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This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation - the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities - Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. The limits of French colonial visions and science; 2. The acquisition of knowledge and plants, from Madagascar to China; 3. Agriculture and everyday knowledge; 4. Enslaved people as knowledge carriers; 5. The cross-cultural quest for spices in Southeast Asia; 6. Materials, environment, and the application of knowledge; Conclusion.
About the author
Dorit Brixius is a historian of global science and medicine interested in eighteenth-century botany and France's Indian Ocean colonies.
