Chapter 1 - What Is a Caribbean Enlightenment?

Summary

Recent changes in Enlightenment and Caribbean studies have made it possible to recover a distinctively Caribbean Enlightenment; doing so contributes to our understanding of French and British colonial societies and of the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural movement. As inspired as metropolitan counterparts by ideologies of utility and improvement, colonists engaged in intellectual practices common in the metropole as their lives in profitable slave societies deeply informed their appropriations of Enlightenment ideas. Focusing chiefly on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1790s, this book explores a Caribbean Enlightenment through four topics: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. These themes illustrate that becoming “enlightened” made a distinctive colonial identity available to White male colonists, one that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree smudged by proximity and intimacy, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave.