Part I, “Before Breadfruit: Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” explores the multiple meanings of science for Jamaican colonists by reconstructing the careers of Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson, two naturalists active from the 1740s into the 1750s. The introduction situates their work in a chronology of naturalists working in Jamaica from the late seventeenth to the 1790s, when the dream of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, and botanically inclined Jamaicans culminated in the successful importation of the breadfruit from the South Pacific. It briefly sketches the social, economic, and political circumstances in which Browne and Robinson worked; it signals Part I’s emphasis on the circulation of information about the island’s natural history within Jamaica and between Jamaicans instead of the connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists and institutions. Part I reveals how colonial naturalists worked in the field; how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment; and how natural history promoted an affectively rich male intellectual sociability among White colonists.

Part I has demonstrated Jamaican engagement in the study of the Caribbean natural world from the 1740s into the 1760s by reconstructing the careers of two naturalists, Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson. Many Jamaicans appear in their accounts: the enslaved and the free, White and Black, poor, middling, and wealthy, male and female. Browne and Robinson struggled with intellectual tasks firmly tethered to metropolitan agendas: making Linnaean taxonomy work on the ground, and collating information from publications and their own experience to arrive at a fuller, more accurate account of Caribbean nature. Yet they were also deeply embedded in Caribbean society, and their success depended on local support. This included White male colonists who self-consciously engaged in typical Enlightenment practices while enjoying the benefits of intellectual stimulation and camaraderie. These practices also enabled them to cultivate disciplined and civil identities in a brutal slave society; they constituted them as a purposeful group that could include the scions of a prominent planter family and a pen keeper while excluding the enslaved and the female from their charmed circle of learning.

The surgeon-apothecary Anthony Robinson (d. 1768) self-consciously continued the work of Hans Sloane, Patrick Browne, and Mark Catesby while covering more physical ground in Jamaica than any naturalist before him. His unpublished manuscript notes provide important insights into the daily challenges of a naturalist at work in the West Indies. Enthusiastically embracing Linnaean taxonomy, he struggled to make sense of Jamaican nature by collating information from published sources, his own observations, and those of local informants. He established a network of collaborators across the island, some of whom he befriended. His intellectual friendships with Thomas Thistlewood and Robert Long (brother of Edward, the author of the influential History of Jamaica [1774]) reveal the benefits of such relationships for White male colonists: They satisfied curiosity and emotional needs, and they cultivated disciplined, “virtuous” identities that further distanced them from the enslaved while asserting their worth against metropolitan disdain.