The introduction provides the key features and argument, divided into six sections. Besides a discussion of creolisation as a concept, the introduction lays out the central tenets of this monograph. This book is about the practices of plant knowledge; that is, the knowing how, but not the knowing that. By looking at the interconnections between people, materials, and nature, this book argues that creolisation took place in the social, cultural, epistemological, and material terms that determined the application of knowledge. As a creolising process, the knowledge of plants derived from cultures all over the world was integrated into the emerging practices within the island space. The cultivators included the Europeans who had migrated to Mauritius by choice, settlers born there, labourers, and enslaved people brought in by forced migration. Unsurprisingly, the agricultural knowledge of these individuals varied widely. Consequently, cultivation turned out to be a complex process of creolising the expertise that had originated in the local populations of the plants’ native habitats with the varying degrees of horticultural knowledge of the people living in Mauritius.

Chapter 4 challenges the legend that ICI members initiated a global reform of colonial agronomy by combining transfers of improved cash crops with the encouragement of small-scale indigenous agriculture. ICI members claimed to replace the “South American” model of neo-slavery plantations with the “East Indies’” model of scientifically improved small-scale farming. Around 1900, the research institute for tropical agriculture at Buitenzorg in Dutch Java represented the “East Indies’” model. Colonial administrations around the world imported improved plants and planting techniques from Buitenzorg to “develop” their colonies. What is more, ICI members transferred the Buitenzorg model to other colonies. Yet, while they promoted the individual freedom of indigenous farmers as a tool of encouragement, they used coercive measures to make them participate in the “liberal” Buitenzorg schemes. The transfer of the Buitenzorg model ultimately failed because it neglected local plants and autochthonous traditions. While the ICI portrayed the ecological engineering at Buitenzorg and the subsequent technology transfers as rational and scientific operations, this chapter reveals the failure of its allegedly progressive schemes of transcolonial and technocratic governmentality.