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.

The Conclusion to Part IV briefly summarizes the findings of the chapters on agricultural Enlightenment in the French Caribbean, characterizing it as, in James Livesey’s terms, a “knowledge culture.” It then underscores the absence of the enslaved’s expertise and knowledge in Caribbean agricultural literature. In the words of Beth Fowkes Tobin, these author-practitioners constructed two classes in their writings: “the managerial class—the planter and his agents—who possess knowledge about technology and labor and yet do not labor physically, and the laboring class—the slaves—who are described as having no knowledge of their own.” The enslaved also possessed considerable skill in cultivating their own food on provision grounds – indeed, their surpluses stocked colonial markets. But their horticultural knowledge went unmentioned. We can hardly be surprised, then, that Guisan and Poyen de Sainte-Marie obliged the planter to look to the enslaved’s happiness without requiring him to ask them in what that consisted.