A Caribbean Enlightenment: Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750-1792 1009360825, 9781009360821
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A CARIBBEAN ENLIGHTENMENT
Exploring the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities among 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. . is Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of History at American University, Washington, DC. She won the Selma Forkosch prize for best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in . She is the recipient of fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. For two years she was Visiting Professor at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, which inspired the research for this project.
IDEAS IN CONTEXT
Edited by DAVID ARMITAGE, RICHARD BOURKE and JENNIFER PITTS The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve. A full list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/IdeasContext
A CARIBBEAN ENLIGHTENMENT Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, –
APRIL G. SHELFORD American University
Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Penang Road, #-/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © April G. Shelford This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Shelford, April, author. : A Caribbean enlightenment : intellectual life in the British and French colonial worlds, - / April G. Shelford, American University, Washington DC. : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Series: Ideas in context | Includes bibliographical references and index. : (print) | (ebook) | (hardcover) | (paperback) | (epub) : : Caribbean area–Intellectual life–th century. | Enlightenment–Caribbean area. | Colonists–Caribbean area–Intellectual life–th century. | Great Britain–Colonies–America–Intellectual life–th century. | France–Colonies–America–Intellectual life–th century. : . (print) | (ebook) | ./–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For my teachers
Contents
List of Figures List of Maps List of Tables Acknowledgments Note on the Text List of Abbreviations
page ix xi xii xiii xv xvi
What Is a Caribbean Enlightenment?
: , , Introduction to Part I
Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
Birds of a Feather
Conclusion to Part I : -
Introduction to Part II
Making the Affiches, Making Americans
American Exceptionalism, Political Economy, and the Postwar Order in the Journal de Saint-Domingue
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Contents
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A Slave Named Voltaire; or, Gender and the Making of American Taste
Conclusion to Part II
: , Introduction to Part III
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”
Conclusion to Part III
: Introduction to Part IV
“Je sçais par une longue expérience”
Agricultural Enlightenment in the Saint-Domingue Press
The Enlightened Planter
Conclusion to Part IV
Concluding Reflections
Bibliography Index
Figures
. . . . . . . . . . . . .a .b .a .b . .
Commonalities of Enlightenment intellectual culture page Philip Wickstead (active –), Portrait of Benjamin and Mary Pusey (c. ) Manchineel, Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands () Manchineel description, Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica () Robinson’s sketch of an elephant caterpillar () Robinson’s drawings of Marcgravia scandens (a) and Clarendon or Wild Rose (b) (a) Sloane’s hog-doctor or Boar-wood tree. (b) Browne’s hog-gum tree Edward Long’s and Anthony Robinson’s sketch of the petchary Chronology of the founding of periodicals in Saint-Domingue during the s Chronology of Brittany Affair and Stamp Act Crisis in the Affiches Américaines, January–June British book exports from London to Jamaica and New York, – Thomas Thistlewood’s book exchanges, Commonplace indexing in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia () Indexing page from first volume of Thistlewood’s commonplace books Now iconic mill from Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage () Design for “improved” sugar mill (b) from Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage () Indigo works, Élie Monnereau, Le parfait indigotier () Indigo works, Jean-Baptiste du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles () ix
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List of Figures
. Indigo works, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage () . Indigo works, Encyclopédie () . Indigo works, M. de Beauvais-Raseau, L’art de l’indigotier () . Cierge épineux, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences ()
Maps
. Proportional distribution by parish of places mentioned in Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica () page . Place names and geographic locations mentioned in Anthony Robinson’s manuscript notes (–) . Subscription locations for Affiches Américaines and Journal de Saint-Domingue . Distribution of subscribers to the Journal de Saint-Domingue
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Tables
. Patrick Browne’s subscribers by residence page . Sloane’s and Robinson’s descriptions of “wild” ginger . Breakdown of subscribers of the Journal de Saint-Domingue by profession . Content analysis of nonfiction section, Journal de Saint-Domingue . Estimated value of books advertised for sale by James Brands . Frequency and average value of books in Kingston estates, – . Compilation of Poyen de Sainte-Marie’s calculations for planting slips and rattoons
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Acknowledgments
The subject of my first book, the French érudit Pierre-Daniel Huet, described a beloved teacher as a father to his soul, “not only my teacher, but a friend and like a parent to me.” I have had many such parents, and I dedicate this book to them. I hope to have honored them by emulating their generosity with my students and colleagues. As this book nears completion, I am overwhelmed with gratitude towards those who sustained me through its creation. I probably would not have survived long enough in the academic profession to write this book at all if David Armitage and Darrin McMahon had not acted swiftly to support my candidacy for a visiting professorship at the University of the West Indies from to . There, in the Special Collections of the University of the West Indies Library, an encounter with the journals of Thomas Thistlewood began my transformation from an intellectual historian of the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters into one of the Enlightenment. I and this project benefited incalculably from the warm welcome of my students and my colleagues in the History Department: James Robertson, who encouraged me to broaden my scholarly interests into the eighteenth century, his wife and fellow historian Linda Sturtz, Jonathan Dalby, Philip Ainsworth, Kathleen Monteith, Swithin Wilmot, Glen Richards, Jenny Jemmott and especially Aleric Josephs. The unflagging enthusiasm of a trio of exemplary scholars, colleagues, and friends – Richard Sha, Eileen Findlay, and Kathleen Wellman – rekindled mine when my confidence in this project wavered. Anthony Grafton, David Bell, James Robertson, Darrin McMahon, and James McClellan III kindly wrote letters of recommendation for fellowships so I could devote more time to research and writing. As a result of their efforts, the American Philosophical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Edinburgh welcomed me into stimulating intellectual communities. In xiii
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Acknowledgments
my footnotes, I tally my debts to many other archives and libraries. Of special note are Tracy Commock and Leleka Johnson at the Institute of Jamaica and Rhian Rowson at Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives. They made available to me manuscripts that transformed this project. Kathleen Wellman, Natalie Zacek, James Livesey, and Mark Towsey reviewed the entire manuscript for a Book Incubator at my home institution, American University (AU). Their insights were critical to completing the penultimate version. This project was enriched, too, by the commentary of many colleagues who read complete drafts or portions of the book: James Delbourgo, David Bell, Sue Peabody, Philip Katz, Joyce Chaplin, Kate Haulman, Pam Nadell, Eileen Findlay, Richard Sha, Eric Lohr, and Elke Stockreiter, who gave me an unexpected and heartening compliment. I am indebted to the many auditors at colloquia and conferences for their questions and comments. The organizational aplomb of Erica Munkwitz, on whose dissertation committee I proudly served, brought order out of the library inventories I had gathered. Carmen Bolt did the same with a very unruly bibliography. The Interlibrary Loan Office of the AU Bender Library always delivered. Online teaching during the pandemic and the return to the classroom, even masked, reminded me of just how much my students have taught me. Other colleagues at AU and elsewhere as well as old and new friends outside academia sustained this effort in many ways, from the scholarly and collegial to the psychological: François Regourd, Jordan Kellman, Nick Dew, Françoise Waquet, Meghan Roberts, Dan Watkins, Sarah Benharrech, Julie Landweber, Beth Hyde, Sarah Marsh, Thomas Merrill, Caroline Meyers, Louise Papile, Martha Pleasure, and the artists of the Washington Glass Studio. My thanks to everyone at Cambridge University Press who made this book a reality, beginning with the editors of the “Ideas in Context” series, Liz Friend-Smith, the manuscript’s readers, and Lisa Carter. I mourn the absence of dear colleagues and friends who have passed away: Donna F. Ryan, Sharon Kettering, and most recently and much too soon, Andrea Tschemplik. Last, but emphatically not least, I thank my husband and fellow historian, Philip M. Katz. I simply could not do without his intellectual acuity, probing questions, and editorial vigilance; his steadfast companionship through the vicissitudes of an academic career; and his enduring love.
Note on the Text
Unless explicitly indicated, translations from the French are my own. Orthography and punctuation of eighteenth-century texts in English have sometimes been lightly modernized for clarity.
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Abbreviations
AdlG AdS ANOM ARTFL BL BNF BRIS IoJ-Rob JFSGR MdSM, Description MdSM Chd’Ag MONSON NLS ODNB RS
Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux, France Archives of the Académie Royale des Sciences, Collège de France, Paris, France Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France The ARTFL Encyclopédie, https://encyclopedie .uchicago.edu/ British Library, London, England Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France Papers of Robert Long, volumes, Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives, Bristol, England Robinson papers, Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica Jamaican Family Search Genealogy Research Library, www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/ Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia, –), volumes Papers of Moreau de Saint-Méry, Mémoires établis pour les Chambres d’agriculture et de commerce de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et de Saint-Domingue (/), ANOM, F The manuscripts of Thomas Thistlewood, now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online; www.oxforddnb.com Royal Society, London, England xvi
List of Abbreviations Sgard-Dict UCL
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Dictionnaire des journaux –, ed. Jean Sgard, https://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettese.fr/journaux Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, University College of London, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs
Periodicals of Saint-Domingue AA Affiches Américaines AdC Avis du Cap Avis Avis divers et Petites Affiches Américaines Gaz Gazette de S. Domingue IA Iris Américaine JdSD Journal de Saint-Domingue
What Is a Caribbean Enlightenment?
This book asserts that there was a distinctive Caribbean Enlightenment and that recovering this Enlightenment matters for two reasons: it contributes significantly to our understanding of eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean societies and to our understanding of the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural movement. Yet recovering a “Caribbean Enlightenment” only became possible when scholars of eighteenth-century life and the Enlightenment began to offer different answers to Kant’s eternally vexing question, “What is Enlightenment?” It was unthinkable when the Enlightenment was still conceived as the work of prominent philosophes ensconced in cosmopolitan European capitals with Paris preeminent. The Caribbean lacked anyone who possessed the intellectual stature of a Benjamin Franklin or a Thomas Jefferson, much less a Jean-Jacques Rousseau or a David Hume. But a Caribbean Enlightenment became discernible as scholarly approaches of the last few decades brought the social aspects of intellectual life to the fore and as scholars’ interests “switched from the Enlightenment as an idea to the Enlightenment as a practice.” This entailed, according to Bettina Dietz, “turn[ing] away from a pure history of ideas in favor of a cultural history of publishing and reading, a social history of intellectual sociability, and the situating of ideas within historical-political constellations.” As Carla Hesse points out, this “sociocultural history of the Enlightenment” necessarily poses very different questions: “How did the Enlightenment emerge? How
Two figures meriting systematic analysis as Enlightenment intellectuals: on the British side, Edward Long, author of The History of Jamaica (), often cited for his racist views; on the French side, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, see Moreau de Saint-Méry ou les ambiguïtés d’un créole des Lumières, ed. Dominique Taffin (Martinique: Société des Amis des Archives et de la Recherche sur le Patrimoine Culturel des Antilles, ). L. W. B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
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did it spread? And how was the Enlightenment transformed from a new way of thinking into a new way of life?” Nearly forty years ago, the essays in The Enlightenment in National Context reacted to an Enlightenment composed of “systems of socially disembodied ideas” whose geographic centers were either assumed or considered irrelevant. The pioneering work of Robert Darnton and other scholars compelled us to consider how print, the chief disseminator of Enlightenment ideas, actually worked (or did not work) as well as what people actually read and what they made of it. The role of the press in Enlightenment studies now embraces enterprising publishers and printers, from a bookseller in Berlin to a mestizo priest in Mexico City. Tracking the mobility of texts through translation, John Robertson and Sophus Reinert have illuminated how Scots, Neapolitans, and Germans all looked to the same political economy to develop solutions to the distinctive problems of their states. Historians of science, long attentive to the social contexts and meanings of the production of knowledge, have applied a transnational approach to create intellectually rich studies such as James Delbourgo’s A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (). The work of these scholars and others has given us a more richly detailed and nuanced picture of the Enlightenment as a simultaneously cosmopolitan and local phenomenon. I have distilled the lessons of these new approaches into a trio of commonalities that undergirded Enlightenment intellectual culture wherever it appeared: attitude, approach, and activity (Figure .). Attitude comprised both intellectual rights and responsibilities. The right to think
Bettina Dietz, “Making Natural History: Doing the Enlightenment,” Central European History , no. (): ; Carla Hesse, “Towards a New Topography of Enlightenment,” European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire , no. (): . The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), vii. Pamela E. Selwyn, Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, – (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, ); Fiona Clark, “‘Read All About It’: Science, Translation, Adaptation, and Confrontation in the Gazeta de Literatura de México,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, –, ed. Daniela Bleichmar, Paul De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Keven Sheehan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), –; Fiona Clark, “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Lightning and Enlightenment in the Gazeta de Literatura de México (–),” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series , no. (): –. John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Antonella Alimento, “Translation, Reception and Enlightened Reform: The Case of Forbonnais in Eighteenth-Century Political Economy,” a special issue of the History of European Ideas , no. ().
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Attitude
Approach
Intellectual Rights
Curiosity
Intellectual Responsibilities
Assumption of Intelligibility
Activities Collecting Conversing Spectating Networking Reading Writing Experimenting Publishing Socializing Organizing
Figure . Commonalities of Enlightenment intellectual culture
for one’s self was the most democratic and potentially transformative. In the apt phrase of a disapproving Englishman, it was the liberty of “every man in this Enlightened age . . . of making a philosophy (and . . . a religion) for himself.” Indeed, Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar claimed that liberty without apology: “The God whom I adore, is not a God of darkness; he hath not given me an understanding to forbid me the use of it. To bid me give up my reason, is to insult the author of it. The minister of truth doth not tyrannize over my understanding, he enlightens it.” Certainly not everyone enjoyed and exercised Shaftesbury’s “Intire Philosophicall Liberty.” In reality, rights were abridged by factors such as censorship and religious belief; they were denied partly or wholly because of status, gender, and race. Chief among intellectual responsibilities was the imperative for improvement, personal and social, moral and physical. This logically followed from the belief that knowledge must be useful, not idle. An emphasis on improvement retains an urgent sense of human agency at the heart of the Enlightenment while bypassing the misleading popular characterization of it as optimistic. Eighteenth-century people were not
Alexander Catcott quoted by Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: Norton and Company, ), . Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius (Edinburgh, ), :. Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, .
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fools. D’Alembert warned in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie that “everything has regular revolutions,” and he even worried that “barbarism” was humanity’s “natural element.” With respect to approach, people were supposed to be curious about the diverse phenomena of the human and natural worlds, which were assumed to be intelligible. “Intelligible” is preferable to “rational” – and expansive enough to include what recent scholarship on sensibility has abundantly proved: eighteenthcentury people believed they understood the world, especially the other people in it, not just through their rational capacities, but through sentiment. Indeed, the capacity to imagine internal emotional states like one’s own was key to developing compassion and opened a pathway to virtue. My list of activities suggests just some of the ways people could participate in Enlightenment intellectual culture. Clearly everyone did not have access to all of them, much less engaged in them. But anyone who was literate and possessed some disposable income and time would have had access to some, and there were social imperatives beyond the intellectual to pursue them. Conceptualized as approach-attitude-activities, the Enlightenment is not just a “most reified bundle of axioms.” Instead, it seamlessly joins the high and the low, the learned and the popular, the intellectual and the social. As such, it offered eighteenth-century participants neither consensus nor a “coherent doctrine,” but ways for people to ask questions about things that mattered to them and to argue about the answers. Paris and other European cities remain central, yet their intellectuals could not control how people appropriated and applied what they made available in the intellectual marketplace. As Sebastian Conrad writes, “The
Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire,” ARTFL. On the rehabilitation of curiosity after denigration in the Christian tradition, Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, ); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, – (New York: Zone Books, ), chap. . Chief theme of Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, ); Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, – (New York: Palgrave, ). Simon Schama, “The Enlightenment in the Netherlands,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, . Paraphrase of Antoine Lilti, L’héritage des Lumières: Ambivalences de la modernité (Paris: Gallimard & Seuil, ), . Reconfirming French centrality, Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ).
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Enlightenment was not a thing; rather, we should ask what historical actors did with it.” In fact, many colonists were doing many things with the Enlightenment in the Caribbean. Yet the notion that they were “enlightened” would have struck many contemporaries in Europe as oxymoronic. Caribbean philistinism had already become cliché by the middle of the eighteenth century. Historian François Regourd nicely sums up French metropolitan disdain, which applies equally well to the British: colonists were perceived as “materialist and debauched, indifferent to the life of the mind, unfit for the slightest intellectual activity that did not promise immediate profit.” No surprise, then, that Charles Leslie declared of Jamaica in that “learning is here at the lowest Ebb.” Derogatory views of Caribbean philistinism became even more powerful in combination with arguments that Europeans and their offspring inevitably degenerated morally, physically, and intellectually in the tropics. As Natalie Zacek observes, historians have generally echoed rather than interrogated the harsh judgments of eighteenth-century critics. Richard Dunn asserts that “ever since the eighteenth century the sugar planters have deservedly received bad press” – and not, of course, just for boorishness. Others assert that, at the time of the American Revolution, the Leeward Islands were noteworthy only for their “grotesque character of life” and that Nevis at mid-century was nothing but a “tropical hellhole of dissipated whites.” Regourd notes similar characterizations by historians of the French Caribbean: these scholars relate that colonists favored “useful preoccupations, dancing, crude jokes, gossip, and sexual gluttony” over “disinterested learning, reflection and conversation” and “notoriety conferred by wealth” rather than time-consuming literature. Yet Zacek notes that this view is changing, that historians have begun to “explore English West Indian society in a more nuanced way.” Indeed, Trevor Burnard was the first historian to engage seriously with the intellectual life of Thomas Thistlewood, a notorious slaveholder important in
Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History,” American Historical Review , no. (): . François Regourd, “Lumières coloniales. Les Antilles françaises dans la République des Lettres,” Dix-huitième siècle (): . Charles Leslie, A New and Exact Account of Jamaica (Edinburgh, ), . More on this topic, Chapter . Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Quoting Pierre Pluchon and Jack Corzani, Regourd, “Lumières coloniales,” . Zacek, Settler Society, .
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this account, too. Regourd was urging colleagues working on the French Caribbean to do the same, and studies by Jennifer Palmer and Paul Cheney have acknowledged a place for Enlightenment in their studies of Saint-Domingue, chiefly in connection with rationalizing plantation management. Yet only two historians have placed eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual activity at the center of book-length treatments: James E. McClellan III in his pioneering study of Saint-Domingue’s scientific society, published nearly three decades ago, and B. W. Higman in an astute portrayal of the intellectual life of a Jamaican clergyman, John Lindsay. In this book, the colonists doing Enlightenment in the French and British Caribbean take center stage. They include planters, of course, but many others as well: physicians, merchants, overseers, military men, publishing entrepreneurs, colonial officials, and the rare minister or priest. They were just as inspired as their metropolitan counterparts by ideologies of utility and improvement, and they engaged in intellectual practices common in the metropole. They collected specimens of fauna and flora, sharing them with a local naturalist or posting them to a metropolitan intellectual society; they contributed a poem or a report on an agricultural innovation to their local periodicals; they checked out a book from a circulating library or read the news to each other in a café; they recorded observations from their barometers and thermometers and peered through telescopes and microscopes; they challenged metropolitan economic and political constraints by arguing in meetings and in letters to the editor. In the process, they made the Caribbean an object of knowledge, generating new knowledge about it. They brought ideas to life through diverse practices, from a White slaveholding parent of a mixed-race child transcribing passages of John Locke’s treatise on education to an experienced
Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the AngloAmerican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), chap. . Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), ; Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), chap. , at , –. Discussed further in Part IV. James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ); B. W. Higman, Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, – (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, ); also see James Robertson, “Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’s Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism,” History , no. (): –; Dennis Benn, The Caribbean: An Intellectual History, – (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, ). Special case discussed in Part IV, Justin Roberts’s Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ).
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French sugar refiner perusing chemical works to understand the process bubbling in his boiler house. These examples underscore the fact that my primary focus will be a Caribbean Enlightenment as experienced and made by White, male British and French colonists. This is not to dismiss the aspirations of the enslaved or free people of color or to occlude their participation in and contributions to knowledge production. Rather, it reflects an essential feature and function of Enlightenment as these men practiced it. Exclusion, based in race and gender, was very much the point. They enacted what David Hume so brutally asserted in his essay “On National Characters”: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.” Thus, a White author masqueraded as an enslaved “Toussaint” in a Saint-Domingue newspaper, deriding the possibility of a colonial learned academy by savagely satirizing his persona’s intellectual pretensions. Similarly, Edward Long in viciously dismissed the intellectual capacities of Francis Williams, a free Black man who had acquired a reputation for learning both in Jamaica and in Britain. White women were also largely
Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History , no. (): –, and in The Atlantic World, ed. D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly (New York: Routledge, ), –; Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ). Hume added this footnote to the essay five years after its original publication in : David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, ), . Even more unequivocal was a final revision of : “I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites.” Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture: Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University, ), –; Richard H. Popkin, “Hume’s Racism,” in The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, ), –; John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): –; Robert Palter, “Hume and Prejudice,” Hume Studies , no. (): –; Emmanuel C. Eze, “Hume, Race, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): –; Aaron Garrett, “Hume’s Revised Racism Revisited,” Hume Studies , no. (): –; Aaron Garrett, “Human Nature,” The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), :–, esp. –; Silvia Sebastiani, “National Characters and Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate,” in Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. See Parts II and III, respectively.
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excluded. Certainly they could discuss a book over tea and experiment with the medicinal qualities of a local plant. But in Jamaica we will see them excluded from intellectual friendships forged by men and how in Saint-Domingue they were assigned a complementary role to an emphatically male ideal of enlightened citizenship. Certainly not every White male in Cap Français or Kingston engaged deeply in Enlightenment intellectual culture – but neither did all the men in Bordeaux, Bristol, or Boston. The Enlightenment’s impact does not depend on inevitably elusive numbers, but in how individuals used its tools to make sense of their worlds, determine the meanings of their lives, and act. This is a book, then, about how a small but not insignificant set of people practiced and experienced the Enlightenment – its wonders and challenges, discipline and diversions, camaraderie and competition. It thus recovers an important facet of what Burnard has termed the “rich, vibrant, and distinctive” cultures of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and a significant aspect of the “beyond” that the Caribbean historian Douglas Hall implicitly challenged us to find when he wrote many years ago: “Life in our slave society of the eighteenth century went beyond master-driver-slave-and-whip, and sugar-rum-and-molasses.” This is not directly a book about slavery, either. Yet slavery inevitably conditioned many appropriations of Enlightenment intellectual culture as all of the actors in this book benefited from the brutal system of racial bondage that inextricably linked astounding wealth and enormous human suffering. Indeed, becoming “enlightened” made a new, distinctive colonial identity available to them, one that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy, redrew the line between free and unfree smudged by proximity and intimacy, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave. The Europeans who went to the islands were not culturally autochthonous. They brought with them a common intellectual heritage, one continuously refreshed by the circulation of metropolitan publications and the development of domestic cultural institutions, such as theatre and coffeehouses. As in the metropole, being “enlightened” in the colonies signaled more than the pursuit and possession of useful knowledge; it bolstered claims to gentility or civilité, serving as a means to acquire social and cultural capital. If anything, these larger stakes were felt by Caribbean
Burnard, Mastery, Desire, and Desire, . Douglas Hall, “Planters, Farmers and Gardeners in Eighteenth Century Jamaica,” Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture (Department of History, The University of the West Indies, ), .
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colonists more keenly because of the in-between state they occupied. Edward Brathwaite captured this in-betweeness when he defined “creole society” as the “result of a complex situation where a colonial polity reacts, as a whole to external metropolitan pressures, and at the same time to internal adjustments made necessary by the juxtaposition of master and slave, elite and labourer, in a culturally heterogeneous relationship.” This uncomfortable, sometimes perilous situation transformed the Enlightenment in the Caribbean into a distinctive “politics of culture.” Philip Wickstead’s portrait of the planter Benjamin Pusey and his wife Elizabeth illustrates how colonists could appropriate metropolitan ideas and forms to serve a colonial agenda and their stakes in doing so (Figure .). Nothing in the painting, not even the Black servant, would necessarily suggest that the scene is set in Jamaica rather than England. Yet Wickstead probably painted it on the Cherry Hill and Cherry Garden Estate that Pusey owned in St. Dorothy’s parish. Hardly the grandest planter, he was prosperous enough, and he served multiple terms in the Assembly of Jamaica. He had a taste for improvement, as his name appeared on a list of Assembly members selected to oversee the creation and management of a free school for the poor in Spanish Town, the colonial capital. He appreciated poetry, too, which he sought to promote locally by subscribing for six copies of the domestically printed Persian Love Elegies by John Wolcot (who later enjoyed much success as the satiric poet Peter Pindar back in Britain). As a member of the White planter elite, it is not surprising that the portly and neatly attired Pusey occupies the center of the painting.
Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), xvi. Phrase from David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), . On Black enslaved servants as status symbols, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), chap. ; Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –; David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. I have learned much about Wickstead from Kate Crawford’s dissertation, “Transient Painters, Traveling Canvases: Portraiture and Mobility in the British Atlantic, –” (PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, ), which she very generously shared with me. Benjamin Pusey, UCL; additional property acquired by his death, “Gymballs and Cherry Garden Estates,” Caribbeana, volume , JFSGR. Benjamin Pusey, Feurtado, “Official and Other Personages of Jamaica from –,” JFSGR. School funded with a legacy from a member of the island’s most important planter dynasty, the Beckfords, The Laws of Jamaica, –, :–.
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Figure . Philip Wickstead (active –), Portrait of Benjamin and Mary Pusey (c. ). Oil on canvas. . cm. Collection: The National Gallery of Jamaica. Photo credit: Franz Marzouca
Gesturing toward a painting on a chair by the piazza’s entry, he commands everyone’s attention: the enslaved Black man who props up the painting; his wife in her pink satin dress, edged generously with lace; even the whippet at lower right. A landscape on the wall, an oriental carpet bunched up against a globe, books scattered on the floor as if they had just been consulted – all attest to the Puseys’ affluence, refinement, and intellectual interests. It is a rather charming depiction, but it communicates power as well. However affectionate, even bemused, his wife’s gaze acknowledges his authority. Fully illumined, husband and wife assert “enlightened” command over the human being and the humble beast consigned to the shadows and the margins. Wickstead was working in the popular metropolitan genre of the “conversation piece,” deploying its conventions to depict a colonial parlor. Like metropolitan painters, he showed his subjects “in a comparatively relaxed guise, demonstrating a ‘natural’, easy gentility through everyday
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acts.” The mid-century trend of emphasizing “familial intimacy and domestic affection” is much evident here as well. As in metropolitan conversation pieces, the Puseys’ dress and possessions project status, while their books and globes constitute their “proudly displayed cultural capital.” Yet the portrait did more than satisfy Pusey’s vanity; it performed a function similar to the conversation pieces produced for British patrons in India “eager to establish their credentials as a ruling elite.” As such, it expressed “planters’ desires for a cultured, established, and naturally increasing white Jamaican society” as it projected a refined image of colonial society back to the motherland. But the image is not entirely stable: while Pusey is the undeniable center of this group portrait, the servant and the painting he supports interrupt the wedge of light falling from the outside into the parlor – a reminder to us of the traffic in labor and cultural goods on which the Puseys’ prosperity and cultural aspirations depended. Acknowledging the many motives my subjects had for engaging in Enlightenment intellectual culture (beyond a disinterested pursuit of knowledge) does not compel me to adopt a hermeneutics of suspicion, however. I approach Caribbean colonists in the spirit of Joyce Chaplin’s An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation & Modernity in the Lower South, – (). In the preface, she recounts how her original thesis collided with an epiphany in the archives “when I was sitting over yet another planter’s library inventory, which contained, yet again, all the latest (circa ) in improving literature. An argument that this was a static society seemed not to explain the actual society at hand.” The resulting study is impressive, first, for how seriously she takes her subjects. She does not assume that bad faith or hypocrisy necessarily motivated the southern slaveholders of North America when they sought to reconcile
Hannah Grieg, “Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text,” in Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance, ed. Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant (London: V&A Publications, ), –. Kate Retford, “From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England,” Journal of Design History , no. (): –. Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), ; Lawrence E. Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal , no. (): –. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature – The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . Crawford, “Transient Painters,” . Thanks to Richard Sha for this observation. Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation & Modernity in the Lower South, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), vii.
