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"Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans"--
List of contents
1. What is a Caribbean enlightenment?; Part I. Before Breadfruit: Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Jamaica: Introduction to Part I; 2. Jamaica's Patrick Browne; 3. Birds of a feather; Conclusion to Part I; Part II. Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the 1760s: Introduction to Part II; 4. Making the Affiches, making Americans; 5. American exceptionalism, political economy and the postwar order in the Journal de Saint-Domingue; 6. A slave named Voltaire; or, gender and the making American taste; Conclusion to Part II; Part III. Tristram in the Tropics: or, Reading in Jamaica: Introduction to Part III; 7. Whence, whither, and which books?; 8. 'Truth hard to be discovered': The commonplace books of Thomas Thistlewood; 9. Containing the Overflowing Fountain of His Brain: Robert Long's 'Reflections'; Conclusion to Part III; Part IV. Cultivating Knowledge: Agricultural Enlightenment in the French Caribbean: Introduction to Part IV; 10. 'Je sçais par une longue experience ...'; 11. Agricultural enlightenment in the Saint-Domingue press; 12. The Enlightened planter; Conclusion to Part IV; 13. Concluding reflections; Index.
About the author
April G. Shelford is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of History at American University, Washington, DC. She won the Selma Forkosch prize for best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 2002. She is the recipient of fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. For two years she was Visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, which inspired the research for this project.
