Drawing on his experience as a planter, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663–1738) disentangled details about sugar cultivation and production from the limited discussions found in natural histories and travel accounts to create a full-fledged planters manual in Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1722). Elie Monnereau did the same for indigo in L’art de l’indigotier (1765), which detailed the “art” of cultivation and processing and the “science” of plantation management, including the regulation of enslaved laborers. His treatise also suggested how his peers shared information through manuscripts; his visual representation of indigo production, superior to previous versions, became a model for others after influencing Beauvais-Raseau’s L’art de l’indigotier (1770), published by the Académie Royale des Sciences. Discussion of Labat and Monnereau/Beauvais-Raseau demonstrates how Caribbean agriculturalists addressed the problems common to anyone seeking to communicate practical and technical information: What elements of a description made it particularly informative? What should an illustration include to make it most useful? How could text and illustration together facilitate communication? Discussion of Monnereau’s and Beauvais-Raseau’s treatises also underscore the differences between colonial and metropolitan agendas in the production and promulgation of agricultural knowledge.

Part IV, “Cultivating Knowledge: Agricultural Improvement in the French Caribbean,” shows how Enlightenment and agriculture were as intertwined for colonists as for metropolitan improvers. It reveals the often considerable ingenuity of Caribbean agriculturalists as they appropriated scientific advances, staged trials, developed new technology, circulated manuscripts, and published their findings in letters to the editor and freestanding treatises. As with political economy (Part II), their discourse of agricultural improvement merged with those of patriotism and civic-mindedness, utility and emulation. Caribbean agricultural texts and images also reveal a disconnect between metropolitan and colonial intellectual agendas; they challenged the efficacy of the existing intellectual infrastructure, such as the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, which was supposed to secure useful knowledge, promote improvement, and arbiter competing claims to intellectual authority. Finally, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, which demanded the consideration of slavery as a moral, not a management problem, compelled Caribbean responses. These included the promotion of the “Enlightened planter,” an agriculturalist whose estate flourished precisely because he harmonized humanity and interest.

The Conclusion to Part IV briefly summarizes the findings of the chapters on agricultural Enlightenment in the French Caribbean, characterizing it as, in James Livesey’s terms, a “knowledge culture.” It then underscores the absence of the enslaved’s expertise and knowledge in Caribbean agricultural literature. In the words of Beth Fowkes Tobin, these author-practitioners constructed two classes in their writings: “the managerial class—the planter and his agents—who possess knowledge about technology and labor and yet do not labor physically, and the laboring class—the slaves—who are described as having no knowledge of their own.” The enslaved also possessed considerable skill in cultivating their own food on provision grounds – indeed, their surpluses stocked colonial markets. But their horticultural knowledge went unmentioned. We can hardly be surprised, then, that Guisan and Poyen de Sainte-Marie obliged the planter to look to the enslaved’s happiness without requiring him to ask them in what that consisted.

This chapter focuses on planters manuals beyond Saint-Domingue published by Jean Samuel Guisan and Jean-Baptiste Poyen de Sainte-Marie. Writing respectively in the very different circumstances of an underdeveloped French Guiana and an economically mature Guadeloupe, both writers urged planters to adopt technological innovations, regiment their workforce, keep detailed records, and prioritize long-term profitability over short-term profits. Publishing in close proximity to the French and Haitian Revolutions (1788 and 1792, respectively), they also had to consider increased anti-slavery sentiment, even revolutionary ferment, in expressing their pro-slavery views. They responded by promoting the ideal of an “enlightened” planter, which is contrasted to the ideas of the marquis de Casaux, published in a 1781 treatise. Appropriating the language of sentiment, Guisan and Poyen folded “humanity” into plantation management, asserting that this would harmonize with the planter’s self-interest and increase his happiness by promoting that of the enslaved. Ultimately, though, they construed the planter’s mastery differently: for Poyen, a benevolent plantation monarch ruled over his subjects while Guisan’s planter was accountable to a wider social and political order devoted to collective good.

During the 1760s, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue created a lively public forum to address colonial agricultural concerns that metropolitan learned societies largely ignored. Colonists enthusiastically embraced the same rhetoric of emulation and civic-mindedness as their counterparts in France while vigorously asserting intellectual authority based in practice. They sought to improve the cultivation of older but challenging crops, such as indigo and cotton, and to introduce new crops that would enhance the colony’s profitability, provide gainful employment for their society’s poorer members, and occupy unexploited ecological niches. To assess proposed innovations, they staged trials witnessed by expert practitioners; circulated information through manuscripts; and wrote up public answers to questions posed by the Affiches. This chapter also shows the limitations of local improvisations to solve agricultural problems as competing claims to intellectual authority based in experience created rifts between groups of colonists, colonists and the editors of their periodicals, and colonists and elite metropolitan institutions.