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their enlightened “modernity” with the brute facts of their slave societies, which contemporary Scottish stadial views of human history condemned as atavistic. Second, she illuminates their attempts by combining evidence from diverse primary sources – private correspondence, newspaper advertisements, agricultural treatises – with a deep understanding of the ideas with which her subjects engaged. Nor is my goal to require yet another element in the characterization of particular eighteenth-century Caribbean “creole” societies. Even scholars deeply interested in creolization acknowledge the slipperiness of the concept as “creole” quickly breaks through the modest definitional bound of people of African and European descent born in America. The constant churn of population caused by high levels of mortality and the comingsand-goings of merchants, military men, officials, planters and their children, among others adds to the problem of characterizing the White colonists of these societies overall. More seriously, it was a deeply polemical term. Visitors could deplore the “creole” while colonists could proudly claim the label. They could reject it, as North Americans did, or they could transform themselves into “Americans,” as periodicals in SaintDomingue urged their readers in the s. As a rule, I use the word “creole” when it appears in my sources and when it reflects a perception of or an assertion by my subjects. Otherwise, I prefer the term “identity” as defined by Kathleen Wilson, who was supplementing a quotation from Stuart Hall: “a historical process, [it was] ‘a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being”’ . . . tentative, multiple and contingent” – in short, a dynamic process rather than a static quality. Diffuse and shifting, “identity” captures the creole impulse while leaving room for outraged British and French colonists to claim their rights as Englishmen and Frenchmen. These shifting (sometimes opportunistic) identities also validate the convenient shorthand of terms such as “Jamaican” to denote those who shared a space and a distinctive way of life that ended at the water’s edge. ***
Charles Stewart, “Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory,” in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Charles Stewart (London and New York: Routledge, ). Joyce E. Chaplin, “Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance,” in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Charles Stewart (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, ), . See Part II. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, ), xiii.
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What Is a Caribbean Enlightenment?
The title of this book reflects the region’s economic, demographic, and ecological coherence: a tropical environment in which enslaved laborers, vastly outnumbering their masters, powered an agro-industrial regime devoted to producing consumer commodities for export. Ideally, a book about a Caribbean Enlightenment – even one focused on just one slice of the population – would cover more than the French and the British national contexts. So confined, it would include French and British holdings beyond Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, my chief focus here. But such a book would become entirely too diffuse. The Enlightenment was a vast world of mobility, networks, and connections, but scholars must narrow their focus if they hope to contribute anything meaningful. And, as Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus have demonstrated, there are very good reasons to center a study on the most populated, economically dynamic colonies of two empires battling for primacy throughout the eighteenth century. This book is divided into four parts, each of which explores a distinct and well-established field of Enlightenment scholarship: natural history; the press and the public sphere; the histories of reading and the book; and Agricultural Enlightenment. All four topics have generated impressive bodies of scholarship, which constitute the essential ground of my work. In each case, I identify the assumptions and expectations that colonists shared with metropolitans and how they diverged. We will see how their appropriations of Enlightenment intellectual culture were creative, suited to colonial agendas, hardly passive, and often not deferential to the metropole. As an intellectual historian, I am naturally drawn to identifying, contextualizing, and interpreting the texts my subjects produced as well as the circumstances of their production. But I also employ other means to detect intellectual activity, such as mapping the movements of naturalists and collating information from newspaper advertisements. Part I begins in the late s, and Part IV reaches into the early years of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Taken together, they push back to the s and s a serious engagement with Enlightenment intellectual culture. It thus resists the dating of an “Atlantic Enlightenment” from and the gravitational pull of the Haitian Revolution. The importance of the latter especially is undeniable, yet it cannot tell us everything
Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French SaintDomingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Wiliam Max Nelson, “The Atlantic Enlightenment,” in The Atlantic World, ed. D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly (London: Routledge, ), .
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we need to know about the French colonial regime any more than the French Revolution can tell us everything we need to know about the Ancien Régime. 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 s into the s. Browne’s and Robinson’s work tells us much about how colonial naturalists worked in the field, the intellectual challenges they confronted, and the critical importance of networks of local informants to their research – even, in Browne’s case, to publication. It reveals how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment and how White male colonists cultivated affectively rich intellectual friendships and appropriated a disciplined and respectable scientific identity. Part II, “Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of SaintDomingue in the s,” argues that the three periodicals established in the colony during this decade were facets of a coherent and deeply gendered Enlightenment project: the long-lived Affiches Américaines and the short-lived Journal de Saint-Domingue and Iris Américaine. Although well known to scholars and increasingly available through digital publication, the Affiches has been insufficiently exploited for what it tells us about colonial intellectual life; the other two, because of their rarity, have never been systematically analyzed. All three served as a conduit for metropolitan material. But by combining this material with domestically produced efforts, the Affiches and the Journal created forums for discussing issues of public concern, such as governance and commerce. They fostered the creation of an informed and articulate male citizenry devoted to the common good and committed to finding enlightened means towards it. The Iris promoted the flip side of this ambitious cultural program by encouraging the refined White woman to civilize her partner through the cultivation of belles lettres, ideally displacing his “colored” concubine. Part III, “Tristram in the Tropics: Or, Reading in Jamaica,” addresses a significant lacuna in the histories of the book and reading, vigorous fields in European and North American Enlightenment studies. It begins with an impressionistic survey of reading on the island that analyzes newspaper advertisements, library inventories, book orders, and the practice of borrowing and lending. 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 their
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practices do not permit generalizations to all Jamaican readers, they demonstrate how colonial readers took possession of Enlightenment and suggest how they used publications to reflect on their situations in light of personal experience, social status, intellectual aspirations, and even spiritual anxieties. Part IV, “Cultivating Knowledge: Agricultural Enlightenment 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, and developed new technology. From letters to the editor to freestanding treatises, their agricultural writing even sought to solve social problems by promoting crop diversification. Caribbean agricultural texts and images also reveal a disconnect between metropolitan and colonial intellectual agendas, challenging the efficacy of the existing intellectual infrastructure that was supposed to secure useful knowledge, promote improvement, and arbiter competing claims to intellectual authority. Finally, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, which demanded that slavery be considered 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. As these summaries suggest, this is not the Enlightenment of bookshelves stuffed with canonical texts, though more than enough of those figure in my story. Nor is this the Enlightenment construed as the progress of humanity, the benign advance of liberal democracy, or the malignancy of European hegemony. Learning what people “made” of Enlightenment through a dynamic encounter of mind and material, we avoid unhelpful dichotomies that cast it as progressive or repressive and escape what Michel Foucault called the “blackmail of the Enlightenment”: the demand that we be for it as an agent of liberating change or against it as a source of new forms of oppression. The diversity of Enlightenment views on any given topic – its “noisily argumentative world” – further frustrates judgment as it counsels us to investigate the tension between different viewpoints and the stakes people had in them. In the confines of a single
Annelien de Dijn, “The Politics of Enlightenment: From Peter Gay to Jonathan Israel,” The Historical Journal , no. (): –. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, ), –; James Schmidt, “Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault,” History of European Ideas , no. (): –. Foucault’s “blackmail” much in evidence in the framing of Ritchie Robertson’s encyclopedic synthesis, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, – (). In contrast and also
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article published in a popular British periodical, for example, a reader in Glasgow or Montego Bay encountered Hume’s scathing dismissal of the intellectual and moral capacities of Africans and James Beattie’s sharply worded rebuttal. As the Enlightenment in the Caribbean tells us things we did not know about Caribbean societies, it also contributes to our understanding of the Enlightenment writ large. Here that chiefly means exploring the conditions, agents, and methods of its “acclimatization” for what it reveals about the powerful appeal of Enlightenment intellectual culture and the dynamism with which it spread. Metaphors are not arguments, of course, but they are economical – and one that suggests the opportunities and pitfalls of “acclimatization” would have been appreciated in the eighteenth century by everyone from a royal administrator to a Caribbean colonist coaxing fruit from his transplanted peach tree. The Enlightenment was like a ship stuffed with plants of diverse provenance, only some of which might flourish wherever the ship disembarked on its global voyage. The former required an amenable environment and cultivators who carefully selected, perceived benefits accruing from their efforts, and risked hybridization to produce distinctive, even wildly different varieties better suited to their needs. In short, they never let anything alone, and they made what came to them their own. The quartet of themes I explore here obviously does not exhaust the subject. The indefinite article in my title is a reminder of the openendedness of this study. This book will hopefully inspire other scholars to discover other Caribbean Enlightenments that augment, correct, or supersede mine. Nor does my title assert a unitary Enlightenment in the Caribbean – or anywhere else, for that matter. We should not expect the Enlightenment to look precisely the same in French Guiana, Barbados, or Martinique any more than it looked the same in Philadelphia or Charleston, in Amsterdam or Edinburgh. With justification, some scholars worry that the proliferation of “Enlightenments” – not just geographically based, but Jewish, Catholic, radical, military, Protestant, participatory, practical – drains the “Enlightenment” of meaning, making it hopelessly diffuse and worthless as an analytic tool. How scholars with different projects engage with this important question and emerge with different alluding to Foucault’s blackmail, Vartija urges that the Enlightenment’s foundational and troubling role in the creation of modern ideas of equality and race is best handled by eschewing judgment and focusing on the links and tension between them in Enlightenment thought. Quoting Barbara Taylor, Devin J. Vartija, The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), .
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answers is always valuable, necessary, and (dare I say it?) enlightening. Where definition fails, another metaphor may satisfy. Richard Sher elegantly characterizes the Enlightenment “as a grand symphony with multiple variations,” and my schema maps nicely onto his common core “of general values to which proponents of the Enlightenment adhered.” Ultimately, the struggles to contain Enlightenment show that we have grasped something truly essential about it: a protean quality that inevitably undercuts crisp definitions – without excusing us from the obligation to try.
Richard Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in EighteenthCentury Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.
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Before Breadfruit Natural History, Sociability, and Colonial Identity in Jamaica The starting-point must be to marvel at all things, even the most commonplace. The means is to commit to writing things that have been observed, and are useful. The end must be to depict nature more accurately than anyone else. Carl Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica ()
The Ties of Friendship may proceed from a Difference, as well as a Similarity, of Manners. We seek in another the Perfections we want in ourselves; and the Eagerness of the Pursuit, or the difficulty of succeeding, leads us into a Passion for acquiring them. William Guthrie, The Friends: A Sentimental History ()
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Introduction to Part I
In February , Dr. Anthony Robinson, a resident of Jamaica for some years, launched a series of experiments on the cabbage tree to determine whether it would yield an edible flour as some East Indian trees did. His method came from the popular travel accounts of the seventeenth-century explorer, William Dampier. On a trip around the world, Dampier had encountered Southeast Asians who processed the pith of a local tree into flour to make “very good bread.” The natives of “all the Spice Islands” followed the same practice, a fellow ship’s captain assured him. Robinson’s experiments began February on the Chiswick Estate of Matthew Wallen in Jamaica’s easternmost parish, St. Thomas in the East. Processing the pith of a mountain cabbage resulted in “a pound of a fine impalpable ashcolor’d farina or meal,” which made an agreeable porridge. He conducted similar experiments on the estates of his friends Jasper Hall and Dr. Pringle, then again at Wallen’s. But the results were disappointing compared to those of his first trial. Nevertheless, Edward Long, Robinson’s friend and author of The History of Jamaica (), found them encouraging enough to recommend publicizing the process to colonists living inland. “With very little trouble,” they would secure a very “nourishing and restorative” food from the abundant cabbage trees growing there. Thinking globally came easily to Robinson. He applied knowledge gathered from islanders on the other side of the world to the needs of islanders living on his side. His effort was systematic and recognizably “scientific”; it distinguished clearly between “observation” and “experiment” as eighteenth-century naturalists understood the terms. It was simultaneously local and cosmopolitan: it depended on colonial material
William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, ), –. IoJ-Rob, : #. Edward Long, History of Jamaica (London, ), :. Lorraine Daston, “The Empire of Observation, –,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.
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support and encouragement and on ideas that had circled the globe through publication. Accounts that document the practice of natural history this well in a colonial environment are rare – and even rarer in eighteenth-century Jamaica. In fact, Robinson figures in a genealogy of naturalists who worked on the island from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. Many were physicians, with Hans Sloane preeminent. Sloane’s A Voyage to the Islands ( and ) was a critical authority for Robinson as he crisscrossed the island on botanizing expeditions and cultivated local informants. Equally important was Patrick Browne’s The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (), which focused on the island’s flora and fauna despite its title. And Robinson’s activities had a legacy. Some of his informants nurtured their own botanical interests and pursued serious activities after his death in : welcoming and assisting visiting European naturalists, exchanging letters and specimens with metropolitan scientific organizations, encouraging the foundation of the island’s first botanical garden in , and ensuring the favor and funding of the Assembly of Jamaica for Joseph Banks’s project of naturalizing the breadfruit in the s. All this made the arrival in of the HMS Providence, completing its “useful” project of bringing breadfruit from Tahiti to feed the enslaved, the crowning achievement of decades of Jamaican botanical enthusiasm.
Other physicians: Thomas Trapham, author of A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica (), and the naval surgeon Henry Barham, whose manuscript Hortus Americanus circulated in Jamaica until its publication in ; M. T. Ashcroft, “Tercentenary of the First English Book on Tropical Medicine, by Thomas Trapham of Jamaica,” British Medical Journal (): –; David Buisseret, “Studying the Natural Sciences in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica,” Caribbean Quarterly , no. (): –; “Barham, Henry (?–), botanist,” ODNB; James Robertson, “Knowledgeable Readers: Jamaican Critiques of Sloane’s Botany,” in From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections, ed. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter (London: The British Library, ), –; Robertson, “Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’s Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism,” –. Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (London, ). Higman, Proslavery Priest, –; Hall, “Planters, Farmers and Gardeners in Eighteenth Century Jamaica”; Douglas Hall, “Botanical and Horticultural Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in West Indies Accounts: Essays on the History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy in Honour of Richard Sheridan, ed. Roderick A. McDonald (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, ), –; of the ample scholarship on Joseph Banks, John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Neil Chambers, Joseph Banks and the British Museum (London: Pickering & Chatto, ). On breadfruit’s reception, Lorna Loring, “Voyages of Improvement: Ambition and Failure in Projects of Plant Transfer and Improvement in the Late Eighteenth-Century British Empire” (PhD dissertation, American University, ), –.
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In short, there was consistent and increasing interest in natural history, especially botany, in eighteenth-century in Jamaica. It is a difficult story to recover fully, because evidence is scattered among cultural institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, eighteenth-century and modern metropolitan and Jamaican publications, and assorted rare book collections and archives from the Caribbean to New Zealand. Its fragmentary nature and the presence of so much of it in the archives of scientific organizations, such as the Royal Society of London and the Royal Botanical Garden of Edinburgh, gives the erroneous impression that Jamaicans with such interests were rare and isolated. Moreover, the compelling figures of Sloane and Banks and the organization they headed act like intellectual force fields, powerfully attracting scholarly attention. Part I reconstructs roughly two decades of this story by documenting the little-known careers of Browne and Robinson, both of whom migrated to Jamaica during the mid-s. Scholars have done extensive and important work on medical professionals in the Caribbean. They have revealed how medical specialists suppressed the contributions to knowledge of enslaved and indigenous peoples; they have explored the complex ways in which their grappling with Caribbean medical challenges shaped metropolitan medical ideas and promoted the emergence of a biologically based racist ideology, which intersected with and supported the imposition of a European imperial order. Much can be found in Browne’s and Robinson’s intellectual legacies to confirm these conclusions. For example, both neglected to name enslaved informants as they did many, if not all, of their White informants, underscoring the European appropriation of the medical knowledge of the enslaved in a racialized form of epistemological imperialism. But my focus here is different: I use their overlapping careers to help us grasp more fully the intellectual and practical challenges
Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Schiebinger, Plants and Empire; Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves; Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries; Miles Ogborn, The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), –; Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the EighteenthCentury British Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Emily Senior, The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, –: Slavery, Disease, and Colonial Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Pratik Chakrabarti, Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire, – (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Kathleen S. Murphy, “Translating the Vernacular: Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies , no. (): –, Robinson at .
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of a colonial naturalist’s work and to reveal the larger cultural stakes these activities had for the White, male collaborators whose expertise they nurtured and who became their friends. In both chapters, then, we see how Browne and Robinson made their way on an island with little physical or intellectual infrastructure; how they collated and assessed information acquired through their own efforts and from colonial informants and published sources; how they tested and applied Linnaean taxonomy when the Swede’s ideas remained both novel and contested; and how they created and cultivated networks of local informants to assist them. Indeed, like many Linnaeans scattered throughout the world, they made the Swede’s ideas work in the field. Yet because Linnaean natural history was “a collective and collaborative enterprise and not the work of one man,” Browne and Robinson were firmly anchored in a Jamaican social context. Through the collaborations that evolved into relationships of tutelage and intellectual friendship, we discern White men who found these activities particularly attractive because of its purposiveness and the possibility it offered for creating improved, disciplined selves. Like Roy Porter’s British provincials, their participation in Enlightenment science signaled the possession of culture and a “repudiation of [their own] provinciality”; it offered a “leg-up from rusticity, associated with barbarity and riot, towards metropolitan – indeed, cosmopolitan – urbanity.” Yet such intellectual engagement was more than “aping metropolitan institutions and values.” For colonists smarting from metropolitan disdain, these “gentlemanly activities” were a way to acquire cultural capital as they further distinguished themselves from the slaves over whom they exercised an absolute, if sometimes precarious dominion. They offered new ways of being men through affectively rich relationships centered on collaborative intellectual endeavor, whose benefits ranged from diversion to personal transcendence. This focus also shifts attention from connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists to the circulation of plants and knowledge about the island’s flora and fauna within Jamaica and between Jamaicans.
“Introduction: De-centring and Re-centring Linnaeus,” in Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge, ed. Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nybert, and Stéphane van Damme (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), . Similar assertion with respect to electrical demonstrations in America, Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, –. Roy Porter, “Science, Provincial Culture and Provincial Opinion in Enlightenment England,” British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –. Selected works on colonial science: Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, ), esp. –; James E. McClellan III and
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Jamaicans did not wait until after the Seven Years’ War to become curious about their natural environment and to seek to make it “useful” and profitable. No doubt few of Browne’s and Robinson’s local informants were aware of or had much use for the epistemological hierarchy or “epistemic mercantilism” that theoretically restricted colonists to collection while awarding metropolitans the right to reflection. Most people the two naturalists encountered contributed their mite of information without connecting it to their larger project of advancing knowledge of the natural world while others shared their enthusiasm. But the knowledge and efforts of all of them – Black and White, enslaved and free, female and male, poor, middling, and wealthy – combined to transform Jamaica into a home. Their encounter with Jamaican nature helped create a distinctive, eighteenth-century Jamaican identity in a process similar to what Jack Greene notes in seventeenth-century Barbados: “At the same time that they were coming to terms with their new spaces, learning both how to manipulate them for their own survival and material advantage and how to describe them in terms that would enable them and others to comprehend them, European settlers also became active agents in changing them, in creating new social landscapes.” Browne’s and Robinson’s intellectual legacies differ greatly: an impressive publication versus unpublished, frequently anarchic manuscript notes. They illuminate different aspects of the story of natural history in Jamaica. After briefly describing their island home, Chapter considers the ambitions and accomplishments of Browne’s History in the context of European intellectual life. As a social document, it also reveals Jamaican ingenuity as its people discovered their island’s resources and the local support that make the History as much a Caribbean as a metropolitan intellectual
François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, ); Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene; Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement of the World” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), ; Kathleen S. Murphy, “To Make Florida Answer to Its Name: John Ellis, Bernard Romans and the Atlantic Science of British West Florida,” The British Journal for the History of Science , no. (): –. “Epistemic mercantilism,” Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, ; Parrish, American Curiosity, –; –. Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –.
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achievement. In Chapter , Robinson self-consciously extends the work of Sloane, Browne, and other naturalists as he literally covers more ground on the island than any naturalist before him. We see him struggling to make sense of Jamaican nature as he collated information from published sources and his local informants. Through Robinson, we also glimpse the emotional bonds that transformed collaborators into friends, all of whom engaged in “the collective and cooperative doing of the Enlightenment.” Before we begin, though, some background information about the island Browne and Robinson made their home is in order. By the time they became active in Jamaica, the enormously profitable agro-industrial regime geared to sugar production and powered by enslaved Black labor was already well established. Indeed, it brought exponential economic growth to the island’s economy. Surpassing the sugar production of Barbados in , Jamaica had become the British Empire’s major producer by . The island produced , hogsheads of sugar on plantations in and more than , on plantations in , the year Robinson died. Indeed, the wealth of this economic powerhouse more than quadrupled between and ; by , it had nearly tripled. That said, sugar, however dominant, was not the only form of agricultural activity; in the s, a variety of other commodities were cultivated for internal needs (provisions and livestock) and for export (ginger, pimento, cotton, and coffee). Rapid population growth accompanied this explosive economy, though most came from the increasing number of slaves required to work everlarger plantations. In , there were nearly , people living in Jamaica: , of the enslaved, , White people, and about a
Emphasis added, Bettina Dietz, “Making Natural History,” Central European History (): . Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, . B. W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, ), . Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, ; Trevor G. Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, – (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), esp. –; classic accounts of the Caribbean sugar industry, Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, – (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, ), esp. – and Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, – (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), esp. –; a brief, useful description of the organization and operation of an eighteenth-century Jamaican sugar plantation, Louis P. Nelson, “The Jamaican Plantation: Industrial, Global, Contested,” in The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment, ed. David T. Gies and Cynthia Hall (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), –. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, –. Jack Greene, Settler Jamaica in the s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), esp. chap. .
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Introduction to Part I
thousand free people of color. By , population had increased by nearly half to ,, respectively ,, ,, and ,. In , total population stood at nearly ,: again respectively, ,, ,, and a little more than ,. English settlement had initially clustered in the southeastern part of the island, the location of its administrative and mercantile centers, Spanish Town and Kingston. Kingston was always the larger of the two; in , it had a White population of nearly three thousand while Spanish Town had about fifteen hundred souls, one-third of whom were enslaved. The overall demographics of the island skewed with respect to gender as well as race. Adult White men outnumbered adult White women three to one. Focused first on the southern alluvial plains from St. Thomas in the East to Clarendon parish, cultivation spread in the s after the First Maroon War into the western parishes of Westmoreland and Hanover; it also expanded along the north coast. As Trevor Burnard has meticulously documented, the plantation complex was the economic dynamo driving the Jamaican economy. The planter was both the “chief architect” of the system and its chief beneficiary. Though dominant, the island’s elite of large planters never entirely squeezed out smaller proprietors, especially coffee producers who could exploit lands unsuited to sugar cultivation. Burnard takes pains to point out that lesser White men benefited enough to identify with their social betters. White accountants, overseers, and medical men accomplished other important plantation tasks. And Jack Greene stresses how the typical settler in Jamaica at mid-century produced provisions or livestock on a single establishment. In the towns, a variety of individuals catered to the White population’s other needs, from entertainment to legal and medical services. As an administrative center, Spanish Town was home to many public and judicial officials as well as a variety of lawyers; as a “gentry” center, it was the urban home of many planters, who flocked to the town when courts were in session and the Assembly of Jamaica convened. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the city, albeit small, acquired substantial public buildings, many clustered around the Parade
For precise figures, Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, . Higman, Proslavery Priest, ; James Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town Jamaica, – (Jamaica: Ian Randle, ), . Trevor Burnard, “‘Prodigious Riches’: The Wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution,” The Economic History Review , no. (): . Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, . Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, . Greene, Settler Jamaica, . Ibid., , .
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or old Spanish square, as well as a handsomely rebuilt church. An agricultural system premised on the production of lucrative consumer commodities obviously required merchants, and Kingston with its busy port became an impressive generator of wealth. Some merchants made fabulous fortunes based in the slave trade, trade with the Spanish Main, moneylending, and the importation of staples and luxury goods; many “diversified” their economic interests by purchasing their own plantations. All this activity made Kingston the richest town in British America by mid-century, while the “Profits made in Trade” constructed a town “Inlarged and Improved in Elegant Buildings,” according to a account. Yet though some White men made fabulous amounts of money and others prospered more than their counterparts in Britain, life in Jamaica was hardly easy, much less long or secure. The enslaved lived in a permanent state of demographic catastrophe; mortality for White people was terrifying, too. Between and , funerals (nearly ,) dwarfed baptisms (,) in Kingston. When the young attorney William Hickey sailed into Kingston harbor in , the ship’s captain played him a cruel practical joke, yet one that reflected the grim reality of Hickey’s new home: he should keep an eye out for “a dapper little man, dressed in black,” who would greet him warmly, wish him health and long life, and calculate the dimensions of his coffin. This mortality prevented the White population from achieving “a naturally self-reproducing population” – indeed only an annual and “considerable infusion of fresh immigrants” could maintain it. Nor was the island tranquil. The western portion could not be developed until the government made peace in with the Maroons, runaway slaves who sheltered in the island’s mountains. Tacky’s Revolt, “the most significant Caribbean slave revolt before the Haitian
Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, –. On two such merchant families, Katie Donington, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ); Christer Petley, White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, ; Greene, Settler Jamaica, . Vincent Brown citing Trevor Burnard, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . William Hickey, Memoirs (London: Hurst & Blackett, ), :. Trevor Burnard, “A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica,” Journal of Social History , no. (): .
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Introduction to Part I
Revolution,” erupted in . The British army and navy intervened after the Jamaica militia failed to quash the revolt, and savage punishments followed. Yet while the revolt’s suppression and aftermath were especially brutal, unremitting and ubiquitous violence was the rule in Jamaican society – indeed, it was the weft of the social fabric. This is a fact worth stressing as it never surfaces in either Browne’s account or Robinson’s papers. At the opposite end of violence or the threat thereof was the prospect of boredom. Kingston and Spanish Town offered an increasing array of amusements such as theatrical performances and balls, coffeehouses and horseracing as the century unspooled. Noteworthy events such as Jamaica’s celebration of the coronation of George III prompted special treats such as the performance in of Handel’s occasional music. But while some planters migrated from their estates into Spanish Town for the social and cultural activities accompanying the annual sitting of the Assembly of Jamaica, many others lived in small towns or on properties some distance from urban amenities. As we will see, this did not mean a lack of access to books and other cultural commodities, and individuals improvised to secure some measure of cultural and intellectual stimulation (Part III). But they would also understandably welcome visitors such as weary naturalists who interrupted rural routines.
Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, –; Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). Classic account of Jamaican theatre, Richardson Little Wright, Revels in Jamaica, – (New York: Dodd, Mead, ); Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage, – (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ); Robertson, “Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’s Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism,” –. Higman, Proslavery Priest, –.
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
The Irishman Patrick Browne (–) described himself as “[h]appy in a large share of health & strength; enured to the [tropical] Climate; and with a mind strongly disposed to the cultivation of Natural Knowledge.” He first encountered Caribbean nature as a teenager on Antigua. He returned to Europe to study botany and physical science in Paris; like other Catholic Irishmen aspiring to become doctors, he received his medical degree at the University of Reims. He matriculated, though did not complete a degree at the University of Leiden. Before returning to the Caribbean, he practiced in a London hospital. Thus, he was a welleducated and experienced physician when he migrated to Jamaica around . When Browne justified his enterprise in the preface of The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (), he typically asserted the inadequacy of earlier accounts. Europeans before him, however distinguished their “Talents and Learning” and “Curiosity and Abilities,” had been preoccupied with “the Arts of Government, or the Means of Acquiring Wealth and
Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (London, ), vi. Laurence W. B. Brockliss, “Medicine, Religion and Social Mobility in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. James Kelly and Fiona Clark (London: Routledge, ), –. Ibid., . Marc Caball, “Transforming Tradition in the British Atlantic: Patrick Bowne (c. –): An Irish Botanist and Physician in the West Indies,” in Early Modern Ireland and the World of Medicine, ed. John Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –; Ernest Charles Nelson, “Patrick Browne (ca. –), Irish Physician, Historian and Caribbean Botanist,” Huntia , no. (): –; Ernest Charles Nelson, “Patrick Browne’s The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (, ),” Archives of Natural History , no. (): –; “The Life of Patrick Browne, M.D., Author of the History of Jamaica; from the European Magazine,” Annual Register (): *–; Aylmer Bourke Lambert, “Anecdotes of the Late Dr. Patrick Browne, Author of the Natural History of Jamaica,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London (): –; for a discussion of Browne in the context of other naturalists in Jamaica, Jefferson Dillman, Colonizing Paradise: Landscape and Empire in the West Indies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), chap. .
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
Power.” In addition, “the love of ease and pleasure, to which the climate but too much disposes even the most determined minds, have dissipated the best established Resolutions.” Worse, their attempts “towards exhibiting a just idea of this Island bears the evident marks of Imbecility, Inattention, or erroneous Information.” Unsurprisingly for a doctor, Browne elaborated a history of the study of natural history that was rooted in medicine and that seamlessly joined science and utility. His History was part of a larger story of the struggle of attaining complete, accurate, and well-ordered knowledge. People had always sought remedies for physical problems in nature, but “practitioners and physicians” had acquired it haphazardly, their efforts hampered by “observations of the vulgar” or traditional practices. Significantly and somewhat paradoxically, Browne connected advances in knowledge of the natural world to the wider dissemination of medical knowledge and competition between practitioners. The complexity of their subject – the human “machine” as affected by “age, sex, and climate,” its vulnerability to diseases with misleading pathologies – compelled them to become eminently thoughtful and acute observers. Thus, Browne celebrated the professionalization of medical practice with its demands for mastery of an extensive body of knowledge, abundant training, and intellectual acuity. He claimed, too, that he and his contemporaries were living in a sort of investigative “golden age.” The “inaccuracies” of the Ancients and the subsequent elaboration of useless systems had passed; the naturalists Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, John Ray, and Carl Linnaeus had “at last reformed the whole,” bringing the study of natural history “almost to a perfect standard.” Yet the efforts of an elite of specialized and highly trained intellectuals would not suffice to complete this great project. That depended on full knowledge of all the world’s natural “productions” and the identification of their uses. For this reason, Browne was gratified that so many “gentlemen” employed “their vacant hours” in collecting and observing whatever they found wherever they were living, “at home or abroad.” Yet their praiseworthy contributions to science also had substantial moral benefits. “What study can be more agreeable to a rational being? or what can raise our admiration, or oblige us to contemplate the power and wisdom of the Almighty?” Introducing his first section on geology, Browne argued that natural history “ought to employ some part of the thoughts of almost all sorts of classes of people: The Farmer and the Husbandman . . . the Miner,
Browne, History, v–vi.
