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.

Over the past twenty years, experts on early North America have increasingly turned to comparative and connected modes of study to explain the effects of colonialism on social, political, and aesthetic developments throughout the so-called New World, where English and Spanish empires appropriated and carved up the largest sections of Indigenous territories. Despite notable linguistic, religious, and chronological differences in Anglo and Iberian colonialisms, this critical hemispheric turn recognizes the interconnected nature of lived experience and writing in the region. As part of this volume’s reflection on the history and future of methods in early American studies, this chapter analyzes four major comparative paradigms in the study of the colonial Americas: generic, genetic, appositional, and mediative approaches. As I discuss each of these approaches, I provide examples from primary sources and critical studies published in the past ten years, outlining current modes of scholarship and future directions in the field.

The fifth chapter, ‘Entangled Histories’, starts from the question of erasure. I examine how the memorialization of revolutionary pasts in India and Pakistan has erased a history of entanglements between the Left and other political and intellectual strands. Specifically, I take the case of Darshan Singh Pheruman, remembered today as a martyr who gave his life for the Sikh Panth. Through his life, I examine how the Akali movement, a Sikh socio-religious political movement in the 1920s, blended in with the communist movement in the Punjab. These intersections provide a reminder of how ideas did not observe strict ideological boundaries, boundaries that only seem unbridgeable in nationalist and communitarian erasures of revolutionary pasts. This chapter offers a portrait of the relative fluidity between ‘communist’, ‘communitarian’, and ‘nationalist’ politics of the interwar era. In doing so, it sketches an era of political possibilities that later gave way to a bitterly contested and fractured landscape with hardened political and ideological boundaries.