Chapter 13 - Concluding Reflections

Summary

The goals of this book have been to recover a distinctive “Caribbean Enlightenment” and to show how it contributes to our understandings of eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean societies and the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan movement. Largely focused on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, it has explored four important Enlightenment themes in Caribbean contexts: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. It identifies many White male colonists who embraced Enlightenment practices and, in the process, asserted a colonial identity that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave. The Conclusion suggests future lines of research, such as the comparative vigor of the Enlightenment in French and British colonies and the relationship between the enslaved and free people of color to Enlightenment intellectual culture. Remarking how rapidly White colonists accustomed themselves to their brutal and lucrative slave societies, the Conclusion invites us to consider the consequences of globalization and the moral implications and real-world consequences of political economy in the twenty-first as well as the eighteenth century.