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Ibid., xxxi.
Ibid., xxxii.
Ibid., xxxiii.
Ibid.
Before Breadfruit
the Lapidary and the Chemist,” as well as the physician. Animated by the physico-theology of John Ray’s Wisdom of God Made Manifest in the Works of Creation (), he shared with many contemporaries a confidence in the devotional dimension of scientific activity. Ultimately for him, this great work was inherently hierarchical and democratic, the business of professionals and the vocation of all, and it embraced knowledge of the least of God’s creatures and the contemplation of the Creator himself. Browne also integrated larger theoretical issues into the History. After returning to London in October , he explained them in a letter that responded to one from Linnaeus. Linnaeus had learned of Browne’s project from the Danish biologist Peter Ascanius, one of his students then in London. Ascanius had written him that Browne was both a skilled naturalist and follower of the Swede, predicting that Browne’s work would be “much superior” to Sloane’s. When Browne wrote to Linnaeus, he used the wholly formulaic, if still sincere, Latin expressions of gratitude, esteem, and friendship. He confirmed Linnaeus’s influence on his work, and he claimed that he would organize the island’s natural phenomena – from minerals to plants to animals – into “natural classes.” He would organize the first in a system he had devised; for flora and fauna, he would follow Linnaeus, rigorously recording his observations and classifications in the Latin terms Linnaeus mandated. But because he wanted his work to be useful to doctors, artisans, and cultivators, he would also include local
Ibid., xxxiv. Peter Harrison, “Physico-Theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter R. Anstey and John A. Schuster (Dordrecht: Springer, ), –; Neal C. Gillespie, “Natural History, Natural Theology, and Social Order: John Ray and the ‘Newtonian Ideology’,” Journal of the History of Biology , no. (): –; Steven Shapin, “The Image of the Man of Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science. Volume : Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –; Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, –, –, –. Bref och Skrifvelser af och till Carl von Linné (Stockholm: Aktiebolaget Ljus, ), Patrick Browne to Carl Linnaeus, October , :–; on Browne’s importance in Linnaeus’s reception, Frans Antonie Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of Their Ideas in Systematic Botany, – (Utrecht: A. Oosthoek’s Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., ), –. Carl Linnaeus, A Selection of the Linnaean Correspondence, ed. James Edward Smith (London, ), :. Johan Frederik Gronovius at Leyden sent him a description of the book in February , judging the materials he had already seen superior to Sloane’s. Gronovius to Linnaeus, February , Linnaean Correspondence. Linnaeus purchased many of Browne’s plants for his collection, and they corresponded intermittently until . On Linnaeus and his vast network of informants, Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Hodacs et al., Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge.
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
names, descriptions, and uses in English. In short, Browne’s History would be intellectually bilingual as well as literally bilingual. Given the seriousness of his project, we might expect Browne’s History to be dry, preachy, or both. But Browne was not just a superb observer; he was a fine writer animated by a sense of wonder and aesthetic sensitivity. His description of a molting, large grey house spider attests to his patience and his gift for precise and vivid prose: It throws off its skin once a year, and to go through the operation more easily, hangs itself by a few threads in some lonely quiet place, where, after a few minutes, you may observe the belly part of the old coat burst, and the creature draw out all its limbs very gradually from its former cover, which he leaves hanging to the cord that sustained him during the operation; after which he betakes himself to the occupations of the new year in the usual manner. It is remarkable, that, in this operation, the old nails, as well as the outward cover of the eyes, are left sticking to the old skin.
Browne clearly loved Jamaica, from its “lofty” mountains “as yet adorned with their native woods,” to the fertile savannahs “warmed by the rays reflected from [the mountains] and refreshed from every cloud that breaks, or shower that falls upon the higher lands.” His description of the “romantic” waterfall of the Mammee River approaches the sublime: it plunged two hundred feet, and its “clouds and vapours” reflected “an admirable succession of shining Iris’s, while the sun continues to dart its rays about the stream.” From the grand to the miniscule, he found something delightful everywhere. The sea-going Beroe was a “beautiful,” oblong, gelatinous creature that challenged him to describe its rapid movements and “the beautiful variety of colours that rise from [its limbs] while they play to and fro in the rays of the sun.” His prose vigorously mimicked the thrust and climb of the opportunistic wild fig as it consumed its support, concluding with a Latin exhortation to kings that here was a lesson about extending their power. The woodlouse delivered another lesson in politics, showing “us a most beautiful example of a commonwealth, where all work and feed alike, each assisting carefully the common cause.” A series of deceptively simple and rhythmic clauses suggested the avocado’s nearly unbearable unctuousness, wryly concluding that “[m]ost sorts of creatures are observed to feed on this fruit with pleasure.” In short, Browne’s History is outstanding for its elegance as well as its information.
Browne, History, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., .
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Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Before Breadfruit
Browne’s adoption of Linnaean principles and practices is an example of the “disciplining” of observation from European capital to province, from metropole to colony. Linnaeus defined what the naturalist should observe, mandated the vocabulary he should use to describe it, and specified what he should depict in his sketches. All this disciplining had a larger epistemological point. “In order to make science truly cooperative and cumulative,” according to Lorraine Daston, “it must be possible to transcend local conditions.” This required changes in the practice of scientific description. During the seventeenth century, investigators had indulged in exuberant prolixity. These descriptions expressed a wariness of older scientific worldviews and encouraged an emotional response that would “estrange the observer from the habitual, the familiar, and the conventional, and [would] open the mind to an empiricism without preconceptions.” This “militant” empiricism inclined natural philosophers and naturalists to credit the marvelous with the capacity to reveal nature’s workings. During the eighteenth century, investigators viewed regularity, not rarity, as key to apprehending nature’s universal truths, and they brutally pruned detail as obscuring, rather than revealing. A comparison of Browne’s description of an infamous Caribbean tree with that of his chief intellectual competitor, Hans Sloane, makes this shift clear. The caustic properties of the manchineel tree had long fascinated travelers and naturalists, and Sloane was no different. He had accompanied the spectacularly alcoholic, short-lived Duke of Albemarle to Jamaica as his physician. His fifteen-month visit generated the widely influential Voyage to the Islands (two volumes, and ). Given his profession,
Lorraine Daston, “Description by Omission: Nature Enlightened and Obscured,” in Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), . Browne, History, . More recent scholarship on Sloane: Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum, ed. Arthur MacGregor (London: British Museum, ); From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections, ed. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter (London: The British Library, ); Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, – (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), chap. ; Wendy D. Churchill, “Bodily Differences? Gender, Race, and Class in Hans Sloane’s Jamaican Medical Practice, –,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science , no. (): –; James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ), chapters two and three of which treat Sloane’s activities in Jamaica and the publications they generated.
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he not surprisingly devoted much of the first volume to hundreds of case studies of patients whom he had treated, and he noted in both volumes the medicinal uses of plants he encountered. He devoted three-and-a-half pages to the manchineel in the second volume. He began conventionally with the plant’s Latin descriptions, which referenced earlier publications. He also included common names, though the Spanish vernacular “manzanillo” (little apple), frequently latinized, dominated naming practices. In the next paragraph, he emphasized the utility and quality of the tree’s wood, then described the growth, shape, and fruits of the tree. A second, much shorter paragraph discussed the growth and disposition of the tree’s leaves as the fruit ripened. A third, single-sentence paragraph arrived at the plant’s claim to fame: a “fiery and hot milk” abundant in all its parts. The next paragraph, also a single sentence, specified where the tree grew; the next, that one Mr. Mohun, presumably a Jamaican acquaintance, reported that someone had eaten the fruit without injury. The next refused to confirm another physician’s identification of the manchineel with some other plant. We are then told that goats fed on the tree’s fruit without injury. Sloane repeated how valuable the timber was, though stressed the caution workmen took as the tree’s sap “very much burns and destroys,” referring the reader to the first volume for an account of treating a workman with such injuries. For the next three pages, Sloane recounted what other authors had written about the tree, starting with the fifteenth century. Accounts of the fruit’s poisonous effects dominated: the dangers of sleeping in its shelter; how people sickened after eating fish that had consumed its fruit; how indigenes used the sap to poison their arrows; and how, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, their enemies perished “sometimes stark mad, and their Bowels are discolour’d and unsavoury, enduring great Torment, and Drinking, tho’ dry, is more certain Death.” At the end of this macabre litany, Sloane directed the reader to a handsome plate depicting “a Branch of the Tree with the leaves and the Fruit” and “A Gum which exsudes out of [it]” (Figure .). The fact that it, unlike many of Sloane’s plates, depicted just the manchineel underscores the plant’s fascination for contemporaries. However haphazard, Sloane’s description was comprehensive. But the Voyage also essayed the Herculean task of organizing exploding knowledge about the natural world by slotting plants into a rational taxonomic scheme based on significant morphological features. Ideally, this made it
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Figure .
Before Breadfruit
Manchineel, Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands (). Courtesy of the John Carter Browne Library
easier for other botanists to identify the plant and to supplement and correct his description. Sloane combined the classificatory schemes of John Ray (–) and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (–), creating an overall division between herbaceous, shrublike, and arboreal plants.
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
He further distinguished on the basis of flower, fruit, or seeds. Although nearly two decades passed before he published the second volume, Sloane did not alter his “Names or Method.” Instead, he expressed exasperation with debates over classification. He wrote that it was an impediment to acquiring knowledge, and he disapproved of the disrespectful, sometimes scurrilous treatment of “very great Men, such as Monsieur Tournefort and others, for not taking notice of some slender minutiae, perhaps not worth observing.” One observer made the fruits or seeds the “finis ultimus” of the plant; others focused on less conspicuous features, despite the fact the naturalist often had less opportunity to observe these than leaves and flowers. On such flimsy bases, these querulous naturalists nevertheless cast down “what their Predecessors have settled”; worse yet, they brought into their discussions such a diversity of names, it could take an investigator an entire day to sort out who else had described the plant that interested them. Sloane’s description of the manchineel would not have pleased Linnaeus, who “railed against the verbosity and excessive prolixity of botanical descriptions.” Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica () makes his requirements clear, and Browne’s description of the manchineel shows how he met them. Before turning to Browne, though, let us be clear about what Linnaeus did and did not do generally with respect to botanical classification and naming and specifically what he did with respect to the manchineel. He did not invent the terms “genus” and “species,” whose meanings his predecessors Ray and Tournefort had stabilized. Neither was he the first to classify plants based on some prominent morphological feature as my discussion of Sloane shows. What Linnaeus’s naming system of genus and species did do, according to James Livesey, was to “[streamline] botanical communication,” while focusing on one feature of the plant to determine its nature “simplified recognition.” In the process, the portability of Linnaeus’s system transformed “practical botanizing”; it made life easier for naturalists like Browne because they “carried the organizational scheme with them in their investigations and on collecting trips.” Linnaeus knew of the manchineel long before Browne encountered it in Jamaica. It figured in his Hortus Cliffortianus (), though he
Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands (London, ), :preface (unpaginated). Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands (London, ), :xvii–xviii. Daston, “Description by Omission,” . James Livesey, Provincializing Global History: Money, Ideas, and Things in the Languedoc, – (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –. Ibid., –.
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Before Breadfruit
changed the plant’s generic name to Hippomane. Linnaeus privileged a single Greek or Roman name for a genus, though various rules constrained these choices. He chose this particular Greek name because of its association with noxious qualities, which the manchineel abundantly possesses. But without examining the flower, he could not determine the plant’s order or class. Browne complied with Linnaean requirements for describing and slotting the manchineel into his classificatory scheme (Figure .). Observations of the tree’s blossom enabled him to place it in the class of Monoecia, that is, having male and female flowers on the same plant. Within that class, it figured in the order that “have the filaments of the male flowers joined together at the base” (“Monadelphia”). Browne’s overall description of the tree was terse – especially in comparison with Sloane’s chunky paragraph in English: just ten words in Latin that identified the tree’s milky fluid and whence it oozed, characterized its branching, and noted its spike of flowers, which he described in detail using Linnaean vocabulary. Linnaean procedure demanded that any illustrations should depict flowers as they appeared on the plant and in close-up details, which are absent from Sloane’s plate. While Browne did not include an illustration of the manchineel, other plates in the History show how he followed these directives. But as Browne himself had earlier explained to Linnaeus, his task did not end after situating the manchineel taxonomically as that would fail to supply “useful” knowledge. Thus, he concluded his entry with a paragraph in English that remarked the same chief characteristics noted by Sloane, if much more concisely. Browne often included information from locals in his descriptions, though here he relied chiefly on his own experience. When it came to a plant legendary for its maleficence, he appears to have skeptically assessed published sources as well as local lore. While Browne’s vernacular descriptions rendered the History “useful” to his readers, they give us glimpses into how the island’s peoples transformed Jamaican nature into a medicine chest, a toolbox, a larder, and a warehouse. Distinguishing carefully between native and nonnative species, Browne documented how different groups exploited what was available. The well-off could afford caprice while the “poorer sort” and the enslaved
Carl Linnæus, Hortus Cliffortianus (Amsterdam, ), . Theophrastus’s designation of a plant that allegedly made horses mad, described in Virgil’s Georgics. Vergil, Eclogues and Georgics, trans. James Rhoades (: reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, ), . Browne, History, .
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
Figure . Manchineel description, Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (). Courtesy of the Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden
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Before Breadfruit
settled for what Nature freely offered. Taken together, their choices and constraints created a distinctive island life. Jamaicans needed places to live and work and furnishings for storage and comfort. A variety of native trees – lignum vitae, Bermuda and Barbados cedar, mahogany – provided everything from planks and beams to shingles and wainscoting. Furniture makers also favored increasingly rare mahogany, as well as rosewood or mangrove; they finished their products with the abrasive horsetail and “the finest varnish now known,” derived from the locus tree. Jamaican woods had industrial uses, too: lignum vitae for ship blocks; greenheart or cogwood trees, employed in the mechanisms of sugar mills; and logwood and fustic for purple and yellow dyes. The turpentine tree’s resin resembled its namesake and served the same purpose. The trumpet-tree, the bur-bark, and the lagetto supplied cordage and ropes, though Browne believed the bark of the last would make a fine paper. A coastal trade depended on “Canoas, or long-boats” constructed from the timber of the silk-cotton tree and larger craft made from the mangrove’s, whose “archings and angles of its limbs most naturally adapt it.” Switches made from the “tough and flexile” branches of the Jamaica ebony urged on horses and “refractory slaves” on Kingston’s wharves. The tropical sun set quickly. Burning oil from the seeds of the oil-nut tree lit mills that operated continuously once the sugarcane matured. Finally free of their labors, the enslaved skewered the seeds of the antidote cocoon for lighting, “set[ting] fire to the uppermost, from whence they burn gradually to the bottom.” They improvised lanterns from several larger fireflies, which they imprisoned in clear vials. As the insects naturally congregated, the “negroes have learnt the art of holding one between their fingers and waving it up and down, so that it may be seen by others, who . . . fly directly towards it, and pitch upon the hand, if they do not discover the deceit before they come too near.” The diets of poor White people and the enslaved obviously differed from those of affluent Whites. Nevertheless, everyone enjoyed the papaw, preparations from cassava flour, Indian kale, and the bastard saffron, which Jewish immigrants had introduced to the island. Everyone rejoiced in the pineapple, though newcomers initially found its sweetness cloying. Common pleasures included the “very tender” and digestible mudfish, the silver fish, and even macacca beetles, considered by many “one of the
Ibid., , , –. Ibid., , , .
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Ibid., –, , . Ibid., , , , . Ibid., . Ibid., –. Ibid., , , –.
Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
greatest delicacies in America” when well fried. In contrast, other foods appeared only on better-stocked tables. The delicate meat of parrots, “not unlike [that of] pigeons,” was “frequently served up at gentlemen’s tables in all the country parts of the island.” City dwellers could savor the “rich and delicate meat” from a variety of doves snared in the countryside by enterprising slaves. Some foods inexplicably fell out of favor with the island’s “better sort.” Thus, only newcomers and the enslaved continued to relish the Sour-sop, and the “fair sex” alone esteemed the Sweet-sop. Browne’s descriptions of species of legumes delineate particularly well the correlation of status and food. Everyone ate beans, and everyone ate some of the same kinds. Most inhabitants cultivated the bonavist, “generally reckoned very wholesome and palatable.” Tender kidney bean pods were relished by many, but their beans sustained the slaves. The “better sort” consumed the nonnative lima bean, considered “far superior to any other pulse,” black-eyed peas, and Jamaica or sugar beans, while the hardy red pea nourished slaves and “the poorer sort of white people.” The overlap between foods considered good for livestock, slaves, and “poorer” Whites was a revealing fact of Jamaican life. The tops of one variety of palmetto fed hogs while “the root is more valuable, and supply many of the poorer sort of people with what they call Bread-kind.” Guinea corn fed both livestock and, “in times of Scarcity,” the enslaved. The breadnut fruit, “boiled with salt-fish, pork, beef, or pickle,” fed both groups seeking to survive in difficult circumstances. Both relied on the plantain and the potato, whose leaves also served as animal fodder. Just the name “Negro Yam” alerts us to its consumers. The enslaved made “messes, according to their fancy” of the corn that thrived “luxuriantly” everywhere and that also provided horse and chicken feed. While Spanish callaloo was “commonly used at most people’s tables,” the mountain callaloo was preferred “by the negroes.” The purslane, a troublesome weed in gardens and cane fields alike, was cooked up as a green by servants and the poor. Slaves had a taste for shark and yellow-snake, and they considered domestic cats “a very dainty dish.” As a physician, Browne naturally recorded whatever medicinals Jamaicans discovered in their environment, including those employed by
Ibid., , , , , , , , . Ibid., , , . Ibid., –. Ibid., , , , , , , , , –, . The enslaved’s predilection for cats reminds one of the socially subversive practice of eighteenth-century French artisans torturing their owners’ pet. Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, ), –.
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the enslaved and poorer Whites. He noted how both groups employed the stinking Eryngo as a “very powerful” anti-hysteric. He confirmed the “extraordinary” efficacy of worm grass in treating that ubiquitous parasite among the enslaved, acknowledging that it had been discovered first by slaves and indigenes. “Negroes” employed the snapdragon for fever and the velvet leaf as a diuretic, though White people were largely ignorant of those plants’ healing powers. Country people valued the styptic qualities of velvet Bur, applying it to “bleeding wounds in either men or cattle”; they alone used the seeds of the yellow Thistle “as an excellent remedy . . . in diarrhoeas, and bloody fluxes.” But Browne also warned against the dangers of plant and other natural remedies. Injudicious use of a treatment for fevers made from the white bully tree killed more often than cured, and worm grass had to be administered cautiously to children. He noted the dangerous consumption of marl by slaves, probably “to allay some sharp cravings of the stomach, either from hunger, worms, or an unnatural habit of body”; through autopsies, he discovered the extent of the damage it did. While Browne focused on the “useful,” not all the uses Jamaicans made of their environment were as instrumental. The Barbados cabbage tree provided a “delicate wholesome green,” but Jamaicans chiefly planted it “for its beauty, and seldom or never cut [it] down for that, or any other use.” Many served up the flesh of the iguana “in fricasees,” stating that they were preferable to the “best fowls.” But the animal could also be tamed when young to keep as a pet. Jamaicans cultivated plants just to have flowers to grace their tables, while “Negroes” adorned themselves with beads made from the seeds of the Mackaw tree, “which are of a black colour, about the size of walnuts, and bear a fine polish.” The local knowledge and usages Browne documented were the result of trial-and-error and the lowly “mechanic” arts rather than any more exalted “speculative” philosophy. Yet the stock of such knowledge was rising as the publication at mid-century of the Encyclopédie with its numerous plates documenting artisanal crafts and manufacturing attests. In short, this was knowledge worth having. Browne’s record of these improvisations showed the ingenuity and tenacity of Jamaica’s peoples – ultimately all sojourners from other lands, Europe or Africa, who had discovered the multiple “conveniences,” pleasures, and dangers the island contained. Browne observed the nature and characteristics of Jamaicans, too. In the “civil” portion of the History, he applied the taxonomic bent of an early
Ibid., , –, , , , , .
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Ibid., , , .
Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
convert to Linnaean classification to islanders, dividing them into five “classes”: planters, settlers, merchants, dependents, and slaves. Overall, his descriptions convey a much more positive view of the island, especially the planters, than the accounts of other visitors before and after him. Charles Leslie’s New History of Jamaica (), whose low opinion of the island’s intellectual life I quoted in Chapter , makes a particularly instructive contrast. Leslie portrayed Jamaicans darkly from the very first page. Upon arriving in “this new world,” he found “everything altered.” Not surprisingly in an island crowded with Africans and their descendants, few faces had “the gay Bloom of a Briton.” But Leslie was making a larger point: the White people were sickly. They resembled corpses with garments like shrouds, though “[t]hey live well, enjoy their Friends, drink heartily, make Money, and are quite careless of Futurity.” Leslie’s account clearly registered the high mortality rates discussed earlier. But it also drew on medical views that posited the dangerous effects of a tropical climate on migrants from more temperate climes, which converged seamlessly with a discourse of New World degeneracy codified at mid-century. Worse, Leslie’s characterizations of colonial bodies identified Britons living in the tropics and their creole descendants as irredeemably “other.” In Jack Greene’s terms, he deployed the socially derisive and condescending “language of alterity,” which “expressed metropolitan misgivings about the genuine Englishness of England’s overseas offshoots” and conceptualized the “Creole as a deviant and distinctive social type.” Thus, as his ship sailed into Kingston harbor, Leslie drew the starkest contrast between Jamaica and England, distinguishing himself as a true “Briton” or “Englishman” from Jamaican colonists. However impressive, even delightful the island’s
Charles Leslie, A New and Exact History of Jamaica (London, ; Dublin, ; Edinburgh, ). Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” The Williams and Mary Quarterly rd series, , no. (): –; Mark Carey, “Inventing Caribbean Climates: How Science, Medicine, and Tourism Changed Tropical Weather from Deadly to Healthy,” Osiris , no. (): –. Antonello Gerbi authored the classic account, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, – (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, ); also see, Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), chaps. and ; Senior, Medical Imagination, chap. . Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –; another example of such “othering,” April G. Shelford, “Sea Tales: Nature and Liberty in an English Seaman’s Journal,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (): –.
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appearance, he sighed as he remembered the “happy Climates” he had left behind: Britannia rose to my View all-gay, with native Freedom blest, the Seat of Arts, the Nurse of Learning, and Friend of every Virtue; where the meanest Swain, with quiet Ease, possesses the Fruits of his hard Toil, without Disturbance; while I was now to settle in a Place not half inhabited, cursed with intestine Broils, where Slavery was established, and the poor toiling Wretches worked in the sultry Heat, and never knew the Sweets of Liberty, or reap’d the Advantage of their painful Industry, in a Place, which, except the Verdure of its Fields, had nothing to recommend it.
While Leslie slightly adjusted his grim first impressions later, he depicted Jamaica overall as a heart of darkness. Indeed, how could people so physiologically and morally degenerate create anything but profoundly disordered societies? “No Country exceeds them in a barbarous Treatment of Slaves,” he wrote, “or in the cruel Methods by which they put them to Death.” He underscored his point with graphic descriptions of cruel and lingering punishments. “Happy Britannia! where Slavery is never known, where Liberty and Freedom chears every Misfortune.” He compared the Maroons, the runaway slaves whose resistance compelled the British to make peace in , to Romans battling for their liberty. In a political culture animated by visions of republican virtue, no one would have missed the point. And his depictions had staying power. In , William Jones, the Welsh Methodist who came to the island to tutor the Attorney General’s children, transcribed into his diary Leslie’s unflattering account of the state of Jamaican religion and a particularly graphic description of the flogging of an enslaved man. In contrast, Browne depicted Jamaicans as living in a “happy land.” He noted the leadership role that the great planters played in Jamaican society, comparing it to the aristocracy’s in the metropole. He frankly acknowledged that their debts, inevitable in the sugar business, were larger than perhaps they should have been because of their “natural propensity to increase their possessions.” But they were generally “of a free and open disposition, friendly where they take, honest in their dealings, and punctual” in acquitting their debts when possible. Whatever their faults, the
Leslie, A New History, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . On the Maroon War, Edward B. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. William Jones, The Diary of the Revd. William Jones, – (London: Brentano, ), –. Browne, History, .
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visitor frequently encountered among them men of taste, learning, and sophistication that equaled their counterparts “in any part of Europe.” Nor did Browne indulge in misogynous descriptions of the island’s White women, which became typical in visitors’ accounts. In Kathleen Wilson’s words, “white Creole women were considered by male and female observers to be gauche, simpering, indolent, sluttish, vain, not only prone to display the ‘vulgar manners’ of their black servants but also singularly lacking in the wit and grace of their European counterparts.” One of Jones’s diary entries confirms Wilson’s generalization: Creole women had no desire to please, but were instead “pettish, insolent & proud”; they despised “Domestic Oeconomy” and were over fond of “Thoughtless Extravagance & expensive Pomp.” Browne disagreed. He admitted that the indolent and flighty nature of many White women “deter the gentlemen of these colonies from entering into the matrimonial state.” And he mentioned White men’s sexual inclination for Black women with incomparable allusiveness, though a footnote specified the “vicious habit” to which he referred. Yet he overall judged the “amiable sex [as] great lovers of decency and cleanliness, always sprightly and good humoured, naturally modest, genteel, and lovers of mirth; nor does any people excel them in the labours of the needle, or oeconomy, when they take to those useful occupations.” Significantly, Browne included no graphic descriptions of slave punishments, departing from the example of Sloane, who included an instance as savage and terrifying as Leslie’s. In contrast, Browne depicted the situation of slaves in relatively benign terms. He asserted that their lives, though laborious, were not unduly harsh. Their masters gave them “rich and convenient” grounds to raise food, which rewarded a few hours a week of labor with sufficient surplus to take to market. Yams and corn cultivated
Wilson, The Island Race, –; Sarah E. Yeh, “‘A Sink of All Filthiness’: Gender, Family, and Identity in the British Atlantic, –,” The Historian , no. (): –; Natalie A. Zacek, “Searching for the Invisible Woman: The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Britain’s West Indian Colonies,” History Compass , no. (): –; Trevor Burnard, “‘Gay and Agreeable Ladies’: White Women in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica,” Wadabagei , no. (): –; Aleric Josephs, “Jamaica Planter Women and the Challenges of Plantation Management,” Journal of Caribbean History , no. (): –; Deirdre Coleman, “Creole Identity in the Enlightenment,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –; Christine Walker, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Chloe A. Northrop, “Fashioning Society in Eighteenth-Century British Jamaica” (PhD dissertation, University of North Texas, ). Jones, Diary, –; also, Robert Long’s observations, Chapter . Browne, History, . A very influential, if misunderstood passage, according to Delbourgo in “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities,” www.britishmuseum.org/PDF/Delbourgo%essay.pdf.
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in the plantain walks supplied the needs of the newer slaves and the infirm and compensated for shortfalls during famine years. In the next paragraph, he admitted that the “inconveniences,” the “toil,” the “vicissitudes of heat and cold,” the “grossness of their food in general” made it remarkable that the slaves were not more “slothful and sickly than they are commonly observed to be.” Yet he attributed these abuses to ignorance, not malice, and he blamed planters for hiring unqualified medical men under whose care they suffered, too. In short, Browne’s Jamaica hardly resembled the hell on earth evoked by Leslie and by contemporary historians Trevor Burnard and Douglas Hall in their biographies of Thomas Thistlewood. Browne certainly noted some of the same behaviors as Leslie, but cast them differently. He ascribed the planters’ remarkable fondness “of grandeur and distinction” to “the general obsequiousness of their numerous slaves and dependents, as well as from the necessity of keeping them at a distance.” But he in no way suggested that this made them tyrannical, as even the prominent planter Richard Beckford suggested in a treatise he wrote for his estate managers (Chapter ). Indeed, despite some disappointment, he harbored hopes that they would become “guardians of the island’s happiness, subjecting the lands to the due payment of monies borrowed at an easy interest in Europe, and becoming the sureties of the industrious and careful.” We could accuse Browne of wearing both rose-colored glasses and blinders. Yet it is more useful to ask why his view of Jamaica’s planters was so much more positive. Here we trip over the biographical lacunae that prompted Marc Caball to describe Browne as “fundamentally an elusive figure” with an undeterminable “political outlook.” A profile in Anthologia Hibernica of noted personality traits – cheerfulness, “good address and gentle manners, very temperate” – that no doubt made Browne companionable. Nor was he inclined to question the basis of an obviously brutal social order, but one yet to be seriously challenged by anti-slavery sentiment. Yet one wonders, too, whether the young Catholic physician, son of “a gentleman of respectable family and handsome estate”
Browne, History, –. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire; Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, – (Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, ); also Amanda Thornton, “Coerced Care: Thomas Thistlewood’s Account of Medical Practice on Enslaved Populations in Colonial Jamaica, –,” Slavery & Abolition , no. (): –. Browne, History, . Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, . Browne, History, . Caball, “Transforming Tradition,” . Anthologia Hibernica (January ): –; reprinted in European Magazine (August ) and Annual Register ().
