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.

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

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.

Part III, “Tristram Shandy in the Tropics: or, Reading Enlightenment in Jamaica,” begins with vignettes that demonstrate how acquiring publications was as important for Jamaicans as it was for British people of the metropole and North America and that they did so for similar reasons. Part III thus addresses a significant lacuna in the histories of the book and reading, vigorous fields in European and early American Enlightenment studies. As in Parts I and II, Part III shows the continuity in a colonial context of metropolitan intellectual practices and their adaptation by colonists to suit their needs, interests, and purposes. It begins with an impressionistic survey of reading on the island that explores what publications colonists secured and how they did so. It then delves into the meaning of reading for two Jamaicans, the ex-overseer Thomas Thistlewood and the planter Robert Long, by focusing on two themes: race and slavery, and religion. While the practices of these two readers cannot be generalized to all Jamaican readers, they demonstrate how colonial readers took possession of Enlightenment through reading and suggest how their reading was informed by personal experience, social status, intellectual, and even spiritual aspirations.