In 1788, French botaniste du roi Hyppolyte Nectoux received seven new plants from British crown botanist Dr. Thomas Clarke for his botanical station at Saint Domingue, and in 1789 he received twenty more. This remarkable example of cross-cultural knowledge exchange in the Antilles was later described by the editor of Saint Domingue’s Affiches Américaines: ‘The plants that the Administration recently received from Jamaica were accompanied by very friendly letters, wherein the Governor of that colony and the Director of the botanical garden promise to share everything valuable they receive’.[1]Botanists in the Caribbean could be diplomats as much as they were scientists.
Instances of inter-imperial scientific exchange in the Antilles stand relatively understudied, and this project aims to redress that. By 1777, France and Britain had successfully constructed their respective paradigms of botanical knowledge cultivation in the Caribbean. From metropolitan institutions like the Jardin du Roi and Royal Academy, scientists were dispatched to colonies like Guadeloupe, Saint Domingue, Jamaica and Saint Vincent. In some instances, French botanists worked just seventy miles from their English counterparts.
Yet scholarsof British and French eighteenth-century horticulture have been more inclined to reconstruct instances of botanical knowledge trading in Europe than they have in the Antilles.[2]In general, they have been hesitant to challenge the closed-circuit paradigm of colonial knowledge production drawn up by Regourd and McClellan,[3]and have not responded to Jarvis’ appeal for historians to see intercolonial spaces as favorable to the cross-cultural exchange of scientific knowledge.[4]While scholarship has undermined the assumption that imperial rivalry stifled intellectual exchange between botanists in Britain and France, it is yet to undermine that same assumption for botanists stationed at Jamaica and Saint Domingue. Borders remain impermeable to the circulation and exchange of botanical knowledge in the Antilles while they have been exposed as permeable to that same circulation and exchange in Europe, and this is paradoxical.
The aimsof this project are threefold. First, and most importantly, it aims to shed more light on instances of collaboration between French and British botanists in the Antilles. Second, it aims to challenge the assumption that colonial borders in the Antilles were less favorable to the circulation and exchange of scientific knowledge than those that separated the French and British metropoles in Europe. Third, it aims to show that by applying the transnational ‘lens’ to the inter-imperial production of botanical knowledge in the Antilles, historians can think in new and exciting ways about the organization of imperial space.
The project will be driven forward by four leading research questions. Why did some French and British botanists choose to collaborate with each other in the Antilles? Who were those botanists? What types of scientific knowledge did they exchange, and how did they exchange it?
One hypothesisis that these botanists were inclined to collaborate: that the enlightenment spirit of epistemic universalism was a transnational force powerful enough to transcend imperial rivalries. Another hypothesis is that these botanists were remaking those same scientific networks that had been made across imperial metropoles. This is more realistic. The frequency at which botanists formed networks and moved between intellectual centres like Edinburgh, London and Montpellier would provide for this.
The timescale from which this project draws inspiration is wide, and that is deliberate. Parts of the project will seek to address why scientists chose to exchange scientific knowledge when and where they did, and when and where they did not. To this end, the project will view the Antilles as an ‘inter-imperial microregion’.[5] This paradigm is relatively new. It was conceived by global historians who wished to study inter-imperial spaces, and who recognized the high potential for cross-cultural exchanges within them. The project’s first research goalwill be to identify instances of scientific exchange between French and British scientists in the West Indies. In turn, it will seek to reconstruct those exchanges by identifying the individuals involved in them; their backgrounds, and their aspirations. The project then takes inspiration from the recent uptake in global microhistory: it seeks to reconcile the smaller process of inter-imperial scientific exchange with the larger process of empire-building. Its agenda is simultaneously recentralizing and deconstructive.
The project will draw on digitalized primary source materialfrom the Bibliothèque nationale de France and British Library. Periodicals, autobiographies and letters of inter-imperial scientific correspondence from the colonial Antilles will be supplemented by letters of intra-imperial communication between institutions like the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the French botanical station at Guadeloupe for example. The project will take further inspiration from a wealth of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century European science.
[1]James E. McClellan III, Colonialism & Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Chicago, 2010), p. 160.
[2]For examples see: Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, Edmond Dziembowski and Sophie Audidière (eds), Cultural transfers: France and Britain in the long eighteenth century(Oxford, 2010).
[3]For the clearest description of this system see: James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, ‘“The Colonial Machine”: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Régime’, Osiris 15 (2000), pp. 31 – 50.
[4]See: Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680 – 1783 (Chapel Hill, 2010), p. 464.
[5]Jeppe Mulich, ‘“Microregionalism and intercolonial relations”: The Case of the Danish West Indies, 1730 – 1830’, Journal of Global History 8(2013), pp. 72 – 94.