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
in Connaught province, a stronghold of the Catholic gentry, assimilated the planters to the traditional Irish landed elite that assumed its right to precedence, however buffeted and reduced they were by conquest, English and Scottish settlement, and the penal laws. Finally, Browne had ample reason to be grateful to planters because of the many ways they supported his research – and ultimately made publication of the History possible. The History’s text identifies individuals who probably lent Browne assistance in the field (Map .). He focused his efforts on St. Andrew’s parish, where he lived in Kingston. Beyond that, he worked chiefly in parishes to the east, which had also been settled the longest. The difficulty of traveling even short distances in Jamaica made local support critical to a naturalist’s endeavors. This most often took the form of hospitality, a social practice at which Jamaicans excelled, though it was not unique to them. In , the metropolitan editors of an anthology of newspaper articles originally published in Barbados told how colonists there “receive and entertain Strangers in the kindest and most generous Manner” and were eager to “forward the Interests and encourage the Undertakings of such as propose to reside among them.” The editors were agnostic whether this practice “proceeds more from Curiosity, and a Fondness for new Acquaintance, than from a genuine Principle of Benevolence.” A s description of Jamaica similarly noted that “there is not more Hospitality, nor a more generous Freedom shown to Strangers in any Part of the World, for any Person who appears like a Gentleman and behaves himself Well, is Sure of a Welcome to their Houses and the best Entertainment they can afford.” Trevor Burnard argues that Caribbean hospitality “united whites and separate[d] even the meanest white and coloreds” in a way that strengthened the subordination of the enslaved. Yet this “cult of hospitality,” whatever its motivations and larger social functions, dovetailed nicely with the naturalist’s need for a meal, a bed for the night, and local information and specimens.
Ibid., . J. G. Simms, “Connaught in the Eighteenth Century,” Irish Historical Studies , no. (): –; Kevin Whelan, “Catholic Middlemen in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland (): –. Of the place names in Browne’s text, thirty-eight are keyed to individuals as well. The map aggregates these mentions by parish. Caribbeana (London, ), :iv. Quoting James Knight, Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, . Ibid., –; a more scathing view, Burnard, “Tropical Hospitality, British Masculinity, and Drink in Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” The Historical Journal , no. (): –.
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Map .
Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
Browne frequently named Jamaicans in his vernacular descriptions. Some no doubt played host, offering his project material support. When Browne ascended the Liguanea Mountains behind Kingston, perhaps he stayed with Mr. Jones or Mr. Adams. When he visited the relatively lightly settled St. James, the neighbors Mr. James and Dr. Thene might have welcomed him. Did he stay at William Beckford’s estate in St. Thomas in the East? And Mr. Ascough’s when he collected in St. John’s? Some probably had scant interest in natural history beyond the pleasure of diversion. Yet Browne’s text suggests that others found his visits intellectually engaging. No doubt he discussed the challenges of acclimatizing Old World plants to tropical conditions with Captain Jones, who had successfully transplanted the “mallow of the shops” and clover grass, and with Mr. Jones, whose walnut tree was struggling. The fact that Mr. Boyd of St. Elizabeth’s also subscribed to the History suggests a more-thanpassing interest in natural history. And then there was Matthew Wallen. Browne probably had men like him in mind when he urged colonial “gentlemen” to employ their leisure making observations and collecting local specimens. Wallen came to Jamaica as a naval officer in , so he was still a newcomer when he met Browne. Years later he would acquire some metropolitan recognition for his botanical interests – indeed, he is the connective thread that runs from Browne to the Bounty’s arrival in . These activities were in the future, though, when the two young Irishmen chatted perhaps at the edge of a lowland clearing about the virtues of mountain running grass. It made “excellent hay” for livestock – indeed, Wallen “had frequently tried the experiment before I left Jamaica, and always found it to answer beyond his expectation.” He praised Wallen as “a gentleman of a very happy turn
Ibid., several mentions of Jones, , , , , twice on , ; one of Adams, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., , , . Ibid., . Mrs. Wallen provided a specimen of the “mountain cock,” which Browne described as a “curious bird,” ibid., . Ibid., xxxiii. Thanks to Edward Riou Crawford, one of Wallen’s descendants, for biographical information; Wallen to Joseph Banks, BL, Manuscripts, Add. , Volume (–), April , September , May , March , May ; for a medal awarded him by the Royal Botanical Garden at Edinburgh, NLS, E//: –. Nini Rodgers, “The Irish in the Caribbean –: An Overview,” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America , no. (): –; Mark S. Quintanilla, “‘From a Dear and Worthy Land’: Michael Keane and the Irish in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua , no. (): –; Karst de Jong Ba, “The Irish in Jamaica during the Long Eighteenth Century (–)” (PhD dissertation, University of Belfast, ). Browne, History, .
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Before Breadfruit Table . Patrick Browne’s subscribers by residence ( total) Jamaican
Other Caribbean confirmed / Confirmed Likely likely
/
Great Britain confirmed / likely
Royal Navy confirmed / likely
/
Continent Unknown / (academic) inconclusive
/
of thought, and a great promoter of every sort of curious and useful industry.” In addition to the mountain running grass, he had experimented with a “nourishing grain” and “oat-like” plant and introduced the small hairy nettle into Jamaica. The purchase of subscriptions extended Jamaican support of Browne’s work. In fact, the History’s subscriber list captures the intellectual networks Browne navigated and created as he traveled in Europe and the Caribbean. It brings together on two pages everyone from a slave trader in Kingston to a university professor in the Netherlands. Analyzing it also reveals a modest level of English support, suggesting an insecure intellectual reputation at the center of British science, which made Jamaican support even more critical (Table .). Nearly all of the subscribers on the European side of the Atlantic were people seriously engaged in natural history. Six of the continental figures held academic posts in the Netherlands, five of whom were botanists and early supporters of Linnaeus. There was Linnaeus himself in Sweden, of course, and Christoph Jacob Trew, the Nuremberg court physician and member of several European academic societies who patronized the efforts of Dionysius Ehret, Browne’s illustrator. Before moving to Jamaica, Browne had worked at London’s St. Thomas hospital with “the celebrated Doctor Letherland, physician formerly to Queen Caroline, his warm and affectionate friend.” He likely had connections with a community of other professional Irishmen making their careers in the capital, amongst them, the physician Michael Connel, also a graduate of Reims, and
Useful in identifying subscribers, JFSGR and UCL. Ibid., , . Jan Frederik Gronovius at Leiden, Johannes Burman at Amsterdam, M. Schwenke at the The Hague, and E. J. Van Wachendorff at Utrecht. On Ehret and botanical illustration, Kärin Nickelsen, Draughtsmen, Botanists and Nature: The Construction of Eighteenth-Century Botanical Illustrations (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, ). “Life of Patrick Browne, M.D.,” *–*.
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(probably) John Nugent, son of Christopher Nugent, Edmund Burke’s physician. He either met or renewed his acquaintance with Nicholas Tuite, a successful planter at Montserrat who owned a London home and subscribed for two copies. Browne probably first met some of his English subscribers during this London stay. Most were medical practitioners, six were already or would become fellows of the Royal Society, and three were tremendously important in the metropolitan botanical world and beyond: Peter Collinson, John Ellis, and John Fothergill. A shared enthusiasm for Linnaeus’s new system no doubt cemented the relationship between them. But despite friendly mentions of all three in Browne’s text and their subscriptions, Collinson’s and Ellis’s letters to Linnaeus do not suggest a close relationship. Indeed, Browne seems to have been something of an outlier in the British botanical world. Even if all the “unknowns” in Table . resided in Great Britain (unlikely, by the way), support from the “home team” would still have been thin – and the socially prestigious were notably absent. A brief comparison with the subscription list of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (–) is illuminating. Catesby had eleven more subscribers than Browne ( to ). In his analysis, David Brigham emphasizes their diversity, which included a healthy representation of the high and mighty. In addition to three continental royals, Catesby’s subscribers included the queen, the princess
Toby Barnard, “The Irish in London and ‘The London Irish,’ ca. –,” and John Bergin, “Irish Catholics and Their Networks in Eighteenth-Century London,” Eighteenth-Century Life , no. (), respectively, – and –, esp. , , , ; Craig Bailey, “Metropole and Colony: Irish Networks and Patronage in the Eighteenth-Century Empire,” Immigrants & Minorities , no. – (): –. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of North America; Parrish, American Curiosity; Peter Collinson, “Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .”: Selected Letters – of Peter Collinson, F.R.S., ed. Alan W. Armstrong (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, ); Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-Century Natural History Exchange (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, ); Julius Groner and Paul Frederick Sinel Cornelius, John Ellis, Merchant, Microscopist, Naturalist, and King’s Agent – Part I (Pacific Grove, CA: Boxwood Press, ); John Fothergill, Chain of Friendship: Selected Letters of Dr. John Fothergill of London, –, ed. Betsy C. Corner and Christopher C. Booth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Murphy, “To Make Florida Answer to Its Name.” Browne, History, , , . The Linnaean Correspondence, Collinson to Linnaeus, May , April , April , August , https://info.alvin-portal.org/, accessed August . David R. Brigham, “Mark Catesby and the Patronage of Natural History in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Empire’s Nature: Mark Catesby’s New World Vision, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, ), –, subscriber list at –.
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Before Breadfruit
of Wales, a duchess, nine lords, nine earls, six baronets, four dukes, and one viscount. Sir Hans Sloane was present, of course, as was John Stuart, the botanically inclined third earl of Bute who would begin transforming Kew from a pleasure garden into a serious research institution in the s. Catesby had colonial subscribers, too, but the balance tilted decisively towards England. In contrast, Browne had a lone “Sir” and one “Lord.” Finally, Catesby had become a fellow of the Royal Society in . Sloane died just a few years before the History’s publication, and Browne never became a member of the premier intellectual society he had headed for decades. In short, Caribbean support was indispensable to the History’s publication, a hefty and expensive volume with two maps and forty-nine plates. Of the subscribers, more than half hailed from Jamaica, though some had removed to England once they had secured their fortunes. Caribbean support ticks up even more if confirmed and likely residents of other islands are included. Again, the list reflects Browne’s travels, including the early stay in the Leewards when he met Martin Blake of Antigua. Honoring their friendship by naming a variety of wild rose after him, Browne described Blake as a “great promoter of every sort of useful knowledge” and “a gentleman to whose friendship this work chiefly owes its early appearance.” Forty-eight of the confirmed Jamaicans were landholders, according to the quit rent records of , and they usually owned land in multiple parishes. Jamaican subscribers whose principal source of wealth was land extended from the fabulously wealthy to the modest. Leading the way were the Beckfords. Four of them – William, Richard, Julines, and Francis – subscribed; together they owned more than , acres with William owning more than ,. No one compared with them, though the Fearons and the Fosters ran respectable place and show with, respectively, four and three family members appearing on Browne’s list. According to the Quit Rent Books of , twenty-five of the other thirty-five subscribing landholders owned more than , acres; twelve of the twentyfive owned between , and a tad more than , acres. At the low end of landholding was Browne’s good friend Matthew Wallen, whose Cold Spring estate in the Liguanea Mountains behind Kingston comprised just
Karl Wolfgange Schweizer, “Stuart, John, third earl of Bute,” ODNB. Browne, History, . Records compiled by Governor Knowles during the controversy over moving the capital to Kingston, suspected of underestimating the amount of land owned by Jamaicans. Greene, Settler Jamaica, esp. chap two, “Patterns of Landholding”; information on individuals accessed through JFSGR.
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
eighty-five acres. In contrast, his brother Thomas, who also subscribed, owned nearly five thousand acres, scattered between three parishes. Browne enjoyed his one chance to describe the “long-leafed Sciodaphyllum” near the St. Andrew estate of Samuel Adams, who owned five properties in as many parishes. In contrast, John Boyd had just one property of acres in St. Elizabeth, where Browne observed the “smooth erect Croton.” Yet the quit rents do not capture all of Browne’s wealthy subscribers, which included Henry Needham, the “handsome, Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Jamaican planter” who fought a duel with Ballard Beckford over a slight to his lover Teresia Constantia Phillips, a.k.a. the scandalous “black widow.” Browne’s subscription list also illustrates how the line between planter and other professions often shifted. Zachary Bayly and Alexander Grant both parlayed their mercantile earnings into profitable landholdings. According to Trevor Burnard, the “merchant prince” Bayly owned several sugar plantations and had become one of the wealthiest men on the island by the time he died in . Alexander Grant, a Scot of impecunious, if respectable background, arrived on the island a physician, developed mercantile interests with Peter Beckford, the eldest son of the planter dynasty’s founder, married an heiress, and died in owning eleven thousand acres valued at nearly £, pounds. Burnard speculates that Thomas Hibbert, eldest son of a Manchester merchant family that began as linen merchants, was even wealthier than Bayly. Arriving in Jamaica in , he became a spectacularly successful slave trader; in , he bought the first of two estates in the northeastern parish of St. George. In contrast, Edward Foord stuck to slave trading and money lending, which made him a fortune. Obviously these men were not yet as wealthy when Browne was on the island as they were when Burnard picks up their stories, but they were clearly up-and-coming, ambitious men. Browne even successfully recruited subscribers bitterly at odds over the proposal to move the capital from Spanish Town to Kingston. The relationship between the colonial government and the governed (or the planter elite, which dominated the island’s Assembly) was frequently strained, but this controversy was worse. Governor Knowles, supported by Kingston merchants, advocated the move in . Knowles, who subscribed for two copies of the History, almost certainly suffered in
Browne, History, . Ibid., . Wilson, The Island Race, . Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, – Donington, The Bonds of Family. Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, –.
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comparison with Edward Trelawny, who had an unusually long and successful tenure. Browne allegedly supported the move, too; a chronicler of the controversy later wrote that “[t]he literary assistance of Brown [sic], the naturalist, was also useful to [Knowles] who had neither the ability nor the inclination to wield a powerful or a persuasive pen.” Yet Rose Fuller, the Chief Justice who furiously opposed the governor, subscribed; perhaps he enjoyed sharing his memories of Leiden, where he had studied in the early s, with Browne. Subscribers on the other side of the capital divide were Francis Delap, the Provost Marshal, and the lawyer Robert Arcedeckne. It is obvious why most in the small circle of European naturalists subscribed to Browne’s History. But why so many Jamaicans? As they did not explain themselves, we must cautiously speculate. Let us begin with the assertion that it would have been strange if all the people who offered Browne a meal and a night’s stay and who ponied up the price of a subscription were immune to enthusiasms sweeping the metropole and the siren’s song of “utility.” The point of an ideology – and that is what “improvement” and “utility” were – is that people know about and act on it. A letter of Wallen to Sir Joseph Banks articulated that point bluntly, if ungrammatically: “The Knowledge of Nature, its Operations and Productions is undoubtedly one of the chief Things to exalt a Man, but the sooner this Knowledge is productive of Good to us who know less the better.” Thus, even the fabulously wealthy Richard Beckford authored an “improving” manual for sugarcane cultivation (Part III). In addition to the botanically inclined Jamaicans already mentioned, Browne also wrote of “curious gentlemen” who had imported the Virginia mulberry because it was “said to be of that sort on which the silk-worm thrives best.” No
George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica (London, ), :. On the controversy, George Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, – (London: Longman’s, ), –; Robertson, Gone Is the Ancient Glory, –. Bridges perhaps misunderstood Browne’s role, as the biography published in Anthologia Hibernica contains a somewhat different account of Browne’s activities on Kingston’s behalf, though also strongly connects Browne with Knowles. On Fuller, Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, –; J. S. Hodgkinson, “Fuller family (per. c.–),” ODNB. An affinal relative of Sloane, he became a fellow of the Royal Society in . Jong Ba, “The Irish in Jamaica,” –. BL, Manuscripts, Add. , volume (–), Wallen to Banks, March , fols. –. Browne, History, . On silk in North America and Saint-Domingue, Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit, –; JdSD (March ), –.
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
doubt he found a receptive audience for his claim that domestic mining might satisfy the needs of those “very ingenious planters” as well as “strengthen the colony with some thousands of industrious labourers besides.” But subscribing to Browne’s book no doubt had attractions beyond the subject. First, supporting Browne’s project converged with the social and cultural pretensions of his planter friends. The planters who took charge of Jamaica’s future were new men, generally undistinguished by family lineage. They were sandwiched between a colonial administration they regarded with hostility and a mass of slaves who often eyed them with deadly intent. The condiment was a spread of more modest proprietors, artisans, merchants, and what Browne termed the “poorer sort.” Thus, sponsoring Browne merged social, intellectual, and cultural aspirations in a way the metropole judged important, one that drew on the association of science with “politeness” and bolstered the claim that they were gentlemen fit to mind their own business. Their ability and willingness to support the History, a major intellectual enterprise, asserted the right to be taken seriously and proved a concern with more than immediate profit. This was the flora, fauna, and other natural resources of the Jamaican island, in stewardship to them. The colonists had met the challenges of the Jamaican environment with ingenuity and tenacity, attesting that the island possessed the human capital required to secure that happy future. The formulations of a Leslie and metropolitan disdain in general no doubt stung. The History asserted a more thoughtful facet of a distinctly Jamaican identity, which jostled with the “Briton” and usually manifested in standoffs with colonial administrators. Through Browne’s History, one island addressed another as worthy of respect, if not an equal, for what it might become if properly understood and valued. Jamaican support of the History and such implicit claims did not go unnoticed in the metropole. Indeed, Tobias Smollett savagely belittled both Browne and his project’s Caribbean supporters in the Critical Review, which he founded in June . Reviews published in periodicals like these mattered because, while critics themselves were keenly aware of the difficulties in educating the taste of readers, such compilations increasingly did just that, whether pored over in public settings such as circulating
Browne, History, nA. Klein, “Politeness,” –; Alice Walters, “Conversation Pieces: Science and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England,” History of Science , no. (): –; similar point for British America, Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene, .
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libraries or in private homes. The reader of Smollett’s review would learn very quickly that the reviewer thought it a very bad book. Smollett dismantled Browne’s intellectual worth and his Jamaican subscribers’ social pretensions. By then, Smollett had nearly transformed himself from a physician into a man of letters and from a Scot into a Briton. He had already established himself among the London literati and published his first, very popular novel, The Adventures of Roderick Random (), which drew on his experience as a naval physician during the War of Jenkins’ Ear and his own stay in Jamaica. Married to a woman from the island, he was better acquainted with Jamaica’s planter class, whom he apparently thoroughly disliked, than most of his readers. Smollett’s review suggests how little intellectual capital Browne had to spend in the empire’s capital. He began by poking fun at the whole enterprise, speculating that even Duck Island in St. James Park would reward the “indefatigable” investigations of a naturalist. This trivialized Browne’s impolitic boast of having collected half again as many plants as Sloane ( to ), not to mention “Fossils, Insects, and other productions; many of which [Sloane] makes no mention of.” Smollett snidely noted that Browne had not published a third part mentioned in the prospectus. A discussion of tropical diseases, it “no doubt helped the doctor to the greater part of his subscribers” if they intended to peruse the work at all. Thus, Smollett impugned the intellectual seriousness of Browne’s subscribers and none too subtly referred to alleged West Indian debility. Slamming everything from trivial factual errors to infelicities of style, he nevertheless conceded that there was some useful information on plants even if it were “generally to be found in Sloane’s history of Jamaica, and many other books.” Smollet’s penultimate paragraph was a burlesque of Linnaeus’s classificatory system that heaped scorn on Jamaica’s peoples. First, he turned the
David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, – (New York: Routledge, ), –. One of four reviews published in as many months. Samuel Hanley, Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer: A Duty to Examine the Labors of the Learned (Newark: University of Delaware Press, ), –. Juliet Shields, “Tobias Smollett: Novelist, Brutish or British?,” in Oxford Handbooks Online (), https://doi.org/./oxfordhb/... Browne, History, vi. [Tobias Smollett], “Article . The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica . . .,” The Critical Review (June ): –, at . Ibid., .
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Jamaica’s Patrick Browne
Latin phrase for an ass (the animal) into a dirty joke about the Irish, then speculated that: had [Linnaeus] been acquainted with this creature, [he] would have classed him among the anthropomorphites, or those animals which more or less resemble the human form; and surely he deserves that rank as well as the sloath, which Doctor Browne has introduced into this society, along with the monkey, the negro, the American and even the European; which, it seems, only resemble the human species. Would not these last have been more properly termed anthopophagi, that one another do eat; a class that would have comprehended not only the inhabitants of Africa and America, but also a great number of Europeans, under the different denominations of authors, doctors, and philosophers?
Beyond the typical identification of New World migrants with the dregs of British society, this complicated insult suggests the difficulty of creating a “Briton” identity from the ethnic diversity of the British Isles. Colin Kidd writes that “[d]espite the undoubted reality of racism, slavery, and xenophobia, anti-Catholicism was a more pronounced feature of eighteenth-century discourse than hostility to blacks.” There was no love lost between Presbyterian Scots and Catholic Irish – and Browne hailed from Connaught province, a stronghold of the Catholic gentry. A Lowlander, Smollett almost certainly possessed the same “typical prejudice of a Lowlander against both Highlanders and the Irish” as David Hume, whose general dismissal of former ages as barbarous negated the claims of Irish antiquarian scholars to past cultural sophistication. Lumping together European intellectuals with what he considered inferior, even bestial New World and African peoples, Smollett identified their behavior with that of the legendary cannibals. In other words, he acknowledged Browne’s innovation of employing Linnaean terminology only to turn it into a weapon of withering satire. Surely nothing intellectually worthwhile could be expected from such a production! Significantly, the second review by Sir Tanfield Leman began by defending Browne’s subscriber list. Although “not very numerous,” it yet included “more than a few truly respectable names,” including “several
Ibid., . Greene, Evaluating Empire, . Colin Kidd, “Ethnicity in the British Atlantic World, –,” in A New Imperial History, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Simms, “Connaught.” Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.– (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), –; Colin Kidd, “Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland,” English Historical Review , no. (): –.
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Before Breadfruit
of our own countrymen, justly eminent for their literary abilities” as well as several illustrious “learned foreigners.” He generously regarded Browne’s boast as exuberant, though questioned the author’s decision to include information on “the artichoke, carrot, parsnip, and many other productions common at every table, and in, almost, every garden in Great Britain.” He also found Browne’s writing style “wanting,” though he declined to “[trouble] our readers with observations on the inaccuracies of his style; or attempting to be witty upon his Irishisms.” How did Browne react to this critical reception? It is unknown, but he certainly did not tarry long in London, returning to the Caribbean in spring . Nor did his efforts on behalf of science ever translate into better material circumstances or much intellectual recognition. Perhaps Ellis shared with him the letter of praise from the American naturalist Alexander Garden. Despite “Dr. Browne’s not fulfilling his promise with his subscribers,” Garden wrote in , “still I think he deserves well of the learned world. Has he not given a much more full and accurate account of the island than Sir Hans Sloane? Surely then he deserves more esteem than him.” But Browne definitely read – and perhaps reread – the joyful letter from Linnaeus: “I never coveted any Book, I know not by what Instinct, with more ardour desire [sic] than yours . . . Good God how was I transported with desire of a book infinitely to be commended.” He praised Browne’s powers of observation and judgment, which “set forth his plants so correctly and so exactly to the Life, that I could see as it were the plants themselves before me.” And he appreciated Browne’s “Candour and human disposition,” which led him to correct others’ work without attacking them “as [is] now the Custom among the vulgar herd.”
[Sir Tanfield Leman], Monthly Review; or Literary Journal (July ), . Ibid., , . James Edward Smith, ed., A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists (London, ), Garden to Ellis, May , :; on Garden, see Parrish, American Curiosity. Linnaeus to Browne, March , The Linnean Society, London, http://linnean-online.org/ /.
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Birds of a Feather
Edward and Robert Long were the great grandsons of Samuel Long, who participated in the conquest of Jamaica in and became one of the largest landholders on the island. Without them, we would know nothing about Anthony Robinson. Edward provides precious glimpses into his life and character in A History of Jamaica () and in an affectionate sketch published in Gentleman’s Magazine in . His older brother Robert preserved much of Robinson’s legacy of notes and illustrations. Their immediacy makes visible the daily process of doing natural history in a colonial context, much of which disappears in published accounts. We see the Linnaean imperatives shaping Robinson’s practice – from seeing to recording information – and his constant struggle to reconcile published sources, personal experience, and information from locals. His notes enable a detailed, if incomplete, reconstruction of his movements and precise identification of the people he encountered and their contributions to his work. Finally, they show intellectual friendships in the making, relationships that, while furthering the “advancement of learning,” disciplined behavior, satisfied emotional needs, promoted social aspirations, and even promised personal transcendence. Edward knew Robinson well because Robert was Robinson’s close friend and patron. All three men participated in a small circle that collaborated on natural history illustrations at the family’s Lucky Valley Estate. A reversal in the family’s fortunes had compelled Robert and then Edward, two of Samuel’s three great grandsons, to reside on the island to
Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, “Long, Samuel,” ODNB; excellent overview of the Jamaican, landed, and mercantile branches of the Long family and information on Edward and Robert’s generation, Catherine Hall, “The Slavery Business and the Making of ‘Race’ in Britain and the Caribbean,” Current Anthropology , supp. (): S–. Long, History of Jamaica, :, , , ; Gentleman’s Magazine (March ), –.
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Before Breadfruit
manage the family’s affairs. Born in Jamaica in , Robert died in England in after traveling there in . Edward returned to England permanently in after participating in the island’s public life and marrying into the Beckford dynasty. Once in England, he vigorously defended planters’ interests. His chief claim to fame, The History of Jamaica (), is known best today for its deeply racist views. Edward composed his sketch of Robinson’s life when the Gentleman’s Magazine published a poem about his military “career” that was erroneously attributed to Robert (see below). Edward reported that Robinson was born in Sunderland-by-the-Sea, a port in northeastern England of six thousand souls. He apprenticed to his father, “a man exceedingly respectable in his profession” of surgery and apothecary. Apprenticeship was the standard entrée into the trade, and what Robinson learned from his father sufficed for a provincial practitioner. Of humbler status than the physician, the surgeon-apothecary nevertheless provided more people with more services more affordably. After his apprenticeship, Robinson apparently did not further his training by attending lectures or making connections with a hospital in a larger town as some peers would have. In his youth, Robinson “became attached to botanical studies,” according to Edward, devoting his leisure time to studying the works of “antient herbalists” and collating what he learned from them with observations from his botanizing excursions. Once in Jamaica, he encountered Linnaeus’s ideas, “a new and beautiful theory in his favourite science.” Captivated, he focused on Linnaeus almost exclusively for several years. He learned to draw plants to overcome the limitations of dried specimens.
Records and Letters of the Family of the Longs of Jamaica and Hampton Lodge, ed. Robert Mowbray Howard (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, ), :–. Miles Ogborn, “Discriminating Evidence: Closeness and Distance in Natural and Civil Histories of the Caribbean,” Modern Intellectual History , no. (): –; Seth Suman, “Materialism, Slavery, and the History of Jamaica,” Isis , no. (): –; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), esp. chap. . Joan Lane, “The Role of Apprenticeship in Eighteenth-Century Medical Education in England,” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W. R. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; E. M. Sigsworth and P. Swan, “An Eighteenth-Century Surgeon and Apothecary: William Elmhirst (–),” Medical History , no. (): . Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), . J. B. Oldham, “Two Eighteenth Century Liverpool Surgeons: Park and Alanson,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine , no. (): –. Quotations from Edward Long’s letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine.
