This essay examines the relationship between slavery and plant knowledge for cultivational activities and medicinal purposes on Isle de France (Mauritius) in the second half of the eighteenth century. It builds on recent scholarship to argue for the significance of slaves in the acquisition of plant material and related knowledge in pharmaceutical, acclimatization, and private gardens on the French colonial island. I highlight the degree to which French colonial officials relied on slaves’ ethnobotanical knowledge but neglected to include such information in their published works. Rather than seeking to explore the status of such knowledge within European frameworks of natural history as an endpoint of knowledge production, this essay calls upon us to think about the plant knowledge that slaves possessed for its practical implementations in the local island context. Both female and male slaves’ plant-based knowledge enriched – even initiated – practices of cultivation and preparation techniques of plants for nourishment and medicinal uses. Here, cultivational knowledge and skills determined a slave’s hierarchical rank. As the case of the slave gardener Rama and his family reveals, plant knowledge sometimes offered slaves opportunities for social mobility and, even though on extremely rare occasions, enabled them to become legally free.
...More
Article
John Stewart;
(2020)
Chemistry and Slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB766765131/)
Article
Elizabeth A Heath;
(2020)
The Meaning of Freedom: Slave Self-Purchase and the Making of Free Labour in Martinique
(/isis/citation/CBB508370262/)
Article
Weaver, Karol K.;
(2012)
Surgery, Slavery and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB001251768/)
Article
Weaver, Karol K.;
(2004)
“She Crushed the Child's Fragile Skull”: Disease, Infanticide, and Enslaved Women in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue
(/isis/citation/CBB000660567/)
Article
Tésio, Stéphanie;
(2008)
Climat et médecine à Québec au milieu du 18e siècle
(/isis/citation/CBB001211519/)
Article
Kate Ramsey;
(2021)
Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against “Obeah” in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB140553807/)
Thesis
Gushurst-Moore, B;
(cited 2012)
A Garden in Her Cups: Botanical Medicines of the Anglo-American Home, c. 1580--1800
(/isis/citation/CBB001567420/)
Article
Kobelinski, Michel;
(2013)
O inventário das curiosidades botânicas da Nouvelle France de Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1744)
(/isis/citation/CBB001420630/)
Article
McClellan, James E., III;
Regourd, François;
(2000)
The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Régime
(/isis/citation/CBB000671213/)
Article
J'Nese Williams;
(2021)
Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820
(/isis/citation/CBB785011260/)
Article
Olga Elina;
(2018)
A Passion for Plants: Collections and Power Games in Botany in the Russian Empire from the 18th to the Early 19th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB427183623/)
Book
Schiebinger, Londa L.;
(2004)
Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
(/isis/citation/CBB000750941/)
Article
Rafael de Bivar Marquese;
(2022)
A Tale of Two Coffee Colonies: Environment and Slavery in Suriname and Saint-Domingue, ca. 1750–1790
(/isis/citation/CBB450823002/)
Book
Andrés Avelino de Orihuela;
(2021)
The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Antislavery Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB985131973/)
Book
Paolo Conte;
(2021)
Il più grande male dell'umanità. Alexander von Humboldt nell'abolizionismo francese dei primi dell'800
(/isis/citation/CBB486493587/)
Book
Bruce A. Ragsdale;
(2021)
Washington at the plow : The founding farmer and the question of slavery
(/isis/citation/CBB486752354/)
Essay Review
Sasha Turner;
(2018)
Slavery and the Production, Circulation and Practice of Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB454547678/)
Book
David Richardson;
(2022)
Principles and Agents: the British slave trade and its abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB104965625/)
Book
Kathleen M. Brown;
(2023)
Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB065925879/)
Book
Katherine Paugh;
(2017)
The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition
(/isis/citation/CBB922169542/)
Be the first to comment!