A Caribbean Enlightenment
Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750–1792

Explores the Enlightenment in the brutal slave societies of the colonial French and British Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution.

April G. Shelford (Author)

9781009360838, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 March 2025

406 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.585 kg

'April G. Shelford's engaging and well-written book … is one that scholars of the French and British Caribbean and Atlantic world will want on their shelves.' Matthew Mulcahy, American Historical Review

Exploring the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean, A Caribbean Enlightenment recovers a neglected aspect of the region's history. Physicians to planters, merchants to publishing entrepreneurs were as inspired by ideologies of utility and improvement as their metropolitan counterparts, and they adapted 'enlightened' ideas and social practices to understand their place in the Atlantic World. Colonists collected botanical specimens for visiting naturalists and books for their personal libraries. They founded periodicals that created arenas for the discussion and debate of current problems. They picked up the pen to complain about their relationship with the home country. And they read to make sense of everything from parenting to personal salvation, to their new societies and the enslaved Africans on whom their prosperity depended. Ultimately, becoming 'enlightened' was a colonial identity that rejected metropolitan stereotypes of Caribbean degeneracy while validating the power to enslave on a cultural basis.

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]