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Birds of a Feather
Indeed, he acquired such skill that “good judges” compared his work favorably to that of a professional draftsman – a bit hyperbolic as even Robert sometimes criticized his drawings. Edward also praised Robinson’s “clear and sound” judgment, his impressive memory, and his “great general knowledge in some other sciences,” especially history. “He was distinguished beyond most men for a feeling heart, a warm and steady attachment in his friendships; a behavior perfectly inoffensive, an integrity that nothing could corrupt; a rigid adherence to truth, and for a pliancy and vivacity of temper which rendered him acceptable to all companies.” Unfortunately, his research remained “hastily scribbled” and nearly illegible on whatever scrap of paper was at hand, “blurred and blotted” and “promiscuously thrown together.” He died in July before taking up the oft-deferred task of organizing them. However haphazard, much – if far from all – of Robinson’s work has survived, because Robert preserved it in a final act of intellectual friendship. He ordered transcriptions of most of the notes, organizing them into conventional categories: plants, birds, reptiles, insects, fish, and “Marine animals of the Blubber Kind.” This reorganization frequently makes it difficult to determine where and when Robinson made a particular observation, but Robert’s indexing permits recovery of some of this information. Robert preserved many drawings, too, if just a fraction of Robinson’s output. Much other potentially illuminating material has disappeared: letters exchanged between Robinson and his naturalist friends on the island; perhaps more “Botanical Reflections”; and his poems, which are revelatory social documents, if disappointing literature. Robert’s second tally of the resulting descriptions was descriptions of birds, of plants, and of everything else.
Thanks to Catherine Levy of Jamaica, who with the Institute of Jamaica arranged for the repatriation of a large corpus of Robinson’s papers and drawings from Natural History Museum in London and who shared her research on Robinson with me. T. D. A. Cockerell, “A Little Known Jamaican Naturalist, Dr. Anthony Robinson,” The American Naturalist , no. (): –; Frank Cundall, “Dr. Anthony Robinson, of Jamaica,” The Journal of Botany – British and Foreign (): – at ; “Notes and Queries,” Journal of the Institute of Jamaica (November –December ): . Cundall quotes Long’s biographical sketch extensively. Original order of notes reconstructed by reversing Robert’s sorting of materials from ten folders into four volumes of transcriptions. Citation = original folder and the number assigned by either Robert or Robinson. Robert organized materials that came to him after the transcription of the original legacy into a fifth volume, cited as IoJ-Rob, V [entry #]. The National Library of Jamaica has a significant holding of Robinson’s bird illustrations and some of his notes. Edward offered some poems to the Gentleman’s Magazine, which in December had published “In Praise of Tobacco,” previously published in the Cornwall Chronicle. IoJ-Rob, V, inside front cover.
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Map .
Birds of a Feather
Comparing the geographic references in Robinson’s notes to those in Browne’s History reveals how much more widely he ranged. This matters because Jamaica is very ecologically diverse, ranging from rainy Portland in the northeast to the comparatively dry southwest. From through , Robinson worked mostly in the island’s south central parishes, Clarendon, St. Catherine’s, St. Andrew’s, sometimes dropping down into Vere. He visited Westmoreland in the west during the s, but made extended stays in and . By , another important site of activity emerged at the other end of the island in St. Thomas in the East. During his second extended stay in Westmoreland, he served with the militia in Savannah-la-Mar, the parish’s chief port and administrative center. He was briefly assigned to Lucea in Hanover, the parish north of Westmoreland. The last few years of his life were geographically less focused, centering mostly on Kingston in St. Andrew’s parish with forays into St. Catherine’s and at least one trip to St. Thomas in the East. On foot or on horseback, sometimes accompanied by an enslaved boy, he probably traveled relatively light: some pocket versions of reference books, a magnifying glass, paper and pens for notes, pencils for drawings, perhaps a hand microscope and watercolors. Here I retrace Robinson’s movements, using Edward Long’s descriptions of the island to set the scene and pausing when he encountered three individuals who befriended him and played an important role in his research: Robert Long, Thomas Thistlewood, and George Spence. The earliest and latest of Robinson’s dated observations, and , were made in Clarendon parish near the Longs’ Lucky Valley Estate. According to Edward’s History, Clarendon was “one of the largest, healthiest, and best settled” parishes because its abundant water supply, good soil quality, and sturdy roads “encouraged the inhabitants to carry their sugar-plantations much farther inland than in any other district.” His description inadvertently reminds us of the catastrophic demographic effects of slavery by noting how the Carver plantation relied upon natural increase rather than “African recruits” to maintain their labor force allegedly because the superior fertility of the soil made cultivation much easier. When in Jamaica, Robert Long spent much of his time at Lucky Valley. Edward claimed to have suffered as a child under Robert’s
Robert Long’s reorganization makes mapping Robinson’s movements difficult. For Robinson’s nearly one thousand descriptions, we have fewer than references compared to Browne’s to St. Andrew parish alone. Long, History of Jamaica, :. Plan and description thereof, Higman, Jamaica Surveyed, –.
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“most tyrannical overbearing disposition,” though he “afterwards proved himself a very worthy man.” Like Robinson, Robert left many manuscript notes, which reveal little of his familial situation or his management of his family’s property. Instead, they chiefly record his intellectual life, divided between natural history, and “Miscellaneous Reflections.” In Chapter , I will discuss the latter extensively; here I chiefly use the former for reasons its title makes obvious: “A Supplement attempted or Appendix & Addendum to Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Patrick Brown [sic] in Notes & Observations Natural and Moral on the Native Blacks, the Quadrupeds, Reptiles, Insects, Plants, Birds, Fishes, Air and Clime etc of Jamaica by Robert Long, being occasional remarks and observations from to inclusive.” As far as I can determine, though, he infrequently referred to Browne and not at all to Sloane. Yet however ad hoc Robert’s organization of Robinson’s papers, it was a model of rationality compared to his own. He made no apologies for this; addressing an imagined reader, he explained that his repetitions resulted from more and luckier observations, the later correcting the earlier. While he, like Robinson, gestured toward a larger, coherent intellectual project, he never completed it. Robert’s curiosity was relentless as a few observations from four randomly selected pages attests: ruminations about excruciating toothache pain; a detailed description of a wasp’s nest, which he found “rude” compared to the “civilized state” of a bee’s hive; a tiny drawing and paragraph-long description of “a minute insect magnified”; a question about calculating the altitude and distance of clouds; a playful suggestion that one would need Bishop Wilkin’s flying machine to establish whether there are mountains on the moon, not green cheese; seasonal events, such
Robert M. Howard, Records and Letters of the Longs of Longville, Jamaica, and Hampton Lodge, Surrey (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, ), :–. The book has very little on Robert besides a portrait of him as a child. A brief miscellany recorded, for example, his assuming the Lucky Valley lease in ; his father’s purchase of “ young Ebo” women for the estate; the death of his brother Charles in , but not his father’s the following year. BRIS-Ms, back of title page. For citation practice, see following note. Robert segregated his work from Robinson’s. Robert’s papers were donated to the museum in Bristol in by Benjamin Heywood Bright, member of a prominent merchant family that engaged in considerable trade with Jamaica, including enslaved Africans. Robert’s manuscripts include many, but not all, of the notes that Robert himself inventoried in a small-format notebook, now in Robinson’s papers at the Institute of Jamaica. The Bristol manuscripts include materials not listed there; it also inventories other writings and drawings now lost. The Bristol manuscripts are divided into six parts, which I cite as BRIS-Ms[volume #],[page #]. The first volume, BRIS-MS, includes the vast majority of Robert’s surviving notes on natural history. An “addendum” to a lost prefatory discourse, end of BRIS-Ms.
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as the inanimate state of an ash-colored, spotted moth in September and October; musings about how long a spider or crab could live without a leg or a scorpion without its tail, but as “some of these creatures will not exist under confinement so this couldn’t be known”; a remark that “Negroe fetishes are not so venerable as a quack’s powder . . . being an abominable compound of the vilest offals.” He frequently ended his observations with a “Query,” sometimes a cascade of them. In a small-format notebook where he inventoried his writings, he devoted three pages to “experiments and experimental queries.” Would water evaporate at different rates from marl, clay, and sand? Did the mechanism of a clock move differently in different weather conditions? How would a “piece of sugar cane of one eye or bud” vegetate compared with “the cane slit or divided into halves”? Would strong lye or lime in powder or lime water kill leaches or slugs? Curiosity probably attracted Robinson and Robert to each other. Robert’s references to his friend stand out because he rarely mentioned individuals. With evident pleasure, he twice noted the “beautiful” plant Robinson named after his family, the Longinia. He recorded what Robinson told him and their activities. They engaged in “experiments,” some a tad dangerous. They “handled” a captive alligator, taking him onto “our laps where he lay on his belly without any motion but that of respiration.” A hardy tick on the body of a dead bald pate pigeon inspired a round of experiments. They immersed the hapless insect twice in Madeira, but it emerged “lively as ever,” drowning finally in rum. In March in England, Robert received news from “my friend Mr Anthony Robinson” of his capture of a “most formidable” and terrifying swordfish, observations of an anteater, news of a reward from the Assembly of Jamaica for the invention of soap made from a native plant, accounts of his experiments with the sago palm, and his discovery of a native variety of sandalwood that made an excellent balm and whose leaves made a good tea. As much as they resembled each other in curiosity and enthusiasm, they differed in their objects. Robinson was passionate about plants and birds, Robert, about insects. His delight in them and his confidence that their diversity and complexity revealed the work of Providence was a continuation of the enthusiasm of seventeenth-century naturalists, such as Jan
BRIS-Ms, left-right. Wilkins reference to the second book, “Daedalus,” of Mathematical Magick (). IoJ-Rob, Small-format notebook, unpaginated. BRIS-Ms, left, right. BRIS-Ms, right. BRIS-Ms, –.
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Swammerdam. To observe them closely, Robert employed a microscope, which had become a fixture in metropolitan homes where “experimental philosophy” was a “virtuous recreation.” He examined wasp’s eggs, an ant’s “shining polish’d jet black” body, little scarlet insects sheltering in a decayed cedar stake, and the beauties of a butterfly’s wing. Prompted by observations and experiments, he sometimes digressed into moralizing. He envied the aforementioned pigeon’s ability to “make the whole country her own by her swift and easy flight,” avoiding earthly cares. But the tick was “a hidden Enemy,” a portion of pain balancing “the pleasant moments of its life” as well as a cautionary tale to the great. As the bird sustained “a little vile insect,” they should never regard their riches as “properly their own,” but should consider their “Estates in Trust . . . [for] the benefit of the poor and industrious laborers and Mechanicks.” He found a demonstration of divine providence in the “extraordinary instinct” that prompted a mother wasp to place several torpid spiders, “fresh & plump, free from putrefaction,” in her nest to nourish offspring she would never see. Resembling those of other naturalists enthralled with insects, his comments echoed the physico-theological views discussed earlier that valorized the natural historian’s efforts as proof of divine activity even in Creation’s lowliest creatures. A microscope permitted the naturalist to acquire, in the words of a contemporary naturalist, “a more just and sublime Idea than Mankind had before of the Grandure [sic] and Magnificence of Nature, and the infinite Power, Wisdom and Goodness of Nature’s Almighty Parent.” Yet Robert’s microscope also revealed troubling “Beauties of Nature.” Why had nature so lavishly adorned things “too minute or insignificant” for humans to perceive? Then he reconsidered, concluding that “[t]he Deity has kindly and compassionately withheld” the horrifying visions of the louse and “other ugly or noxious
Beth Fowkes Tobin, “Drawing Insects: John Abbot and the Arts of Noticing,” The Eighteenth Century , no. (): n. Jim Bennett, “Telescopes,” in A Companion to the History of Science, ed. Bernard Lightman (London: Wiley Blackwell, ), ; Boris Jardine, “Microscopes,” A Companion to the History of Science (Hoboken: Wiley, ), –; G. L’E. Turner, “Eighteenth-Century Scientific Instruments and Their Makers,” in The Cambridge History of Science, :. BRIS-Ms, left, right, right, right; BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, right. BRIS-Ms, right. BRIS-Ms, right; BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, right. BRIS-Ms, left. Tobin, “Drawing Insects,” –. J. A. Bennett, “Social History of the Microscope,” Journal of Microscopy , pt. (): . It was frequently alluded to in poetry popularizing physico-theological views. William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –, –.
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creatures.” Ultimately, Robert was impressed most by the sheer plenitude of Jamaican nature: its teeming diversity, its struggles for survival, its beauty, even beautiful violence, its endless cycling through generation and death, and sometimes resplendent revival in the midst of decay. Given Robert’s importance in his life, Robinson not surprisingly referred to Clarendon more than any other parish in his notes. In spring , he came upon a tree growing near Longville that agreed with Linnaeus’s description of the chinchona. A year later, he observed it again, finding the fruit consistent, too, thus securing its identification. Observations that same month included the mountain grape already described by Browne growing south of Lucky Valley Estate and a “most beautiful fern tree” located in the Clarendon Mountains just beyond the estate’s new sugar works. He noted fish and birds as well: in January , measuring a snook caught at Bower’s River on the border of St. Catherine’s parish; two years later in the same area, drawing and describing a recently killed “middle sized green backed coot, the sixth coot of my describing, and the fifth of my figuring.” Locals provided information and specimens. He paid a “Negro-Boy a Bit for a little Crabcatcher,” which, though small, fiercely snapped at his fingers, “its eyes very large and lively with very beautiful irises.” Westmoreland, a second geographic focus, offered many opportunities to observe birds and marine life. After the Maroon Wars, the parish surged economically, though the mountainous northeastern portion remained populated only by runaways. Edward reported that the western, wellwatered hills promised exceptional fertility and that “it may be esteemed one of the most eligible for sugar in the whole island, both in regard to quantity, and excellence of quality.” He judged Savannah-la-Mar, the parish’s administrative center and chief harbor, “unhealthy and inferior.” Robinson’s papers indicate visits to Westmoreland in and and lengthier stays in and . Robert perhaps accompanied him on some trips, though when is uncertain. He perhaps introduced Robinson to a fellow planter, John Parkinson, who became Robinson’s chief host there. Parkinson had little interest in natural history, but he shared what he knew. In , Robinson stayed at his Paul Island and Springfield Estates. Paul Island was on the Cabaritto River, the parish’s chief waterway, which emptied into the sea a few miles west of Savannah-la-Mar. He also stayed at Parkinson’s Springfield estate, situated nearly due west of Paul Island at
BRIS-Ms, . IoJ-Rob, D and , C, D, G, D, , and . Long, History of Jamaica, :–.
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the edge of a great swamp. There he composed a droll description of an “inoffensive” captive iguana that “seemed contented with its situation, and continued in whatever attitude I chose to put it, provided it was not an uneasy one.” Springfield was probably where Robinson’s fascination with the cabbage tree began. He noted their abundance in the swamp between the estate and Negrill Bay. Dr. David Miller, whom he met through Thomas Thistlewood, corrected his notion that “violent storms or hurricanes” easily felled such tall and slender trees. Quite the contrary, Miller had seen them “violently agitated,” their tops nearly touching the ground without breaking, proving “how tough & strong these black & whalebone-like fibres must be of which the outer case of the tree is composed.” On April, Robinson “walked into the morass near Mr. Hunter’s at Negrill . . . and had a cabbage tree felled,” which he then described. He took to the waters of the Bay with Hunter, who brought up a sea worm from the bottom at his request. He cut short his observations, though, because one of the fisherman “cou’d not endure its disagreeable Effluvia which it emitted a few minutes after it was taken up.” While coasting, he found nothing more pleasing than “observ[ing] some hundreds of [actineas] with their arms extended in the form of a stellate flower,” sometimes packed so tightly that “the incurious” mistook them for “a kind of sea moss.” In April , Hunter brought up a “very beautiful” angel fish, which Robinson described and drew. We know more about Robinson’s activities in Westmoreland than anywhere else because there he befriended Thomas Thistlewood, whose journals recount their relationship. Thistlewood is well known – indeed, infamous – to scholars and students of the Caribbean and the Atlantic World. His prominence stems from decades of journals, which among a great deal else tersely document his appalling cruelty toward the enslaved. The biographies of Trevor Burnard and Douglas Hall suggest his genius for devising savage and shaming punishments, such as compelling one slave to defecate in the mouth of another, whose jaws were then bound shut. Thistlewood’s sexual predation included multitudinous encounters with female slaves – nearly four thousand with nearly women over nearly four decades, by Burnard’s count, one of whom he drove to madness with relentless sexual violence. Indeed, Thistlewood is the
IoJ-Rob, A. IoJ-Rob, A; D. IoJ-Rob, G, , and . Hall, In Miserable Slavery, . Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, ; Jennifer Reed, “Representing Sexual Violation in the Archive of Caribbean Enslavement,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (): –, –.
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archetypal White man “off the leash” in the Caribbean – a variety of colonial male neither unremarked nor uncriticized by visitors to the Caribbean and other colonials. The wealthy Jamaican planter Thomas Pinnock (–) deplored the impact of the “almost Absolute” and “intoxicating” power White people possessed over the enslaved, though his concern was not their happiness and safety, but its impact on a society where White men, unrestrained in their passions, “wantonly destroy all happiness.” Yet Thistlewood also possessed intellectual and social aspirations; he succeeded well enough (with White peers at least) that his obituary in in the Cornwall Chronicle characterized him as “a gentleman . . . whose attainments, in many branches of natural knowledge, in which he was peculiarly communicative, rendered him a most desirable companion of men of science.” Yet that was decades in the future when Robinson attended a dinner in March , hosted by Thistlewood at Egypt Estate where he worked as an overseer. Several dated entries in Robinson’s papers show some contacts with Thistlewood before then, but no suggestion that Thistlewood meant more to him than any other local informant. One of a “curious company” Thistlewood hosted, Robinson spoke much about Long over dinner and claimed to have completed one hundred illustrations for a natural history of birds. Thereafter, the two men enjoyed each other’s company often whenever Robinson was in Westmoreland, dining together and traipsing around the countryside, sometimes with mutual acquaintances, such as Drs. Miller and Gorse. Between March and June , for example, Robinson visited several times, sometimes staying overnight. During the same period, Thistlewood wrote four times to Robinson, enclosing specimens or seeds, while Robinson wrote once to Thistlewood. On March, just a week after Thistlewood’s dinner party, Robinson returned to Egypt with a group that included John Parkinson, who had employed Thistlewood in the past. Robinson stayed after the other guests left. At this point, their relationship acquired a dimension of tutelage that
NLJ, Ms . Michael Chenoweth, The th Century Climate of Jamaica, Derived from the Journals of Thomas Thistlewood, – (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, ), . Thistlewood’s extensive weather records are the basis of his meteorological study of the island. IoJ-Rob, A, , . Thistlewood’s journals confirm that they had not become friends earlier. MONSON /, May ; MONSON /, December and December . MONSON /, March . MONSON /, March, April, – April, – April, May, – May, May, May, – May, May, June.
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endured until Robinson’s death, though became less pronounced as Thistlewood became more adept. Thistlewood reported that Robinson took “a great deal of pains” to instruct him in Linnaeus’s system – instruction that converged nicely with Thistlewood’s growing horticultural interests. He had already established a garden at Egypt, though he would fully realize his horticultural dreams on his own property, Breadnut Island Pen, a few years later. We can readily imagine the two men poring over a small-format version of one of Linnaeus’s works, examining intently a plate that illustrated which features of a flower the aspiring botanist had to describe. In effect, Robinson introduced Thistlewood to the authorities he himself consulted continuously, and Thistlewood relied on Robinson’s assessments of other naturalists’ publications. On April, Robinson remarked on the high quality of the figures in George Edwards’ A Natural History of Birds (–), a four-volume work owned by Robert Long. On April, Robinson was back at Egypt, sketching an “elegant” water lily he had seen in the pond behind Springfield Estate and drafting a female carpenter coot shot by Thistlewood the day before. He also instructed him “in drawing Birds, Plants, etc.” Thistlewood listened attentively when, on April, Robinson “staid [after dinner] comparing [Philip] Miller and [Patrick] Brown [sic].” On May, “Dr Robinson gave me some directions, to enable me to describe birds properly.” In June, Thistlewood picked up his own copies of Browne’s History and Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary in Savannah-la-Mar. Clearly neither man believed that Thistlewood’s lessons should remain theoretical. Books trained the student in practice, and practice required discipline, to which Thistlewood willingly submitted as evidenced by the detailed descriptions he sent Robinson and the many drawings of birds he undertook. Before returning to Westmoreland in , Robinson traveled to St. Thomas in the East, the easternmost parish that Edward Long predicted would become “one of the most populous and opulent” because of “the goodness of the soil, the number of rivers, and plentiful supplies of rain.” There Robinson effected his experiments on the cabbage tree on the properties of his friends Wallen, Hall, and Pringle. Robinson had certainly met all three men before , most likely in or around Kingston. We have already met Wallen in Browne’s History. Hall was a wealthy Kingston
MONSON /, March . MONSON /, April . Long, History of Jamaica, :.
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MONSON /, April . MONSON /, May and June .
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merchant who, like Browne’s subscribers Zachary Bayly and Patrick Taylor, diversified into agriculture. Robert Pringle was probably a Scot who served as a parish magistrate and who died in October in Philadelphia “whither he had gone for the recovery of his health.” Like many physicians, he might have been employed on a plantation when he first came to the island, then gone into planting himself. Robinson returned to Westmoreland in as acting lieutenant of a foot company quartered at Savannah-la-Mar. This inspired a mockHoratian ode by Edward Long, which exploited the incongruity of a naturalist becoming a military man. His apothecary’s pestle now stirred the regiment’s pepper pot while his pills had become bullets, his harmless powders, gunpowder, and his plasters, cockades. Tongue firmly in cheek, Edward asserted that even the most outrageous statements had become credible “since toads, birds, snakes, and botany forgot; / Forgot, alas, so soon!” Yet Robinson clearly had no intention of letting his military career get in the way of socializing or his natural history work. Between July and May , Robinson visited Thistlewood nearly a dozen times and stayed overnight nine more. They visited mutual friends twice, exchanged nearly a dozen letters, and loaned several books to each other. There was little activity for the remainder of , but it picked up between February and September with twenty-one visits to Egypt and three more to mutual friends. Two weeks after Robinson’s first visit to Egypt on July, Robinson was back, telling Thistlewood he was “fully convinced by trial, that crocodiles and alligators can move both their jaws, . . . that there is sorts of machineel [sic], the apples of one of which may be eaten without danger, but this last he does not positively affirm.” He also judged Browne’s History “a good performance,” after comparing his own observations of many plants with Browne’s. New acquaintances replaced the ailing Parkinson and absent Miller as when Robinson dined at Thistlewood’s with Dr. Lowthe and Mr. Norman. The two men continued to exchange drawings, and Thistlewood revived his practice of sending Robinson freshly killed birds, such as a “beautiful, white belly’d drake,”
Brathwaite, Development of Creole Society, . JFSGR; Scots Magazine (January ), . Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), chap. five; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, –; Alan Karras, “The World of Alexander Johnston: The Creolization of Ambition, –,” The Historical Journal , no. (): –. Gentleman’s Magazine (February ), –. MONSON /, July .
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and descriptions of birds hunted earlier, such as “the beautiful crab catcher, I shot the latter end of last year.” In December, they took a canoe trip. They saw in the New Year with a visit to Mr. William Cook, “look[ing] over his collection of shells: a great number indeed: but not many very rare ones.” In March , the books they exchanged suggest that their shared intellectual interests were expanding into chemistry. Fall , Robinson was posted to Lucea Fort in Hanover. To get there, he could have taken two roads from Westmoreland. Some evidence suggests that he collected along the westward route that ran through King’s Valley, which, according to Edward, exhibited “a lively and picturesque scene . . . [abounding] with delicious springs and cooling rivulets . . . The lofty mountains on either side twice every day extend their grateful shade over the whole, and veil the richly cultivated fields below from the sun.” On a darker note, Edward alluded more than once to measures taken to protect the area after Tacky’s Revolt in . Robinson quickly met people in Hanover to assist with his projects. The most important was Dr. George Spence, a surgeon’s mate who became a landholder after leaving service. A March letter posted shortly after Robinson’s first stay in Hanover suggests that Robinson had introduced him to the mysteries of Linnaean botany just as he did Thistlewood. After assuring Robinson that he had planted the berries he had sent him, Spence confessed to making “but a small progress in Botany.” He was guilty of a novice’s error: taking a plant as “undescribed,” only to discover it “in rummaging my different authors.” But he shifted the blame to Linnaeus for insufficiently differentiating between varieties. His comments indicate that he had learned to examine a plant’s flower carefully and to refrain from final identification until after inspecting the fruit. Robinson’s correspondence between Thistlewood and Spence began to knit together his collaborators in the island’s western parishes. On December, Robinson sent Thistlewood a “drawing of his new discovered dorstemia” with a dozen plants from Dr. Anderson to plant in his garden at Egypt. When Robinson returned to Westmoreland in February , he remained in touch with his Hanover friends as the letter from Spence
MONSON /, November . MONSON /, December ; MONSON /, January . MONSON /, March . Long, History of Jamaica, :. By , Spence owned the Top River Estate and nearly two hundred of the enslaved; by his death in , he had become a local notable, serving as custos and chief judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Spence’s obituary, Scots Magazine (January ): ; JFSGR. Browne, History, . Monson /, December .
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above attests. There Spence also remarked how a letter from Thistlewood that “you showed me . . . makes me earnestly desirous of being acquainted with that Gentleman.” Its subject had been meteorology, not birds or plants, and Spence was surprised by the lowest temperatures recorded by Thistlewood. In Jamaica as in the metropole, the thermometer, like the microscope, had made the transition from “experimental instrument to philosophical furniture” in the “enlightened” household. Spence speculated about why Thistlewood’s and his measurements differed so much, and he urged Robinson to “prepossess this gentleman in my favor if you think I deserve it.” He especially wanted to know him because of “the character you gave me of him as an honest and philosophical man.” Robinson satisfied Spence’s desire for an introduction – epistolary, if not in person. By the end of April, Thistlewood had conveyed to Robinson “the branch of a spicy plant” and a letter from Spence. This “spicy plant” was also the chief subject of Spence’s May letter. He agreed with Robinson that it was not the plant Browne thought it was, though he was unsure of Robinson’s identification. Spence would suspend judgment until Robinson had written him more as “[y]our [botanical] writing . . . always affords me a considerable amusement as well as instruction which I am very desirous of attaining.” At Robinson’s urging, Spence included a description of the tithymalus in Latin, though he claimed to be “insufficiently acquainted with the Botanical Style.” He also requested descriptions in English “for sometimes I do not understand your Latin.” Robinson apparently set to work on his own description of the tithymalus and a drawing of the plant, no doubt incorporating information from Spence. He presented it to Thistlewood on May. Thistlewood’s lengthy transcription into his journal indicates its significance for Thistlewood and nicely records their collaboration on matters botanical and ornithological: Mr. T.T. observes that the [Red Billed Streamer-tailed humming bird] is very fond of sipping the nectar of [the tithymalus]: it is perpetually blooming, and these birds may be always found near it. It grew upon a very barren land about a mile from the sea, near Egypt Estate in Westmoreland Parish Jamaica. The above named and myself found only seven of these plants growing within a few yards of one another, and I have
Spence’s three surviving letters to Robinson, dated March, May, and June , appear toward the end of IoJ-Rob, V. Robinson’s description of lancewood cites a letter that has not survived. IoJ-Rob, V. Golinski, British Weather, , .
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Before Breadfruit never seen in any other place, tho’ I have been twenty years in Jamaica. Anthony Robinson fecit et pinxit May : .
In September, Robinson left for Hanover again. No dated observations exist from this second stay, though a note of January suggests that he was very ill. By fall , he had apparently retired from his military duties, shifting his observations to the central parishes of St. Catherine’s, St. Andrew’s, and Port Royal. An undated letter by Robinson documents some of his work there. It communicated his suspicions that some seed pods his unidentified correspondent found on the beach came from a nonnative tree. Indeed, he speculated that they had been flung overboard by “the Negroes” on a slaver, and he suggested asking “the New Negroes & also the whites on board” whether it was an African tree. Robinson’s notes show that he knew the road that led up out of Kingston into the Liguanea Mountains. On one trip, some slaves told him how to cure venereal “taints” with a “decoction” prepared from the bark of the mountain wild olive, “a beautiful arborescent.” The road ascended into the “lofty regions” of the Blue Mountains by a track so steep and irregular, according to Edward, that only people on foot or horseback could use it. Beyond Elletson’s Merry Man Hill Estate, Robinson enjoyed the song of the black bullfinch and the absence of cockroaches and the “destructive” wood ant. Even further, Robinson reached that “eminence” where, again in Edward’s words, “a very beautiful scenery greets the view,” extending in a majestic and vertiginous sweep down to Kingston, the spit of land embracing the harbor, and the sea beyond. He scouted other locations in the same area, encountering an unfamiliar lizard near Chester Vale, estate of the late Governor Trelawny. He observed closely the wiliness of the great Jamaican hawk. It suffered the assaults of a “pugnacious” loggerhead until, exhausted, it perched “on some twig not far distant from his passive, and as he may foolishly think, inoffensive enemy,” who sprung upon the unwary bird, “seizes him in his talons and devours him.” Robinson’s two last dated entries were made in locales well known from his friendship with Robert: one in July in Longville, the other in February in Spanish Town, where he had use of his friend’s townhome. The first noted his description and sketch of a West Indian locust plant, which he had tended in the Longville garden for a decade.
Monson /, May . IoJ-Rob, V, which has some very irregular pagination. IoJ-Rob, V. Long, History of Jamaica, –. NLJ, #. Ibid.
