Details

Subject(s)

• Caribbean Area—Intellectual life—18th century [Browse]
• Enlightenment—Caribbean area [Browse]
• Colonists—Caribbean area—Intellectual life—18th century [Browse]
• Great Britain—Colonies—America—Intellectual life—18th century [Browse]
• France—Colonies—America—Intellectual life—18th century [Browse]

Series

Ideas in context [More in this series]

Summary note

Exploring the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean, A Caribbean Enlightenment recovers a neglected aspect of the region's history. Physicians to planters, merchants to publishing entrepreneurs were as inspired by ideologies of utility and improvement as their metropolitan counterparts, and they adapted 'enlightened' ideas and social practices to understand their place in the Atlantic World. Colonists collected botanical specimens for visiting naturalists and books for their personal libraries. They founded periodicals that created arenas for the discussion and debate of current problems. They picked up the pen to complain about their relationship with the home country. And they read to make sense of everything from parenting to personal salvation, to their new societies and the enslaved Africans on whom their prosperity depended. Ultimately, becoming 'enlightened' was a colonial identity that rejected metropolitan stereotypes of Caribbean degeneracy while validating the power to enslave on a cultural basis.

Notes

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 14 Sep 2023).

Contents

• What is a Caribbean enlightenment?
• Jamaica's Patrick Browne
• Birds of a feather
• Making the Affiches, making Americans
• American exceptionalism, political economy and the postwar order in the Journal de Saint-Domingue
• A slave named Voltaire : or, gender and the making of American taste
• Whence, whither, and which books?
• "Truth hard to be discovered" : the commonplace books of Thomas Thistlewood
• Containing the overflowing fountain of his brain : Robert Long's "Reflections"
• Je s cais par une longue experience..."
• Agricultural enlightenment in the Saint-Domingue press
• The enlightened planter
• Concluding reflections.

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ISBN

9781009360821 (ebook)

Statement on language in description

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