indigo in L’art de l’indigotier (1765), which detailed the “art” of cultivation and processing and the “science” of plantation management, including the regulation of enslaved laborers. His treatise also suggested how his peers shared information through manuscripts; his visual representation of indigo production, superior to previous versions, became a model for others after influencing Beauvais-Raseau’s L’art de l’indigotier (1770), published by the Académie Royale des Sciences. Discussion of Labat and Monnereau/Beauvais-Raseau demonstrates how Caribbean agriculturalists addressed the problems common to anyone seeking to communicate practical and technical information: What elements of a description made it particularly informative? What should an illustration include to make it most useful? How could text and illustration together facilitate communication? Discussion of Monnereau’s and Beauvais-Raseau’s treatises also underscore the differences between colonial and metropolitan agendas in the production and promulgation of agricultural knowledge.

During the 1760s, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue created a lively public forum to address colonial agricultural concerns that metropolitan learned societies largely ignored. Colonists enthusiastically embraced the same rhetoric of emulation and civic-mindedness as their counterparts in France while vigorously asserting intellectual authority based in practice. They sought to improve the cultivation of older but challenging crops, such as indigo and cotton, and to introduce new crops that would enhance the colony’s profitability, provide gainful employment for their society’s poorer members, and occupy unexploited ecological niches. To assess proposed innovations, they staged trials witnessed by expert practitioners; circulated information through manuscripts; and wrote up public answers to questions posed by the Affiches. This chapter also shows the limitations of local improvisations to solve agricultural problems as competing claims to intellectual authority based in experience created rifts between groups of colonists, colonists and the editors of their periodicals, and colonists and elite metropolitan institutions.