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Figure . Robinson’s sketch of an elephant caterpillar (). Courtesy of the Bristol Museums, Galleries, & Archives
Despite his best efforts, he had great difficulty “getting a complete flower, though the tree then abounded,” for they would fall apart in his hand. The folds in a note suggest that it was enclosed in a letter to Robert. It is a carefully annotated sketch of an elephant caterpillar found on a grape vine and the only one of his insect drawings to have survived (Figure .). A few months later, he was dead. By the time he died in , Robinson had come to know Jamaica better than any serious naturalist before him. He had visited many places more than once as well as pushed into new territory. His knowledge developed on the ground as he visited new places and returned to familiar sites. At each step, he combined what he expected to see and thought he knew with the new, the surprising, and the puzzling. In his mind, he was continuously tacking back and forth between what he himself observed, what he learned from locals, and what he read in published authorities. Yet his efforts were not random. He knew what he was looking for and how to communicate what he learned. At times, he knew that he was literally walking in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors. On August , he encountered a tree noted by Sloane near Spanish Town; in , it had been “cut down but I perceiv’d many young Trees of the same Kind on the river’s Banks hard by.” Robinson regarded Sloane very highly, remarking once that his
IoJ-Rob, V.
BRIS-Ms, .
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“memory is too sacred to admit dispute of his veracity.” But Sloane was just one of many indispensable authorities, which included Browne, Linnaeus, and Mark Catesby. With respect to plants and somewhat less to birds, Linnaeus specified what mattered, what to look for, how to encode an observation to make it intelligible to naturalists beyond its immediate context, and how to slot it into an emerging and (hopefully) complete vision of the natural world. All this made Robinson’s work as a colonial naturalist simultaneously experiential and bookish, local and cosmopolitan. Recording information relayed to him by people living all over the island, he firmly rooted what he learned in specific locales. With citations that continuously acknowledged the efforts of other naturalists (though he often disputed their conclusions), he embedded himself in an international community of naturalists. With Robinson, we see how the requirements of Linnaean taxonomy shaped a naturalist’s work in the field – even his perceptions of what he encountered. His description of the wild ginger, which he observed in Clarendon in March , shows just how thoroughly he had studied his Linnaeus and how prepared he was to deploy what he had learned. “Looking like Linnaeaus” demanded familiarity and facility with the “controlled vocabulary” the Swede required the botanist to use. Browne and Sloane had already described the plant. Table . shows Hans Sloane’s description of its flower alongside Robinson’s. It makes clear how much more demanding description had become, so it is no surprise that Robinson frequently used a glass or a hand microscope. Moreover, Robinson’s word choice was anything but haphazard. The underlined and bold-faced terms are the standard parts the botanist had to examine and describe: periantium, or flower cup; corolla, or flower; nectarium, or “the part that bears the honey,” in Linnaeus’s words; and stamina and antherae, referring to male parts of the flower; pistillum and stylus, referring to female parts of the flower; and the pericarpium, which would become the seed vessel. If we compare Robinson’s and Browne’s description, we would not have to master Linnaean Latin to grasp their similarities. Working within the same paradigm, they composed similar descriptions, structured the same way, detailing the same features, using the same
IoJ-Rob, V. Sloane, Voyage, :; Browne, History, . Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, trans. Stephen Freer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Robinson might have learned this anglicized Linnaean vocabulary from James Lee’s An Introduction to Botany, first published in .
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(b)
Figure . Robinson’s drawings of Marcgravia scandens (a) and Clarendon or Wild Rose (b). Pasted onto heavier stock, the show-through suggests the appearance of some of Robinson’s original notes. Courtesy of the Institute of Jamaica. Photos by the author
words, Linnaean Latin on the one hand, an anglicized version thereof on the other. In other words – or, rather, to adapt Daniela Bleichmar’s words – neither Browne nor Robinson were engaged in simply looking, but rather in “expert, disciplined, and methodological observing” – what she terms “the truly magnificent and sophisticated machinery at work in the naturalist’s gaze.” As Spence’s letters to Robinson show, it was not always easy to master this specialized vocabulary. Nor did it necessarily make Robinson’s
“Looking like Linnaeus” adapted from Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire, esp. chaps. and , quotations at and ; Bleichmar, “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –; on Linnaeus’s “controlled vocabulary” and its application, Dirk Stemerding, Plants, Animals and Formulae: Natural History in the Light of Latour’s Science in Action and Foucault’s The Order of Things (The Netherlands: Reproductiedienst, Universiteit Twente, ), chaps. –.
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Sloane, Ginger [I:] [Zinziber sylvestre minus & majus] Zinziber sylvestre minus [WildGinger] . . . The Flowers stand at top of the Stalk in a Head together, which is composed of a great many set in threeInch long Spike, pretty close together, of a pale purple colour, each whereof is made up of one membranous Leaf, Convex on its undermost side, and Concave above . . . Zinziber sylvestre majus . . . on its top a four Inches long Spike of Flowers, exactly like the former, only larger.
Robinson, “Wild” Ginger [punctuation regularized and emphasis added; Fol. C #] The calyx is double, viz a spatha and a perianthium. The spatha consists of leaves: an exterior one which is imbricated & larger than the interior one, which is tubolose & cut obliquely like the blossom of the digitalis. The perianthium is tubular [and] twice the length of the interior leaf of the spatha, but not so long as the imbricated one. Both the spatha & perianthium arise from the bosom of the germen. The corolla is monopetalous infundibuliform, gradually increasing in the width of its tube to the limb, which is trifid. Each segment is lanceolate & erect. The nectarium arises a little beneath the divisions of the limb, in form like the fore part of a spoon’s mouth. That stamina is a flat thin membrane or pellicule having antherae shaped like an oaten grain with the narrow end downwards adhering length ways to them. The stamina is incumbent upon the concavity of the nectarium. The germen is round & truncated having [illegible] corpuscles or glands fixed on top from the center of which arises an erect filiform style whose upper part is received between the antherae as into a groove having its forked & patent stigmata reclining on the top of the antherae.
descriptions clearer than Sloane’s. He also departed from Linnaean practice by including comparisons. “Like the blossom of the digitalis,” “like an oaten grain,” and “like the fore part of a spoon’s mouth” referred to things beyond the description. As presumably most readers had handled a spoon, this was not a problem. But depending on knowledge of what the digitalis looked like compromised the description’s utility. Robinson did adhere to good Linnaean practice by avoiding any indication of color, because
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“Colour within the same species is remarkably sportive and so is of no value in definitions,” according to the master. Yet despite Linnaeus’s system, disagreements between naturalists about the identity of a specimen still occurred, sparking taxonomic tangles that clearly delighted Robinson. Working briefly through one each of a plant and of a bird gives insight into how Robinson continuously assessed the accuracy of information – whether the source was his own observations, a published text, or local informants – to come to his own conclusions or to suspend judgment. The potential medicinal uses of a tree – maybe two trees? – was at stake when Robinson disputed what Sloane identified as the hog-doctor or boartree and what Browne identified as the hog-gum tree (Figure .a and b). All three names reflected how hogs rubbed against the trunk to apply its healing gum to injuries. Robinson claimed, first, that the hog-doctor and boar-wood were not the same tree, as Sloane maintained; second, that neither illustration depicted the hog-doctor or hog-gum tree, but rather the boar wood. Perhaps the two trees were related, but Robinson could not say how as he had “never had any opportunity of examining the hog-gum tree.” He had seen them in St. Mary’s, but their “great height” made it impossible to inspect the leaves, flower, or fruit. He could inspect the boar wood because its height rarely exceeded twenty-five feet. Unable to settle the question on the basis of morphological features, Robinson focused on the trees’ resins, how Jamaicans used them, and the geographic distribution of the trees. Common in the Vere and Clarendon lowlands, no one there actually harvested the boar wood’s resin, which they certainly would have done to avoid buying it “at an excessive dear rate from the Negroes who bring it from the north side.” Sloane and Browne disagreed about the color of the resin (black and yellow, respectively). Robinson asserted that the hog-gum’s resin was white and “so inoffensive that the Negroes frequently purge themselves with it.” The boar wood’s resin was black “like tar or balsam of Peru” and much too caustic to be taken internally as Sloane recommended. Having been assured “by many gentlemen of great veracity,” Robinson asserted that it did make exceptionally good plasters. Finally, he had never heard either of the boar-wood growing in the mountains or of the hog-gum tree growing in the plains. Ultimately, Robinson failed to settle the question of the trees’ identities, but was confident of success should he be able to gather needed information.
Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, . Sloane, Voyage, :– and : figure ; Browne, History, and figure . IoJ-Rob, D. Ibid.
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(a)
(b)
Figure . (a) Sloane’s hog-doctor or Boar-wood tree. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library. (b) Browne’s hog-gum tree. Courtesy of the Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden
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Robinson’s reference to “many gentlemen of great veracity” underscores the importance of information from locals. He no doubt considered fellow medical men – in publications or in the flesh – highly credible, but he never dismissed what other Jamaicans told him regardless of status, race, or gender. For Robinson, “gentility” correlated with credibility. Thus, the “gentleman” whose earache was cured by a slave remedy was unnamed but credible, as was a “gentlewoman in St Elizabeth’s parish,” who informed him about feeding slaves with the fruit of the breadnut tree during lean times. The testimony of one gentleman – or gentlewoman – was good; the testimony of a group, even better. Thus, not only the St. Elizabeth gentleman, but “almost all other considerable persons in this parish” testified to the inoffensiveness of the gully asp. Initially in the eighteenth century, John Ray did for birds what Linnaeus did for plants: defined what the naturalist ought to attend to when looking at a specific bird without casually comparing it to some other. Ray divided birds first based on where they lived (land or water), then generally by the shape of the bill, foot, or both. In the History, Patrick Browne offered a classificatory system that also focused on bills and feet, though included environmental criteria. Eventually, Linnaeus’s six orders specified characteristics of the beak, the feet, the body, and behaviors such as nesting and mating. Environment did not disappear, because certain morphological features were associated with particular habitats. As with plants, “characteristic marks” such as beaks and claws were like the parts of a flower: means to the end of classifying individuals into groups. This gave Robinson’s ornithological research – collating and comparing information from Sloane, Browne, Mark Catesby, and (eventually) Linnaeus with his own observations – the same “bookish” dimension as his botanical work. He devoted several pages, for example, to sorting
The relationship between gentility and credibility in early modern Europe has been well-established since Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). IoJ-Rob, A. IoJ-Rob, D. Kevin R. McNamara, “The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before ,” The William and Mary Quarterly rd Series , no. (): ; Elsa Guerdrum Allen, “The History of American Ornithology before Audubon,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society New Series , no. (): –. McNamara, “Feathered Scribe,” ; Allen, “American Ornithology before Audubon,” . Browne, History, –. Joyce E. Chaplin, “Mark Catesby, a Skeptical Newtonian in America,” in Empire’s Nature, –; The Curious Mister Catesby: A “Truly Ingenious” Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ); George Frederick Frick
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out the identities of a variety of Jamaican water birds, drawing on Sloane, Browne, and Catesby. He clearly intended to best Catesby, author of Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (–), by publishing his own ornithological work. Thus, his criticisms of Catesby tended to be sharp as in his complaints about Catesby’s depiction of a bird he identified as Jamaican Tell-Tale or Tilderee. Yet Catesby also served as a more neutral point of comparison as when he identified the butter bird Thistlewood shot at Egypt Plantation in May as Catesby’s Rice-Bird or Padda, speculating that the bird had migrated from Carolina. After Linnaeus published his bird taxonomy and descriptions in the edition of Systema Naturae, Robinson alluded to him, too, reminding himself to “describe [a bird] after the manner of Linnaeus” and specifying whenever possible where it fit in the master’s taxonomy. But when it came to birds, Robinson went beyond questioning where the Master had slotted a bird, which happened often enough with plants, to criticize how Linnaeus constructed his classifications. For example, he could not understand how the order Anas, a huge group of birds encompassing everything from ducks and pelicans to albatrosses and gulls, could include all the genera into which Linnaeus divided it. Key to his criticism was the structure of the tongue, which Robinson alleged differed too much between the first two genera (ducks, geese, swans, and mergansers) and the others. In other words, he argued that Linnaeus had missed an essential morphological characteristic. My description of Robinson’s work abundantly proves that “[l]earning to see was never, is never, will never prove effortless.” His struggles illustrate what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison assert about the practice of and the demands made on the eighteenth-century naturalist. The imperatives of disciplined observation thousands of miles from the cabinets of metropolitan collectors and scientific institutions affected not just the work, but also the character of the naturalist, linking the “mastery of
and Raymond Phineas Stearns, Mark Catesby: The Colonial Audubon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ); for shifts in interpreting Catesby’s work, David Wilson, “The Iconography of Mark Catesby,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (–): –, and Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. IoJ-Rob, D and . NLJ, #. Catesby, Natural History, ; NLJ, #; NLJB-Plate . IoJ-Rob, D. IoJ-Rob, D. NLJ, #. Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, ), .
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scientific practices” to “self-mastery, the assiduous cultivation of a certain kind of self.” As Robinson willingly submitted to the demands of the practice of natural history, he cultivated patience, attentiveness, thoroughness, and tenacity. Such “epistemic virtues” ideally affected more than naturalists. In “Botanical Reflections,” Robinson stated the importance of the naturalist’s work, voicing the familiar trope of Caribbean indolence. He rejected the idea that “the culture of the cane is sufficient employment for the workingnegroes.” There were many old men and women and a superfluity of house slaves for whom gardening would replace the idleness that promoted squabbling amongst themselves and conspiring against their masters. “Nor could the considerate Rational Planter,” he concluded, “spend time more agreeably than in cultivating various plants.” Indeed, great rulers had considered such activities worthy of them. The utility of natural history, then, included the moral benefit of substituting industry for idleness both in the slave quarters and in the master’s great house. In its intellectual restlessness and constant activity, Robinson’s own life rebuked alleged Caribbean sloth and demonstrated an “improving” and “virtuous” colonial self. In short, he modeled a way of being in the world for the men he encountered and especially for those he considered friends. Scholars have studied friendship in eighteenth-century British society as have scholars of the North American colonies: how friendship was important to understanding what it meant to be a man, a family member, a participant in society, and a political actor. During the eighteenth century, there was a “transformation of friendship” away from instrumentality toward “a tie grounded in ‘natural sympathy’ that was unconstrained by practical necessity.” Yet these friendships were still useful because they offered the possibility of the moral improvement of the individuals
Ibid., . On monarchs and gardens, Drayton, Nature’s Government, –. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Allan Silver, “Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology , no. (): –. Male friendship was not the exclusive concern of Britons: Kenneth Loiselle, Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Male Friendship in Enlightenment France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); overview, David Garrioch, “From Christian Friendship to Secular Sentimentality: Enlightenment Re-evaluations,” in Friendship: A History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equinox, ), –. Loiselle summarizing Silver, Brotherly Love, .
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involved. As Richard Godbeer puts it, “It was a man’s capacity for emotion, nurtured in the context of loving friendships with other men, that would open the channels of communication and support through which he would grow both rationally and spiritually.” But friendship could only do such important emotional and intellectual work if friends possessed “sensibility, a capacity for refined and yet profound emotional feeling . . . and sympathy, a compatibility in temperament combined with a commitment to empathetic feeling that enabled supportive companionship.” Intellectual friendship, a subset of this larger category, underwent a similar transformation as a humanist-tinged discourse based in classical antiquity was displaced, though not entirely replaced, by the contemporary emphasis on sensibility and sentiment. Surely friendship between White men so outnumbered by Black slaves and so short on White female companionship assumed even greater importance in Jamaica than in the metropole and in Godbeer’s North American societies. That said, friendship in Jamaican society must also be considered in the context of a model of male sociability that featured excessive drinking at parties, which often enough concluded with the gang rape of female slave. Robinson makes a superb window into intellectual friendships among Jamaicans because he was good at it. Remember that Edward Long singled out his “feeling heart, a warm and steady attachment in his friendships.” This talent was fortunate, too, because his papers give little indication of secure and continuous income. While he surely earned money
Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship, . Ibid. On the seventeenth-century, April G. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, – (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, ); L’amitié et les sciences: De Descartes à Lévi-Strauss, ed. Françoise Waquet and Jean-Charles Darmon (Paris: Hermann, ), esp. Waquet, “Introduction,” and Shelford, “Vivre l’amitié: l’érudit français et l’amateur jamaïcain,” trans. Thomas Giraud, –; Mary Terrall, “Masculine Knowledge, the Public Good, and the Scientific Household of Réamur,” in Scientific Masculinities, ed. Erica Lorrain Milam and Robert A. Nye, Osiris , nd Series (): –; for botanical exchange as a vehicle for affection, Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship, ; Thomas Hillock, “Male Pleasure and the Genders of Eighteenth-Century Botanic Exchange: A Garden Tour,” The William and Mary Quarterly rd series , no. (): –; Kenneth Loiselle, “To Enter into Communication Is to Uphold a Friendship: Affectivity and the Communication of Knowledge between Dominique Chaix and Dominique Villars, –,” in Entrer en communication de l’âge Classique aux Lumières, ed. Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire and Héloïse Hermant (Paris: Garnier, ), –. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, –; Burnard, “Tropical Hospitality, British Masculinity, and Drink,” passim. Miles Ogborn, who generously cites some of my earlier work on this topic, in The Freedom of Speech, –. Monson /, April . Long, History of Jamaica, :.
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practicing medicine, his peripatetic life militated against a stable practice. Thistlewood reported his receipt of Royal Society funds “for collecting curiosities and making remarks, etc., in this country,” but for how long? And while the award from the Jamaica House of Assembly mentioned earlier was welcome, it was unique and came late in life. Robinson’s lack of financial security poses a problem, though, because male friendship could only occur between peers who chose freely. Yet to some degree he was dependent – so much even the miserly Thistlewood forgave his debts. How, then, could Robert Long be a patron? Robert himself acknowledged the problems of friendship between individuals of vastly different resources when he commented on a passage in William de Britaine’s Human Prudence in his “Miscellaneous Reflections.” Robert strongly disagreed with the assertion, “If you have a good Friend, never wish him Riches or Honour; for if he has them, he will either leave your Friendship or become your Enemy.” No, Robert countered, de Britaine had confused a friend with a dependent. Friendship between unequals was possible, he continued, because “[t]rue friendship is disinterested & will ever remain unimpeachable. Rich or poor, true friendship knows no distinction nor applies the stamp of merit or demerit to externals and casualties. The true friend will regard riches more as the means to express his constant desire to serve others than himself.” Again, though not referring specifically to Robinson, he certainly signaled what friendship with Robinson meant when he wrote: “A man’s mind should be his most valuable property. It’s his sanctum sanctorum. His person or his estate are but secondary properties. Friendship therefore and an intimate knowledge and possession of the mind’s arcana is the greatest gift one can expect of another.” But though Robinson was good at transforming strangers into friends, he was selective about the strangers he befriended. Status apparently did not matter that much, but gender and race did. No women or “poorer” White people figured among his friends, nor did any of the enslaved or free people of color. When it came to men, what mattered was curiosity and the willingness to learn. Robinson never called Parkinson a friend, for example, though the planter clearly patronized his activities in
Monson /, May . Loans mentioned in notes preceding the volume (Monson /) probably went unpaid, too. William de Britaine, Human Prudence, or the art by which a man may raise himself and his fortune to grandeur (Dublin, ), . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, .
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Westmoreland. He distinguished between friends with adjectives that situated them in a hierarchy from the most affectively rich to the instrumental. Occupying the lowest rung was “friend,” pure and simple. Such was Dr. Lowthe. In contrast, Thistlewood was a “very good friend,” as was Roderick McKenzie, George Spence, and Matthew Wallen. James Hall was a “much esteem’d Friend.” So was Dr. James Anderson, whom Robinson elevated to “much esteem’d and worthy” with George Spence. Robert Long, “my very much Esteem’d Friend,” occupied the highest rank. Such friendships entailed emotional connection and intimacy. Colonists clearly enacted metropolitan values of friendship as they, too, resorted to poetry and publication to express their feelings. Like Godbeer’s North American colonists, they were “doubtless influenced by celebrations of friendship that appeared in eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines. These essays and poems emphasized the role played by sentiment and sympathy in bringing two men together. According to this genre, every man craved ‘the sympathetic affection of the soul.’” Jamaicans wrote and published such poems in their periodicals, too. Edward Long’s poem about Robinson’s military “exploits” was, in fact, one of three submitted to Gentleman’s Magazine by the Kingston printer Thomas Strupar. One was Strupar’s memorial poem for the Kingston printer John Walker, his mentor. Friendship compelled him to write. He evoked Walker’s empathy – how he could not view dispassionately the misfortunes of others – in conventional, if sincere terms. Even as he weakened during his fatal illness, “[f]ondly he pressed the hand to friendship dear.” After his death, Strupar bathed his grave “with friendship’s holy tear.” Contrast this with Robinson’s memorial poem on John Ripley, which Strupar also submitted to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Strupar noted that Ripley had been “well known in that Island for his superior Skill in Horticulture.” Robinson duly praised Ripley for naturalizing the pine and importing honeybees, who allegedly mourned their master’s passing. But he said nothing about Ripley as a friend, writing with respect and admiration, not love. We know how differently Robinson would have written if Ripley had been a friend from a poetic lament on losing one, which he shared with
Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship, . Thomas Strupar, “Select Poetry, Ancient and Modern,” The Gentleman’s Magazine , no. (February ). Ibid., –. Ibid.
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Thistlewood. His estranged friend had forgotten Robinson, “your old, tho’ poor, yet faithful friend.” A “briny Torrent” flowed from Robinson’s “blear’d, grief swol’n Eyes”; his “Ink fraught pen” blared “each dismal heartfelt Sentiment.” Like Robinson, Robert Long was not ashamed of tears, though he carefully identified when and with what restraint men should shed them. To weep over “mere follies or foibles” showed weakness, but male tenderness signaled “no cowardice or effeminacy” in “true cases of pity.” No one was more obdurate than Robert, “no eyes more dry, no tiger more savage and fierce . . . no resolution more unalterable or fixed” when he confronted misfortune, abhorrent men, or contemptible behavior. But “the lightest causes of grief” prompted his tears with people or situations worthy of his attention. Death obviously caused the most extreme grief, and a memorial poem for Robinson shows it unleashing a veritable torrent of tears. Published anonymously in the Jamaican St. Jago Intelligencer in May , Thistlewood cherished it so much, he shared it with friends. Thoroughly sentimental, it engaged in poetic fallacy as Robinson’s objects of study mourned his passing: “See the Trees, all with Tears are burdened, / See the Blossoms with Moisture depend, / Hark the mock-bird screams shrill through the wood, / They lament their Companion and friend!” The poem also evoked those characteristics Edward praised in his biographical sketch: “His heart full of friendship sincere, / Benevolent, Virtuous and True / The hand from Corruption so Clear, / The breast that deceit never knew, / The Eyes that ne’er look’t on distress / But the Tribute of pity they paid, / The Tongue that delighted to Bless / In the grave – low and lifeless are laid!” It even conjured an image of Robinson continuing his work after death with supernatural acuity while perched on the calyx of his favorite flower. But such eternal felicity made the pain of his death worse for surviving friends. In short, the poem memorialized Robinson the naturalist and Robinson the friend. Thistlewood’s account of his friendship with Robinson documents the craving for connection described by Godbeer. Indeed, Thistlewood experienced a greater intensity of friendly feeling than he had perhaps ever experienced and perhaps never did again. This sentiment took root
BL, Manuscripts, Edward Long papers, Add. , v–r. BRIS-Ms, ; Philip Carter, “Tears and the Man,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –; Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, – (London: Routledge, ), –. BL, Manuscripts, Edward Long papers, Add. , v–r.
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early: Just a few weeks after their first meeting, Robinson revealed his “great distress” “in a very moving manner” at probably never being able to complete his work – and Thistlewood was receptive to Robinson’s emotional outpouring. His grief at Robinson’s death is palpable even in his generally laconic journals. Samuel Hayward of Savannah-la-Mar, a close friend who had also socialized with Robinson, relayed news from a newspaper that “my dear friend Dr. Anthony Robinson is dead.” The obituary Thistlewood promptly composed probably included information from that notice, but also remarked that “he was sober and inoffensive, and the most agreeable companion I ever was acquainted with; a pretty poet, a good natural philosopher, and the greatest Botanist that ever was in Jamaica, his genius perfectly adapted to examining plants.” Thistlewood noted that “his inquiries were not for curiosity alone”; rather, he “endeavored to search for such properties in Plants, as might render them serviceable to mankind.” Recalling their time together, Thistlewood opined, “I never was happier than in his company.”After a restless night, he “walked out alone and wept bitterly but still continued uneasy as before.” A few days later, he searched the papers for news of his friend, “but only one . . . mentioned my friend Dr. A. R.” On June, Thistlewood briefly took heart when an acquaintance “assured him that Robinson is not dead, as affirmed in the papers, he having been in his company not long ago.” Sometime during the s, Thistlewood shared his grief over Robinson in letters to Edward Long in England. Referring to Robinson as “my beloved friend,” he sent a transcription of the memorial poem. He considered it “deserving to be included among our best collections”; he hoped for its publication in an English periodical; and he wished the “blessings of heaven” on the anonymous author, who obviously possessed “a great share of the benevolent and amiable qualities which he has so well described in another.” Three passages in Thistlewood’s commonplace books supplied the words to describe Robinson’s friendship and its terrible loss. In , he transcribed a passage from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women: “Even friendship itself, which has originally so powerful a hold of the human
Monson /, April . Monson /, May . Monson /, May . Monson /, May . Monson /, June . BL, Manuscripts, Edward Long papers, Add. , fols. v–v. On the commonplace books, Part III.
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heart, is not to be preserved alive, without that interchange of words and actions, if the parties be near; or that commerce of thoughts and wishes, if they be not, to which it naturally inclines.” With Robinson, Thistlewood had engaged in “that interchange of words and actions,” though his friend was now out of reach of that happy commerce. In , he transcribed a passage from William Guthrie’s The Friends, a Sentimental History (): “The Ties of Friendship may Proceed from a difference, as well as a Similarity of Manners. We seek in another the perfections we want in ourselves; and the Eagerness of the Pursuit, or the difficulty of succeeding, Leads us into a passion for acquiring them.” The “perfections” that Robinson possessed and that Thistlewood coveted included learning as well as Robinson’s capacity for fellow feeling. He was probably reminded of him yet again when reading Sir William Temple’s definition of a friend: “Something like home that is not home, like alone, that is not alone, to be wished & only found in a friend, or in his house.” In the drawings he saved, Robert Long unwittingly preserved the memory of a circle of friends at Lucky Valley estate that, like Thistlewood and Robinson’s other friends in Westmoreland and Hanover, devoted considerable energy to collaborative efforts in natural history. In the Bristol and Jamaican manuscripts, Robert listed hundreds of illustrations completed by the group. Only a small portion has survived, and almost all are of birds. Robinson drew many, of course, and Robert’s brother Edward, several more. So did the Reverend Alexander McKay, the rector of the school near Lucky Valley at Old Woman’s Savannah, and Andrew Peter Dupont, who acquired a modest reputation for collecting in England and whom Robert apparently commissioned to do specific illustrations. Robert annotated many of them, even cross-referencing Robinson’s illustrations with his notes and sometimes adding critical comments. Thus, he found the left foot “defective” in Robinson’s depiction of Wilson’s snipe, but he judged his coffee finch “a very just figure of life.” There is even a drawing
Monson /, /np. Monson /, /. Monson /, /, a volume of commonplaces. The National Library of Jamaica has the surviving bird illustrations. According to Robert, academy founded “through the assistance and protection . . . of such gentlemen of Jamaica as are encouragers of science and polite literature.” BRIS-Ms, ; also Long, History of Jamaica, . Dupont sponsored Robert’s one appearance in print by sending to the Royal Society of London his description and illustration of “a remarkable marine insect,” published in Philosophical Transactions () and reprinted in Universal Magazine (). Dupont’s surviving drawings in Jamaica exquisitely depict the eggs and skulls of birds. NLJ, Ms, plates –, , , . NLJ, Ms, plates and .
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Figure .
Edward Long’s and Anthony Robinson’s sketch of the petchary. Courtesy of the National Library of Jamaica
of the Spanish Main Banana Bird that, greatly offended by Robinson’s laughter at his antics, attacked one of his ears “in great wrath.” These illustrations speak to the social significance of natural history for them. One captures especially well a moment of male sociability facilitated by their shared intellectual passion. In the last year of his life, Robinson and Edward Long collaborated on a painting of the petchary (Figure .). They literally inscribed their friendship into what it had produced: “Anthony Robinson drew it; Edward Long colored it.” Clearly these men – the Long brothers, Thistlewood, Wallen, Spence, and others unknown to us – found these endeavors pleasurable and diverting. At least some must have found a welcome respite from rural ennui, not to mention daily activities that, as slaveowners, overseers, or plantation physicians, made them complicit in a brutal labor regime. As mentioned earlier, some like Wallen later acquired modest fame beyond the island; others like Thistlewood enjoyed more limited recognition. To all, Robinson brought a respectable pursuit that made them more respectable. He brought state-of-the-art knowledge, teaching them how to acquire a correct understanding of the natural world and how to describe and depict what they observed. Sharing such activities, enjoying the
NLJ-, .
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NLJ, Ms , plate .
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affective bonds they forged, set these men apart as serious individuals engaged in serious and edifying activities. However undisciplined in other aspects of their lives – succumbing to abundant opportunities for satisfying their lust and terrorizing their slaves – these men readily submitted to the gentle disciplines Robinson taught them: how to describe a flower, how to draw a bird, how to collaborate, how to be a proper friend. His lessons connected them to a useful, socially beneficial activity in contrast to the sexually disordered and extremely violent society routinely noted and condemned by Jamaicans and metropolitan visitors alike. In the process, they sought to fashion new well-ordered selves. Yes, the enslaved could be trained to assist them as Matthew Wallen did years later when he taught his to graft fruit trees. The enslaved could share with Robinson the medicinal uses to which they put a variety of Jamaican plants. But they could never be friends, thus never true collaborators. They lacked the currency – liberty – required to circulate in this intellectual and affective commerce. They labored under compulsion; their masters chose to become disciplined, thus virtuous men. Yet while Robinson’s friends found satisfactions in the study of natural history tethered to their Caribbean circumstances and their relationship to the metropole, they no doubt enjoyed others that linked them to curious men anywhere and to humanity writ large. Science was never ideologically pure. In the eighteenth century it came with the cultural baggage of utility and improvement, assumptions ridiculed often enough by contemporary satirists. In recent decades, we have come to criticize the “material practices of Enlightenment natural history” just described as “naively empiricist, as part of an imperialist project, and as engaged in commoditization of the natural world,” in Beth Fowkes Tobin’s words. Yet she also asks whether these “techniques of observation and description” also “provided a way of being in and with the natural world that was not driven by the extractive and exploitative systems of global capital.” This analysis of Robinson and his friends’ work bears her out, cautioning us to take seriously its capacity to inspire the kind of wonder that compelled Robert to humbly acknowledge our insignificance and ignorance in the face of the world’s transcendent beauty: The short life and sudden fate of flies and moths who lightened by the candle flame to their destruction in what numbers are daily and nightly destroyed – what avail their . . . wings? To what different fates the various
BL, Manuscripts, Joseph Banks papers, Add. , volume (–), Matthew Wallen to Joseph Banks, May . Tobin, “Drawing Insects,” .
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Before Breadfruit and several orders of animate beings are born? When we consider the short life and violent death of some, need we repine at the brevity of our days or the manner in which we may meet death and expect our final period to existence here? A man may be but as a moth in competition with higher beings, and his existence as comparatively short and precarious.
BRIS-Ms, right.
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Conclusion to Part I
Natural history has long been a vigorous line of research in Enlightenment studies, and Part I has demonstrated Jamaican engagement in the study of the Caribbean natural world from the s into the s. Many Jamaicans appear in this account: the enslaved and the free, White and Black, poor, middling, and wealthy, male and female. A “social” reading of the records left by Patrick Browne and Anthony Robinson reveals the curiosity of many individuals about their environment and their contributions to rendering it intelligible and useful. The majority were not professionally invested like Browne and Robinson, who 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. We have nevertheless seen many of their contacts self-consciously engaging in activities I identified as commonalities of Enlightenment intellectual culture in Chapter – collecting, conversing, networking, reading, experimenting, organizing – and enjoying the benefits of intellectual stimulation and camaraderie. “Before Breadfruit” has also shown that while Jamaican practice did not differ substantially from the metropolitan or North American, it acquired additional significance for its White male practitioners. When planters stepped in to sponsor the publication of Browne’s The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica, they assumed the role of the socially eminent who patronized similar endeavors in the metropole. They thus asserted their right to be considered intellectually serious and responsible leaders of their island home. The individuals that Robinson brought together through his visits and correspondence asserted the same by demonstrating their capacity to undertake demanding intellectual tasks and to assume the
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Conclusion to Part I
obligations of intellectual friendship. They thus cultivated an identity of self-discipline and civility in a brutal slave society, constituting themselves as an intellectual elite that embraced the scions of a great planter family and a pen keeper as they excluded the enslaved and the female from their charmed circle of learning.
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Creating Enlightened Citizens The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the s
How sweet it is to be a Citizen! What emotions should I have experienced given that I have had the happiness through birth and education of knowing two homelands and joining to a more general affection that of my adopted country? Pierre-Louis de Saintard, Essai sur les colonies françaises ()
I do not know the basis of the belief that America’s climate was not suitable for stimulating the arts and eloquence [or] for furnishing subjects to belles lettres and philosophy. Wasn’t it in countries favored by the sun that the arts were born? Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue ()
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Introduction to Part II
As the Seven Years’ War came to an end, Monsieur Hogu trumpeted a new cultural moment in the colony’s history. In the recently founded Gazette de S. Domingue, he wrote: “Once a colony is flourishing, and its tranquility appears assured; once abundance reigns, government is benign, and contentment is universal and unalloyed; [then] individuals with talents exercise them with pleasure, and connoisseurs admire and encourage them.” So Athens had devoted itself to the arts and their delights after turning back the Persian threat. Civil war had not extinguished the love of the arts that flourished after Caesar and Pompey made Rome master of the world. Indeed, the enviable Augustan Age had brought the arts to an exceptional degree of perfection. Cycles of war and peace characterized French cultural achievement, too. Having survived the recent, terrible war, its progress should resume. Hogu rebuked the belief that “the cultivation of the sciences is not absolutely necessary,” that cultivating sugarcane and manufacturing indigo excused islanders from learning “the sciences that began in Greece, progressed in Rome, and achieved perfection in France.” A colony in its early years had more pressing concerns, but one claiming to be “the most beautiful and richest of all French possessions” could no longer deprive herself of the arts and sciences, furthered by the recently established press. Many of the Gazette’s readers no doubt found Hogu’s choice of historical analogies and his characterization of the island faulty, if flattering. France had suffered a humiliating defeat by Great Britain, and the colony simmered with internal divisions. Yet however rosy Hogu’s glasses, he was not alone in claiming that Saint-Domingue was turning the page on an earlier tumultuous history of piratical exploits and popular insurrection.
Gaz, June . On colony’s earlier history, James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, – (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Philip P. Boucher, France and the
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Introduction to Part II
More than a decade earlier, Emilien Petit, member of one of the colony’s Conseils and author of Le patriotisme américain (), had claimed that the island was becoming more civilized; it was no longer inhabited by obscure and “rude” people who, dominated by their passions, sought “shelter against the consequences of their crimes” in the New World. In , the colony’s governor and council members had debated the factors that were removing the “rust” of an earlier time, softening les moeurs, enhancing self-restraint, and so thoroughly eradicating “the licentious customs” of the colony’s foundation, even their memory was fading. Part II explores these cultural aspirations and what they meant to French colonists by analyzing the new periodicals that self-consciously furthered them: the long-running Affiches Américaines and its ephemeral siblings, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine. None of them have received the kind of attention their metropolitan counterparts or North American colonial publications have. Here I argue that the Affiches, the Journal, and the Iris were all facets of the same “enlightening” project. This did not result from a coherent editorial vision, though their editorship sometimes overlapped. Rather, close content analysis demonstrates that the men who founded and edited them considered themselves improvers and their publications catalysts for positive change. They had confidence in the power of communication to inform and of discussion to enlighten; they brought metropolitan ideas and news into the colonies;
American Tropics to : Tropics of Discontent (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, – (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ). John Garrigus, “Le patriotisme américain: Emilien Petit and the Dilemma of French-Caribbean Identity before and after the Seven Years’ War,” Proceedings of the Western Society of French History (): –, quotation at . Pierre de Vaissière, Saint-Domingue: La société et la vie créole sous l’Ancien Régime, – (Paris: Perrin, ), . Charles E. Clark, “Early American Journalism: News and Opinion in the Popular Press,” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –; David Copland, “America, –,” in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, –, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; on French metropolitan periodicals, see Chapters –. Other colonial improving journalism, Clark, “‘Read All About It’”; Fiona Clark, “The Gazeta de Literatura de México and the Edge of Reason?,” Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies, and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), –; Bernard Andrès, “Le fantasme du champ littéraire dans la Gazette de Montréal,” Études françaises , no. (): –; Michael John Eamon, “A Colonial Print Ascendancy: The Domestic Press, Sociability and Elite Formation in Eighteenth-Century Halifax and Québec City” (PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, ).
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they created forums for debate within it; and they believed that a press should serve its public by furthering the collective good. These periodicals urged readers to identify themselves as French and American, patriots and citizens. They connected these identities with Enlightenment as they tutored readers in the practices of civil discourse and civilized taste. As with natural history in Jamaica, there were cultural stakes in these gambits: addressing the metropole in intellectually credible terms, thus asserting a cultural distinction that further distanced free from enslaved and White from Black and mixed race. These ideals were also deeply gendered. John Garrigus has argued how, in the decades after the Seven Years’ War, White panic at the increasing population of free people of color and especially the “sexual power free and enslaved women of color exerted over white men” generated a discourse that “feminized” all free people of color, thus decisively excluded the men from citizenship. Here I narrate how, during the s, Saint-Domingue’s newly established press simultaneously conjured, elaborated, and addressed the colony’s White male citizens and their female counterparts. The Affiches and the Journal encouraged White men to confront the problems facing their society and the French state by rationally and disinterestedly considering them within the frame of political economy and the chief paradigm of metropole–colonial relations. In limited ways, they also urged the acquisition of politesse and taste, though the Iris fully reveals the stakes in cultural sophistication. In her pages, we see the indispensable civilizing role of the White woman: nurturing the literary arts and bringing order into the Saint-Domingue household, disordered by interracial sex, by domesticating her husband’s passion and inspiring tender familial sentiments in him.
Discussion of “American-ness” converges with an older historiographic debate about the island’s “ésprit autonomiste,” which Frostin argued pushed the colony to the point of secession at the end of the s and which he connected with the origins of the Haitian Revolution. Charles Frostin, “Histoire de l’autonomisme colon de la partie française de Saint-Domingue aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles” (PhD dissertation, University of Paris, ), esp. :–; Charles Frostin, “Les colons de Saint-Domingue et la metropole,” Revue historique , no. (): –. In contrast, Debien held that during the s at least colonists craved the rights of a province and the respect they believed they were entitled to as Frenchmen. Gabriel Debien, “Esprit colon et esprit d’autonomie à Saint-Domingue au XVIIIe siècle” (Paris: Larose, ); supportive of Debien, Pernille Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Argument subsequently elaborated in Before Haiti, John D. Garrigus, “‘Sons of the Same Father’: Gender, Race, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, –,” Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Christine Adams, Jack R. Censer, and Lisa Jane Graham (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, ), –, quotation at .
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This analysis thus considerably enriches Garrigus’s analysis of a decade of imperial crisis during which officialdom promoted the creation of a colonial “public sphere.” Yet, however ubiquitous in contemporary scholarship, the phrase “public sphere” is problematic. Key aspects of Habermas’s formulation have been challenged, for example, its assumptions of egalitarian relations within it and opposition to the state outside it. Years ago without benefit of the phrase, Michèle Duchet documented how the realms of officialdom and Enlightenment were not sealed off from each other, but socialized freely in Parisian salons; more recently, Jeremy L. Caradonna notes that “the state and the public sphere were always intimately tied together.” Antoine Lilti further objects that the “imagined” public sphere was more a creation of print media than the forms of sociability Habermas emphasized – and that the former even undercut the social authority of the latter. Nevertheless, here and in Part IV we will see considerable editorial investment in what Habermas believed the public sphere was supposed to do: create a space where individuals came together voluntarily and exercised their rational capacities by discussing in print critically important issues. Yet while colonists also used the press to advance their agendas, it was no more inherently oppositional than its metropolitan counterpart. Reconstructing the origins and purposes of Saint-Domingue’s periodicals, situating them vis-à-vis similar metropolitan publications, and recuperating them as an Enlightenment project corrects an impression that ideas arrived late in the island’s history, most notably in the s with Moreau de Saint-Méry and the Cercle des philadelphes. Both are indisputably important, but Moreau’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (–) casts a long shadow backward while the intellectual organization he helped found has a prehistory. Indeed, some individuals encountered here and in Part IV became members of the Cercle. When the editors
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), chap. , –. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, ; rpt. ); Jeremy L. Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –; on Habermas’s critics, T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ), –, –; on influence of “public sphere” on scholars’ interpretations of the eighteenth-century press, “Introduction,” Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, –, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Lilti, L’héritage, –. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science.
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encouraged them and other readers to express their opinions as Americans during the s, they differed from British colonists to the North, who resisted characterizations as either “creole” or “American” because of the degeneracy and cultural inferiority such terms connoted. Inasmuch as free people of color embraced the designation “colons américains” decades later, the results of that editorial initiative appear equivocal. Nevertheless, by asserting that hemispheric difference was rich with possibility, not degenerate, they turned the colonial tables on the metropole well before Moreau de Saint-Méry attempted to rehabilitate creole character in a Parisian lecture hall and in the Saint-Domingue press in the s. This introduction begins this story by briefly sketching the colony’s development into the s. Chapter recounts how Jean Monceaux, the first editor of the Affiches Américaines, adapted a popular and profitable metropolitan genre to local needs and guided it through its first few years. Even its name claimed a distinctive “American” identity, which the Journal de Saint-Domingue, chief subject of Chapter , agitated for in a magazine-like publication. Both chapters show that, despite the constraints of official censorship, the Affiches and the Journal did not remain silent as political crises roiled their colony, the metropole, and the French and British empires of the Atlantic World; rather, they participated in consequential debates on the Exclusif, the status of Saint-Domingue in the empire, and colonists’ claim to the rights of Frenchmen. Chapter focuses on belles lettres in the Affiches and the Journal, but especially in the Iris Américaine. Targeting a female readership, the last fully reveals the gendered conception of citizenship in Saint-Domingue. Part II concludes with a debate at decade’s end in which a “slave” had the last word about the viability of a colonial intellectual society. *** During the s, the Jesuit missionary Father Le Pers composed a series of remarkable reflections on Saint-Domingue, the colony whose slaves he was charged with evangelizing. Having arrived a few years after it became
Chaplin, “Creoles in British America,” . John D. Garrigus, “Colour, Class and Identity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: SaintDomingue’s Free Coloured Elite as Colons américains,” Slavery & Abolition , no. (): –. Yvonne Fabella, “Redeeming the ‘Character of the Creoles’: Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue,” Journal of Historical Sociology , no. (): –. P. Le Pers, “Livre sixieme [sic]: Le Portrait ou miroir de St. Domingue,” Jesuit Archives, Vanves, GBro , r-rv, v, v; April G. Shelford, “Civiliser le savoir créole,” tr. Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Mobilités et circulation des saviors, ed. Liliane Pérez and Pilar Gonzales-Bernaldo (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, ): –; Jacques Cauna, “En Haïti il y a trois siècles: Les
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officially French in , he was well situated to do so. But he found it difficult to characterize the settlers. They were radically different from what they had been fifty years earlier and what they no doubt would be fifty years hence. The colony was constantly changing, and its new traits made it unrecognizable. “Indeed, seeing the polite habits that begin to dominate, who would believe that the present inhabitants descend directly from the old buccaneers?” Yet the colony was also a place of ambitious newcomers making their way in a society where, unencumbered by estates, wealth purchased status and slave ownership defined a man’s worth: own none, he was poor; fewer than twelve, he was a “petit”; at least twenty-five, a “riche” – and then there were the “très riche” and the “richissime.” At the other end of the social scale, the slaves were misery embodied, oppressed because of their color and seemingly despised even by nature. Le Pers generally considered them stupid and coarse, yet he sympathized with their pitiable situation and deplored their abusive masters. Le Pers admitted that Saint-Domingue did not count for much yet, but he believed that the New World might eventually eclipse the Old. He imagined France and England suffering the same fate as Greece and Egypt, their lights of learning extinguished under a yoke of shameful servitude. “There is nothing America lacks less than intelligence [esprit], I speak of those born of European parents called creoles.” True, they studied little and devoted themselves to enjoying life’s comforts. But once the colony became crowded, they would have to cultivate learning – perhaps even redeem a Europe sliding into barbarism. Indeed, the time would come when Europe would be nothing compared to America. Although Black skin would remain a curse, the mixing of races and the departure of White people would eventually make brown the natural color of New World peoples. What did it matter if future Americans resembled Abyssinians and Siamese or depicted angels as black and devils white? Nothing was more superficial than skin color if one were a good man. If we take prosperity as a proxy for greatness, Le Pers’s anticipation of Saint-Domingue’s role in American ascendency was not unfounded. As he wrote, the colony was taking off economically. Sugar was key. Indeed, not long after his death in , the island’s sugar production caught up with observations morales et predictions d’un Jésuite (un manuscript inédit du père Le Pers), Actes du e congrès nationaux des sociétés historiques et scientifiques (), –; on Caribbean missionaries, Sue Peabody, “A Dangerous Zeal: Catholic Missions to Slaves in the French Antilles, –,” French Historical Studies , no. (): –; Sue Peabody, “A Nation Born to Slavery: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeenth-Century French Antilles,” Journal of Social History , no. (): –.
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Jamaica’s; by mid-century, it likely exceeded that of all the British sugar islands. Nevertheless, agriculture in the colony was always diversified with indigo, coffee, and cotton generating profits. Because a mountainous topography sliced the colony into areas of different soils, climatic conditions, and water supply, no region wholly specialized in one or another crop, and no crop was cultivated with equal intensity everywhere. That said, sugar cultivation and processing, which required much capitalization and labor, was most intense and advanced in the North. In contrast in the South, more modest proprietors – many of them free people of color – cultivated indigo, coffee, and cotton on smaller holdings, which needed much less of both. Le Pers’s curse of “blackness” would afflict many more Africans. As in Jamaica, Saint-Domingue’s plantation complex required ever-more enslaved labor: in , five years before Le Pers’s death, the colony’s inhabitants numbered nearly , Whites, , free people of color, and , of the enslaved; by , approximately , Whites, , free gens de couleurs, and , enslaved. Slaveholders’ hearts grew no more tender. Indeed, during much of the century, there was little economic difference between working slaves to death or adequately nourishing and housing them. Yet despite the harshness of the slave regime, the colony never experienced slave rebellions similar to those disrupting other Caribbean colonies, much less anything as dangerous as Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica. Slaves nevertheless resisted in other ways, from suicide to marronage. Indeed, runaways sheltering in the mountains were a constant source of colonial anxiety before the Haitian Revolution. Le Pers erred badly, though, when he confidently envisioned the emergence of a new, dominant brown race. Quite the contrary, in the decades after the Seven Years’ War, White colonists inscribed an increasingly firm color line between themselves and free people of color. They placed the latter under ever-more stringent measures of control, though without foregoing the convenience and pleasures of concubinage. And he
Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, –. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, ; Garrigus, Before Haiti, –. Population figures from Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, and Jacques Thobie, Histoire de la France coloniale des origins à (Paris: Armand Colin, –), ; on SaintDomingue plantations, Jacques Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre: Histoire d’une plantation de SaintDomingue au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Karthala and A.C.C.T., ); Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). Garrigus, Before Haiti; also, John D. Garrigus, “‘Affranchis’ and ‘Coloreds’: Why Were Racial Codes Stricter in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue than in Jamaica?,” Quaderni storici n.s. , no. (): –.
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probably never imagined those afflicted “Blacks” rising up at century’s end, ending both slavery and French rule. In contrast, Le Pers said nothing about the colony’s political situation – especially odd given a serious White revolt in the early s. Official French control had brought the accoutrements of political order, most notably, a royal governor, an intendant, and the Conseils Supérieurs. The first two were typical of metropolitan France, but the royal governor, who was always a military man of high rank, possessed more power than his counterparts in France, and the military was always more prominent in the colony’s governance. No corporate body represented the colony’s people – or, rather, the people who mattered – as there was in Jamaica or in a French province fortunate enough to be a pays d’état. Initially, the Conseils Supérieurs were supposed to be “a somewhat diminished projection of metropolitan parlements.” But like metropolitan parlements, they consistently claimed a role beyond the judicial and became a hotbed of opposition to state authority. There were two Conseils until the royal government consolidated them in . In the s, one Conseil was located at Cap François, the colony’s chief mercantile center in the North; the other alternated between Petit-Goave and Léogane until when it was permanently established at Port-au-Prince, which became the colony’s administrative center in the West. Long before the Spanish officially ceded control to the French monarch, colonists had been restive. They rebelled in , resisting the establishment of the Compagnie des Indes and the prohibition of trade with the Dutch. Metropolitan control of the colony’s commerce (or its attempts, as smuggling was always robust) would be intensely contentious into the revolutionary period. In , colonists raised another enduring,
Silvia Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: –, ed. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Malick W. Ghachem, “Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between Code Noir and Code Civil,” Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York: Routledge, ), –; Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine, ; Gene Edwin Ogle, “Policing Saint Domingue: Race, Violence, and Honor in an Old Regime colony” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, ), –. Pierre Pluchon, Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Toulouse: Privat, ), ; on prerevolutionary revolts, Charles Frostin, Les révoltes blanches à Saint Domingue (Paris: Éditions de l’École, ); brief and useful overview of government efforts to constrain trade in North American and Caribbean colonies, Silvia Marzagalli, “La remise en cause de l’exclusif colonial par les colons français et anglaise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Les colons contre l’Empire: Les contestations dans l’Amérique franco-anglaise du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècles (Du¨ren: Shaker Verlag, ), –.
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contentious issue: the military character of colonial governance. In the early s, commercial and political irritants converged to spark a second revolt. These included metropolitan fiscal measures compelled by the collapse of John Law’s central bank and the arrival of directors of the Compagnie des Indes, which monopolized the slave trade. The Conseil at Léogane took the lead resisting; eventually the entire colony rebelled. Before the more conciliatory Conseil of the Cap helped restore metropolitan authority, the colony essentially transformed itself into a pays d’état, claiming the authority to negotiate directly with the king on matters of taxation. We will see how intense domestic disagreement over governance and the reimposition of the Exclusif after the Seven Years’ War prompted direct and indirect responses in the Saint-Domingue press. For now, it suffices to note the colony’s unhappiness when the Gazette began publishing in . After the British conquest of Québec in , no French convoys had reached the island. The colony experienced an unprecedented blockade, though illegal trade mitigated the hardships – indeed, one colonist later remarked that without contraband, ten thousand people would have lacked bread. At war’s end, the colony’s White population was deeply divided. The social mobility remarked by Le Pers still existed, but less so as the island’s grand blancs became increasingly entrenched, diminishing opportunities for the petits. Indeed, newcomers’ dreams of rapidly acquiring wealth were melting away in the tropical heat. Tensions between merchants and planters achieved new heights as the royal government sought to reassert its control over trade. As a contemporary noted: “Commerce has succeeded in making itself so hated by the habitants, anyone who did not know better would think it was [an English colony], given the hostility one sees towards French merchants.” Colonists might reasonably have worried that the island’s surging prewar prosperity had ended. Indeed, few would have anticipated its extraordinary recovery in the years before the American Revolution, nor that planters would become more powerful in the three decades after the peace than ever before.
Pluchon, Histoire, –. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, . Wim Klooster, “L’hydre de la contrebande aux Antilles (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles),” Outre-Terre , no. (): . Garrigus, Before Haiti, –. Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: P.U.F., ), :. Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine, , ; David Geggus, “The Major Port Towns of Saint Domingue in the Later Eighteenth Century,” in Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, –, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville:
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Contrasting his indifference to politics, Le Pers would have welcomed Hogu’s words as confirmation of the cultural fluorescence he had predicted and that emerged despite the colony’s limited urban infrastructure. Only in did Cap François reach a population of ,; Port-au-Prince would not match that until the eve of the French Revolution. Yet smaller, but important ports sprinkled along the coast functioned as transportation nodes and also served cultural and social needs. In , for example, Freemasons organized a celebration that included a ball, fireworks, and a “sumptuous meal” in Les Cayes, located well to the west along the southern coast of the southern province. Another significant intellectual development – though few historians besides Pernille Røge have acknowledged it – was the establishment of two Chambres d’Agriculture, one in Cap François, one in Port-au-Prince. In , the government founded them and others in Guadeloupe and Martinique in imitation of metropolitan agricultural societies. They were supposed to counter the frequently uncooperative Conseils and to placate colonial discontents by giving them access to the Minister of the Marine and even a voice in the halls of power. Initially staffed with both planters and merchants, conflict between the groups grew so intense, Choiseul reorganized them with a planter membership alone in . The tone of the Chambres’ mémoires makes clear that they would not become the docile tools of colonial officials. Indeed, in an early mémoire, the Chambre of the Cap asserted that liberty was the “pre-eminent good” and that the people of the colony were “crushed beneath the yoke of arbitrary power.” Yet they were not necessarily antagonistic. After all, the improvement of agriculture potentially benefited everyone, though how to further that goal could spark considerable disagreement. But their mémoires show how seriously and how broadly they interpreted their charge to address “all that is appropriate to contributing to the improvement, progress, and security of the colony.” They also demonstrate how seriously they took that responsibility and how broadly they interpreted it. Many are fully developed treatises that deserve the serious analysis Røge
University of Tennesee Press, ), –; Alan Forrest, The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Garrigus, Before Haiti, . Avis, March ; AA, August . Pluchon, Histoire, –. MdSM Chd’Ag, No. ; Céline Mélisson, “Les chambres d’agriculture coloniales: entre résistances et contestations de l’impérialisme français au XVIIIème siècle,” Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies (): –. Language of the royal edict from article on the Chambres published in the Journal de SaintDomingue.
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Introduction to Part II
has performed on Martinique’s. Saint-Domingue’s reveal the same savvy she finds there; here they enable a richer contextualization of the economic and political issues raised in the Saint-Domingue press. Garrigus asserts that the establishment of a press on Saint-Domingue figured in the creation of a colonial “public sphere” that would promote White solidarity as well as foster colonial patriotism – a legitimate fear given Saint-Domingue’s restiveness during the war. The duc de Choiseul, Minister of the Marine, keenly appreciated the power of the press; after reorganizing France’s chief political newspaper, the Gazette de France, he moved it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he also headed. But the Chambres’ mémoires make clear that colonists very much wanted a domestic press, too. In September , the (still) mixed membership of the Chambre at the Cap wrote of the “urgent” need to establish a press there. In six-pages, it returned to a question it had already raised three times that year: Why was the government denying a colony “so expansive and so wealthy” such a necessary accoutrement of civilization? After finally conceding, why would it permit a press only in Port-au-Prince? A press would enable the colony’s citizens to peruse for themselves the regulations affecting their “status, leisure, and fortune.” It alluded in vague, conventional terms to the transformative capacities of printing: the history of “such a happy discovery” abundantly proved its “utility” in contributing “to the good of humanity as well as the progress of knowledge.” In January , the Chambre of Port-au-Prince urged the Ministry to attend to the colonists’ happiness if France wanted to increase the island’s (White) population and keep wealthy plantation owners from migrating back to the metropole. The colony thus deserved all the amenities of gracious living found in European cities: collèges, concerts, spectacles, public promenades where gentle folk could take in the more salubrious evening air – and enough young White women brought from Europe to marry their sons. While the Chambre did not specifically mention a press (after all, the government had already agreed to their town acquiring one), this was a feature of a refined metropolitan life, thus consistent with the cultural aspirations Hogu articulated.
Røge, Economistes, . Garrigus, Before Haiti, , ; Burnard and Garrigus, Plantation Machine, –. Louis Trénard, “La presse provinciale,” in Histoire générale de la presse française, ed. Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou (Paris: P.U.F., ), :–. MdSM Chd’Ag, Séance at the Cap, September . MdSM Chd’Ag, Séance at Port-au-Prince, August ; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire: State, Church, and Society, – (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ).
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Making the Affiches, Making Americans
From mid-century to the eve of the French Revolution, provincial periodicals like the Gazette de S. Domingue were established throughout France. The Gazette joined seven such publications founded in the metropole between and . Scholars used to consider the genre of Affiches too hemmed in by censorship and too risk-averse politically to qualify as “enlightened.” But their intellectual engagement becomes apparent as the Enlightenment is less defined by attitudes toward political or religious institutions and less identified with leading philosophes, and as scholars complete detailed content analysis of these sometimes frustrating, but always engaging periodicals. Their Enlightenment was resolutely practical: seeking out the useful, spurning the abstract, rejecting philosophical excrescences such as “materialism, irreligion, or skepticism,” and presenting exemplars of virtue for public emulation. In Jean Sgard’s estimation, they were not Enlightenment-lite; rather, they gave it local energy: “Whether it was a matter of public utility, patriotism, or social ethics, the Affiches thereby adapted to their use notions obviously picked up from the Lumières. They transformed them into social practices; somewhat
Gilles Feyel, L’annonce et la nouvelle: La presse d’information en France sous l’Ancien Régime (–) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), –, and detailed history and analysis of metropolitan affiches, Part IV, – (note: Feyel did not include colonial publications in his accounting); a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative study of metropolitan affiches from to the French Revolution, Elizabeth Andrews Bond, The Writing Public: Participatory Knowledge Production in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Allan Tulchin, “Weekly Enlightenment: The Affiches de Bordeaux, –,” French Historical Studies , no. (): –; Jack Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, ), esp. chap. ; Stephen Auerbach, “‘Encourager le commerce et répandre les Lumières’: The Press, the Provinces, and the Origins of the French Revolution, –” (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, ); Eamon, “A Colonial Press Ascendancy,” –; chapter on the Affiches Américaines in the s, Yvonne Eileen Fabella, “Inventing the Creole Citizen: Race, Sexuality and the Colonial Order in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue” (PhD dissertation, Stony Brook University, ). Jean Sgard, “La presse provinciale et les Lumières,” in La presse provinciale au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Sgard (Grenoble: Centre de recherches sur les sensibilités, Université des langues et lettres de Grenoble, ), .
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abstract values mutated into rules of life and became charged with experience.” When they actively solicited readers’ opinions, they figured in Jeremy Caradonna’s “participatory Enlightenment”; resembling academic competitions, they became a “collective problem-solving operation” to further “the practical interests of the broader society.” Saint-Domingue’s Gazette was a pioneer in the genre and survivor of a period of struggle and failure of similar metropolitan publications. It also outlived by decades its sibling publications, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine, flourishing well into the revolutionary period (Figure .). It helped, of course, that it had no competitors. Yet clearly Jean Monceaux, the editor who guided the Gazette, the Avis divers et petites affiches américaines, and the Affiches Américaines until his death in August , established it on secure foundations. We know little about him besides his service as avocat of the Parlement of Paris and procureur to the Conseil Supérieur of the Cap in Saint-Domingue. It is difficult to know how many editors came from the legal community; when they did, they were often men of letters who participated in their cities’ cultural life. Some evidence suggests Monceaux had literary ambitions (see below and Conclusion to Part II). But we learn about him and his editorial objectives most by noting those rare moments when he explicitly articulated them and by scrutinizing his editorial choices. Every affiches had its “own physiognomy,” which took shape in the “Prospectus” in ambitious and idealistic, if not downright utopian terms. Such was the Gazette’s, published in the first issue of January . The objectives stated there became cliché as more affiches joined those of the first wave. But they were relatively fresh when Monceaux enumerated
Ibid., –, quote at . Caradonna, The Enlightenment in Practice, –; key to Bond’s interpretation, too, as her subtitle makes clear. Bond, Writing Public, ; Feyel, L’annonce, . Admittedly incomplete information suggests few. Auerbach, “‘Encourager le commerce’,” , ; suggesting rather more recruits from the legal community, Feyel, L’annonce, , portraits thereof, –, from business / printing community, –. A model for documenting a silent editor, A. Franklin Parks, William Parks: The Colonial Printer in the Translatlantic World of the Eighteenth Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ). Feyel, L’annonce, –, quote at . Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Microfilm M-, “Prospectus.” On metropolitan periodicals stating objectives, Louis Trénard, “La presse périodique en Flandre au XVIIIe siècle,” Dix-huitième siècle , no. (): – at ; Henri Michel, “Un journal de province à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: Le Journal de la généralité de Montpellier (–),” Annales du Midi , no. (): – at ; Réné Favier, “Les ‘Affiches’ et la diffusion de l’innovation en Dauphiné à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (–),” Annales du Midi , no. (): – at –.
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Making the Affiches, Making Americans
them and consistent with the values of metropolitan editors thereafter. First, it acknowledged the unfortunate impact of geography on the colony’s internal communication. Lack thereof was “one of the principal obstacles” to its progress, which required the “perfection” of its agriculture and the increase of its population and commerce. The Gazette would relieve planters’ isolation by informing them about events in the wider world; make their efforts more fruitful by reporting agricultural improvements; relieve their solitude by appealing to their curiosity; inform them of the colony’s laws; and amuse them with short works of poetry and prose. Monceaux cited approvingly the paper’s official support; he praised the postal system that would distribute the Gazette throughout the colony (Map .). Its pages would contain news relevant to commerce, agriculture, navigation, finances, and matters of political, economic, and civic interest. They would inform readers about everything from notices of property sales, commodity prices, mémoires of the Chambres d’Agriculture, material drawn from other periodicals, reports from other colonies, and even verse by colonists serving the Muses. He pledged to spare neither effort nor expense to bring together “everything of the greatest interest to the planters, the merchants, and other groups of citizens.” Finally, Monceaux invited those who cultivated letters, investigated natural history, or studied local agriculture – in short, all those who “think, observe, reflect and make a habit of jotting down their ideas, their perspectives, their reflections” – to “open their portfolios” and enter into an agreeable correspondence with the periodical’s readers, anonymously if they preferred. Just a few months later, the Gazette was suspended. Decades later Moreau de Saint Méry explained that the Ministry of the Marine feared it would encourage rebellion. The royal governor, the comte d’Estaing, “happily did not share these fears” and revived the publication under a new name, the Petites Affiches, thus “reconcil[ing] obedience with utility.” But the differences between the contents of the Gazette and its successors, the Avis Divers and the Affiches Américaines, are indiscernible, and all three pursued the agenda of the Gazette’s Prospectus. The Gazette was a crazy quilt visually and editorially; the Avis Divers stabilized the periodical’s content and design. Still quarto-sized, it followed Parisian publications by moving to two columns of text. The editorial
MdSM, Description, :. Gilles Feyel, “La presse provinciale sous l’Ancien Régime,” in La presse provinciale au XVIIIe siècle, ; Bond, Writing Public, .
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Map . Subscription locations for Affiches Américaines and Journal de Saint-Domingue, largely identical except for # and the Journal’s two additional locations (J and J). Based on Jacques Nicolas Bellin’s map of , Library of Congress Geography Maps Division. List of locations: Fort Dauphin; * Cap François; Port de Paix; St Marc; Arcahaye; * Port au Prince; Les Cayes; Jacmel; Léogane; Petit-Goâve; Fond des Nègres; St Louis; Grande Ance [subscription location of the Journal near Jérémie]; Cap Tiburon; J L’Ance-a Veau & Nippes; J Mirabelais
Making the Affiches, Making Americans
content was generally four pages of news items sandwiched between two pages of shipping news, commodity prices, and notices of runaway slaves, and two pages of “Avis Divers.” The latter announced everything from the sale of plantations and slaves to the services of newly arrived dentists and dancing teachers. Editorial material rarely included content concerning race and slavery, so its central placement literally pushed slavery to the periodical’s edges. Like metropolitan counterparts, its content was eclectic, though that did not make it easier to satisfy readers’ preferences. A letter of September commented wryly that the Gazette’s suppression had silenced readers’ complaints about its contents and greatly enhanced its desirability. Still, it was impossible to satisfy everyone. “One [reader] will demand more news, another more poetry, someone here wants excerpts of new books, someone there, only what amuses . . . It suffices to vary the content as much as possible.” But while the Affiches intended to cater to the tastes of a variety of readers, did a variety of people actually read it? We know neither the number nor the names of the Affiches’s subscribers as we do with the Journal. Price surely prevented many from subscribing as the Affiches was a much more expensive publication than metropolitan counterparts. Yet historians warn against equating subscribers with readers. Feyel quotes a metropolitan editor who estimated that his publication’s readership was quadruple the number of subscribers. People read to each other, sometimes congregating in cafés and reading rooms where they could peruse periodicals, if for a fee. Similarly, in merchants in Port-au-Prince were reading to each other the latest issue of the Affiches, and a new café was advertising the availability of the Affiches and the Journal. Nor should we equate readership with the public the Affiches meant to address. Yvonne Fabella has written that “[i]n the late colonial period, Saint-Domingue’s newspaper was one tool with which white elites attempted to ensure their social and political power.” While the Affiches in the s targeted the same groups, that does not mean that free Black people and gens de couleur, who posted advertisements, did not read it. The mixed-race proprietor of a coffee plantation and slaveholder would be as interested in the commercial news as any White planter; he
Avis (Supplement), September . Fabella, “Inventing the Creole Citizen,” . Paul Benhamou, “La lecture publique des journaux,” Dix-huitième siècle , no. (): –. AA, August . AA, April . Fabella, “Inventing the Creole Citizen,” . Ibid., –.
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might even anonymously contribute his insights about the crop he cultivated. Garrigus’s example of the growing library of Julien Raimond, who participated in revolutionary debates about citizenship for free people of color, comes from a later period, yet documents how gens de couleur participated in print culture and suggests what that participation meant to them. Arguably, as the color line became ever-more firmly drawn, as free Black people and mixed-race people faced more exclusions in colonial life, the Affiches remained relatively more open because its entry requirements were literacy and the cost of a subscription. It resembled the professional theatres founded on the island in the same decade: the price of admission ensured entry, if to segregated, poorer seating. Yet scholars know well that “public” during the eighteenth century never included everyone. Here we can take it to mean individuals competent to engage in the practices of print culture who possessed agency. In short, a reader had to matter. On Saint-Domingue, White men obviously mattered most, and some much more than others. Rhetorically, the deployment of “public” and related phrases such as “public good” gestured toward the useful fiction of a common identity; it also asserted the intellectual authority of publication and contributors alike because speaking on the public’s behalf presupposed the impartiality required to discern truth. Whoever his readers, Monceaux rarely addressed them directly. More often, he expressed faith in their ability to arrive at intelligent conclusions on their own. Yet he guided how they got there through careful selection and organization of items. Much editorial content was not generated locally. Like all editors, Monceaux was a “scissors editor,” plucking material from other periodicals, thus following through on his promise to publish excerpts of “interesting” articles from European and British colonial publications. Initially, this appears more mechanical than intentional. But the sheer quantity of material available and the modest size of the Affiches compelled selectivity. I have been able to identify the source of all but three items in the January issue, for example. Half came from September and October issues of the Gazette de France, his chief
Garrigus, Before Haiti, . Lauren R. Clay, The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. Adapted from Suzanne Dumouchel’s definition, Le journal littéraire en France au dix-huitième siècle (Oxford: Studies in the Enlightenment, ), . Bond, Writing Public, ; Will Slauter, “The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Annales HSS , no. (): –.
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source. The Gazette mostly published official political news, and its content was highly regulated. It avoided controversy, scrupulously reported the movements and ceremonials of the king and his family, and honored the secrecy of the arcana imperii, thus projecting an image of political stability. Indeed, the French reader who relied on it exclusively would have been poorly informed, and the philosophe Melchior Grimm dismissed it as “insipid.” But Monceaux drew from other sources as well. Two items came from the Journal Encyclopédique’s September and October issues. In contrast to the Gazette de France, the Journal was published beyond the reach of the French censors. As its name suggests, its chief priority was widely publicizing the contents of the Encyclopédie, and it generally expressed more daring views than those found in domestic French periodicals. Nevertheless, after , it was permitted to circulate freely in France – a beneficiary of Choiseul’s more lenient policy. Finally, three items came from September issues of the weekly Affiches, annonces, et avis divers, which began as a more commercially oriented supplement to the Gazette but featured literary subjects by the s. Yet Monceaux grouped his materials differently than the Gazette, which organized items by place of origin. Its April issue, for example, contained items dated between March and April from ten European cities. In the earliest issues of the Gazette de S. Domingue and the Petites Affiches, Monceaux vacillated between the Gazette’s dateline approach, presenting news about individual countries under a state’s name, and running European news as continuous text. By early , he was organizing European news by state – Germany, England, France, etc. – and tucking them all under the rubric “European” news. He usually omitted the datelines, perhaps because they drew attention to the fact that the news was literally dated. Consistent with the ambition of knitting together a colony divided by geography, Monceaux included items with island datelines even in the Gazette’s first issue: “From St. Marc, January,” “From the Cap, February.” These datelines suggested immediacy. The paper almost always carried some items, some very lengthy, from the Cap and Port-au-Prince; items from elsewhere often came from places where one could subscribe.
Trénard, Histoire générale, :–, –; Jack Censer, “France, –,” in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere, –. Trénard, Histoire générale, :. Ibid., :. Censer, The French Press, ; Raymond F. Birn, Pierre Rousseau and the ”Philosophes” of Bouillon (Geneva: Droz, ). Philip Stewart, “Affiches de Province (–),” Sgard-Dict.
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Such items transformed the parochial into everyone’s concern; they urged colonists to identify with each other’s joys and sorrows and to emulate the best and most public-spirited among them. Monceaux invited his readers to join the “imagined community” he conjured from the events, trivial and traumatic, of everyday life, enabling them “to think about themselves and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.” In March , the Gazette reported that the Acadians, refugees from the recent conflict, were settling nicely in Môle S. Nicolas. Caterpillars and high winds destroyed cotton crops at St. Marc in December and in Jacmel in March . In the same month, the colonial governor and local notables would be dedicating a new clock in Léogane’s parish church. An earthquake interrupted a performance at the Cap’s theater in January , the crowd’s panic calmed by “some prudent individuals.” In June , the paper published barometric measurements contributed by a reader. In August , four young men had safely returned to their homes in Dondon after a long captivity among Barbary pirates; the next issue satisfied the public’s lively interest with an account of their adventure. When reporting epidemics that affected humans or animals, Monceaux combined the newsworthy with the useful and the laudable, making the Affiches an instrument for the public good. In August , a report on an outbreak of rabies in Les Cayes praised local surgeons for circulating information about treating bites and diagnosing the disease in humans. The following month, an information-crammed item dismissed most remedies as “if not dangerous, at least inefficacious”; nevertheless, it included one from Connecticut, whose colonists were “so convinced of [its] efficacy, the minute it is applied, they feel better.” It also mentioned mortality among the enslaved, praised the measures taken by a local notable to save three of his, and promised to publish a remedy from the Journal Économique in the next issue. An epidemic that ravaged the Portau-Prince region for several months prompted several items: in January , residents implored the paper to mention the loss of a much-admired
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, ), . AA, March . Disease ultimately decimated them. Christopher Hodson, “‘A Bondage So Harsh’: Acadian Labor in the French Caribbean, –,” Early American Studies , no. (): –; Adeline Vasquez-Parra, “Les réfugiées acadiennes dans l’Atlantique français: des voix effacées,” Études canadiennes/Canadian Studies (): –. AA, December and March . AA, March . AA, January . AA, June . AA, August . AA, August . AdC, September . Avis, September .
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public official; in February, sixty deaths quashed hopes that the epidemic was waning, and the city’s medical personnel were performing autopsies to discover the causes of the illness; only in April could the epidemic be considered over. Eventually Monceaux routinely, if inconsistently, combined these domestic items with news from other American colonies, French and English, under the heading “America.” Significantly, he did not slot British and French holdings into different categories, and he published little about Spanish America. Monceaux’s “America” was Anglophone or Francophone. While the space devoted to American news generally occupied fewer column inches than the European section, it sometimes expanded greatly as when covering the Stamp Act Crisis (see below) or “hosting” agronomic debates (Part IV). With American as with other news, one of Monceaux’s chief sources was the Gazette de France, though he also drew from the Gazette du Commerce. In other words, much “news” had first crossed the Atlantic to Europe, then boomeranged back into the Caribbean. Some material did come directly from French Caribbean colonies and occasionally from Louisiana. News followed the sailing route that many French ships took either from Europe or Africa, calling first at the Leewards, and on the ships that traveled between Saint-Domingue and New Orleans. Monceaux established more consistent connections with Martinique as he published dated items from there regularly. News also originated in colonies recently lost to France – New France and the diminutive islands of Dominica and Grenada – and the new British colony of Pensacola in Florida. The subjects of these “American” items varied greatly. Natural disasters figured prominently, as did overall colonial prosperity, including the flourishing or failure of new or old crops. Through the Affiches, readers kept an eye on Caribbean competitors, particularly Jamaica, and learned about promising development efforts elsewhere. An item in October reported successful silk production by Pietist immigrants from Salzburg in Georgia. Items in a December issue broadcast news of a slave rebellion in Surinam, a treaty concluded with some North American Indians, the revolt of others under Pontiac’s leadership, and
AA, January . AA, February . AA, February . AA, April . On metropolitan editors seeking connections with each other, Feyel, “La presse provinciale sous l’Ancien Régime,” . Banks, Chasing Empire, Map . AA, December . Avis, October .
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the difficulties of establishing a flourishing colony in Pensacola. In January , an item told how the governor of the new English colony of Florida was bringing in enslaved divers to harvest oysters that allegedly produced pearls rivaling Brazil’s. A February item reported the findings of an exploratory mission on Lake Superior to determine the existence of navigable connections with open waters and the efforts of the English to mine precious metals in Dominica, which were hampered by slaves fleeing by boat to Trinity Island. Despite his stated intention, little suggests that Monceaux secured news from North American papers, though an intriguing item of April suggests some from the British Caribbean. It is also the only item I have yet encountered in the Affiches under his editorship that even indirectly criticized planters for how they treated their slaves. A correspondent wrote from Grenada, advising that “one must take considerable precautions to treat slaves appropriately . . . for want of attention, we are exposed to an uprising on their part, and we live in continual fear.” Taken together, these items from French and British colonies suggested that colonists everywhere in the Americas faced similar challenges that transcended the divisions between states. For anyone who failed to get the message, Monceaux’s extensive coverage of the Stamp Act Crisis underscored it. To be sure, the Stamp Act Crisis was a major international event worthy of the attention of metropolitan and colonial readers alike, and the news from the north surely offered the consolation of schadenfreude to the humiliated French. But Saint-Domingue’s colonists also felt a deep sense of grievance with the postwar order that their government was seeking to impose. Many colonists were also aware of yet another postwar crisis despite the lack of coverage in French papers and their own Affiches: the Brittany Affair, which began when the provincial Estates refused to levy a new tax in fall and which escalated when the monarchy’s tactics to bring the province to heel alarmed the Parlement of Paris. Indeed, it would not take much for many readers to consider all three crises – resistance in Saint-Domingue, in North America, and in Brittany – as singular and unitary as the ocean lapping at their shores. I have already noted the colony’s long-standing prickliness, which had more than once resulted in full-scale revolt, and the eagerness of the
Avis, December . AA, January . AA, February . AA, April . Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –; Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
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Making the Affiches, Making Americans
Conseils and the Chambres to articulate a vision of colonial rights different from the metropole’s. Even before the war, colonists had complained about the state entrusting their governance to the military. In , Pierre Saintard characterized it as an “extreme abuse . . . which mistreats everyone, which undermines everything; the true cause of depopulation and sterility of all kinds, and the eternal remora of all the best intentions of the leadership.” In February , a mémoire of the Chambre d’Agriculture of Port-au-Prince echoed him: poor governance suppressed population growth – a crucial source of prosperity, according to contemporary political economists – by prompting colonists to flee a land where “tyranny and arbitrary power reign.” Another mémoire reiterated this “very considerable vice” in governance: “[I]f only everyone living in the colony could live as in Europe: under the protection of the laws!” In fact, the duc de Choiseul, Minister of the Marine, ended military dominance in Saint-Domingue and abolished the hated militia in . But the government began reversing itself the very next year – yet kept the subsidy voted by the Conseils to defray the cost of the island’s defense sans militias! Although well intentioned and not corrupt, the new colonial governor, the comte d’Estaing, was not the statesman the situation required. His authoritarianism, refined tastes, and impatience exacerbated an already difficult situation. But more political savvy probably would not have sufficed, given the government’s vacillation and the intractability of the Conseil of Port-au-Prince. In July , for example, Choiseul forbid it from posturing as a metropolitan Parlement in its dealings with the ministry and reminded it to respect the chain of command, not make end-runs around its governor. Not surprising, the Conseil defiantly refused to register Choiseul’s letter when d’Estaing forwarded it to them. A comment by an anonymous correspondent to the Ministry in
Pierre Saintard, Essai sur les colonies françaises (Paris, ), . Petit similarly complained in Le patriotisme américain. ANOM MdSM Chd’AG, Séance of February , Port-au-Prince. On connecting population and prosperity, John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –. ANOM, MdSM Chd’Ag, Séance at Port-au-Prince, August . Reconstituting the militia sparked revolt in –. Garrigus, Before Haiti, chap. four; Pluchon, Histoire générale, :–. Garrigus, Before Haiti, –. Jacques Michel, La vie aventureuse et mouvementée de Charles-Henri, comte d’Estaing (Paris: J. Michel, ), , also chap. ; on Conseils overstepping, Gene Edwin Ogle, “Policing Saint Domingue: Race, Violence, and Honor in an Old Regime Colony” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, ), –; on d’Estaing’s tenure, Frostin, Révoltes, chap. six; Garrigus, Before Haiti, chap. four, esp. –.
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underscores the obstacles he confronted: “It is not an outpost in the East Indies that M. d’Estaing has to govern; it is a province of France, which, by the love of its colonists for their monarch, demands to be treated like those of the kingdom.” It was no small thing to claim the status of province for Saint-Domingue, but it echoed similar demands in and perhaps echoed a different conception of colonial–metropole relations emerging from physiocratic circles. In , Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Maribeau, had asserted, “What is a colony if not a province which, like the other provinces of the same state, should enjoy the same prerogatives in order to prosper, build up its riches, its population, and its [fiscal] contributions.” You did not have to be a physiocrat, though, to denounce d’Estaing as despotic, to decry the trampling of the “rights” and “privileges” of the island’s Conseils, and to defend the patriotism of the Port-au-Prince councilors, as Philippe-François Galbaud du Fort, himself a council member, did in letters to France. Needless to say, the Affiches did not cover the colony’s political uproar. And what Monceaux published about the Brittany Affair appeared long after the fact and, drawn from the Gazette de France, was thin and safe journalistic fare. But colonists’ knowledge of metropolitan politics was not limited to the Affiches. As French historians of the Old Regime and the French Revolution have shown, rumor was always a potent political force, and many rumors no doubt crossed the ocean. Merchants from Nantes, located in the province of Brittany, certainly brought news. Galbaud du Fort had served in its Chamber of Accounts for years before returning to the island in to restore his landholdings’ economic health. Some colonists had access to other sources, including the Gazette de Leyde, which frequently published parlementary remonstrances. No doubt, some identified the
Frostin, Histoire, :. Røge, Economistes, . Gabriel Debien, “Gouverneurs, magistrats et colons: L’opposition parlementaire et coloniale à Saint-Domingue (–),” Revue de la Société d’histoire et de géographie d’Haïti (): , ; Gabriel Debien, Une plantation de Saint-Domingue: La sucrerie Galbaud du Fort (–) (Cairo: Les Presse de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale du Caire, ); Natacha Bonnet, “La production sucrière à Saint-Domingue dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” in La plantation coloniale esclavagiste, XVIIe-XIXe siècles, ed. Daniele Bégot (Paris: CTHS, ), –. AA, January , ; April , ; June , –; June (Supplement). Exceptions to the Affiches’ generally conservative coverage, AA, December ; January ; January . Gazette de Leyde, February , ; August , . Not “approved,” the Gazette de Leyde nevertheless circulated in France. Jeremy Popkin and Carroll Joynes, “The Gazette de Leyde and French Politics Under Louis XVI” and “The Gazette de Leyde: The Opposition Press and French Politics, –” in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –.
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Making the Affiches, Making Americans
same cause of crisis on both sides of the Atlantic as du Fort did in October : the outrage of “an arbitrary and despotic government.” While Monceaux could not engage extensively with the crises disturbing colony and metropole, he could direct his readers’ attention to the Stamp Act Crisis, the price of British victory in the Seven Years’ War. The Stamp Act was one of several measures designed to raise revenue to pay the government’s creditors after an edifying, but expensive victory. Passed in March , it required Anglo-American colonists to pay a tax on nearly every printed piece of paper they used in order to raise money for the British troops protecting them. The North American colonies exploded in protest, denouncing “taxation without representation.” Their resistance – from intimidating government agents and tax collectors to organizing a boycott of British manufactured goods – compelled Parliament to repeal the act a year later. The Affiches’ coverage was much more extensive than that of the Gazette de France – indeed, it was exceptional given the paper’s limited space. Around percent of the items came from the Gazette du Commerce. In short, everything Monceaux reprinted was approved by metropolitan censors. Significantly, he published more than half of it under the “American” rubric. The timeline in Figure . shows the breakdown between these items and “English” news, correlating them with items on the Brittany Affair. Monceaux offered no commentary, though he edited to ensure continuity and clarity. His choices communicated how the crisis spread and how colonists defended their actions. While he published reports of colonial violence, he balanced them with expositions by North Americans of the principles motivating them. He certainly could have run material critical of the North American colonists, but chose not to, and nothing he published did; indeed, some items expressed considerable sympathy, and several deployed a robust rhetoric of the assertion of “rights” in the face of “tyranny.”
Debien, “Gouverneurs,” . Classic treatment, Edmund and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act, ed. Zachary McLeod Hutchins (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, ); impact on North American colonial press, Roger P. Mellen, “The Colonial Virginia Press and the Stamp Act: An Expansion of Civic Discourse,” Journalism History , no. (): –. For example, a highly critical item in the October Gazette du commerce. Taber notes the Affiches’s attention to the Stamp Act Crisis, though without considering it in the larger context of colonial and metropolitan crises. Robert D. Taber, “‘Le Sens Commun’: Atlantic Pathways and Imagination in Saint-Domingue’s Affiches Américaines,” The Latin Americanist , no. (): –.
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Jan 29 1766
Mar 19 1766
Arrests of parlementaires (November 1765)
King revokes Brittany magistrates
Jun 04 1766
Jan 29 1766
Jun 04 1766
Rioting in New England, other disturbances in North America
Discussion in London of Stamp Act Crisis
Jan 08 1766 Stamp Act implementation
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Feb 19 1766 Discussion in London re: crisis
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Apr 30 1766 London publication of materials on colonial grievances
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Jun 11 1766 Louis XV’s Séance of the Scourging
King’s response to deputies of Rouen, Dauphiné
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News items above timeline published under “English” heading
May 28 1766 Metropolitan commentary
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Jun 25 1766 Abolition of Stamp Act
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Missing Issue 26 March Jan 22 1766 Continuing discontent of North American colonists
Feb 19 1766 Letter from Maryland Feb 26 1766
Jan 29 1766 Reports from NY & Boston
Developments in NY & Charlestown
Feb 12 1766 New England disturbances continuing
Apr 09 1766 Continuing resistance to Stamp Act
May 14 1766 Report from NY
News items below timeline published under “American” heading
Apr 16 1766 Assembly in Philadelphia; letter from Boston Apr 30 1766 Three letters from Philadelphia
Figure . Chronology of Brittany Affair and Stamp Act Crisis in the Affiches Américaines, January–June . Created with Timeline Maker Pro v
Making the Affiches, Making Americans
The Affiches began running substantive news on the Stamp Act Crisis in January . Much-edited material from an October issue of the Gazette du Commerce reported the continuing discontent of the North American colonists and the seizing up of Virginia’s commerce. A later issue the same month reported the crown’s arrest of the Breton parlementaires, included news of riots in Boston and Newport, the imminent meeting of the Stamp Act Congress in New York, the successful intimidation of officers charged with implementing the law, and the creation of an “extraordinary” newspaper in Boston devoted to covering the crisis under the motto, “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Many items described events; others delved into the impact of and reactions to the conflict. There was no news in March, but vigorous coverage recommenced on April with three columns’ worth. This included the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress, which read like a primer on political rights and their appropriate representation. Its ten points included the colonists’ unambiguous claim to “all the privileges of other subjects” of the English king and an assertion that the constitution of the colony had been founded on “the rights of humanity and the noble principles of English liberty.” Another asserted the “inherent and incontestable right” of every British subject not to be subject to any tax without his consent or that of his legitimate representatives. Imposition by any other authority was not only illegitimate, but “destructive of the essential rights of the people” and “of public happiness.” In the April issue, an account of the American boycott of British goods praised its transformation of American morals from idleness and prodigality into industry and frugality. Another invited the reader to consider how an Act of Parliament had “transformed two million good, faithful, and affectionate subjects into determined rebels.” At the end of May, a lengthy metropolitan commentary urged the government to take judicious measures to restore peace and expressed affection for the colonists as zealous and faithful subjects despite recent incidents. By early June, the Affiches reported that Parliament was considering the repeal of the Stamp Act and that “enlightened people” were questioning the wisdom of colonial taxes. An English opponent of taxation recounted Robert Walpole’s suggestion that even irregular trade eventually translated into increased revenues to the king’s treasury – a comment of particular
AA, January . AA, April .
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AA, January . AA, May .
AA, April . AA, June .
Creating Enlightened Citizens
significance in a French colony where contraband trade abounded. The Affiches announced the repeal of the Stamp Act two weeks after it published Louis XV’s unambiguous statement of the principles of French absolutism in the “scourging” of the Parlement of Paris. In July, d’Estaing left Saint-Domingue, exhausted and disgusted. The story of how North American agitation compelled the British government to back down no doubt resonated powerfully in SaintDomingue. In its robust political rhetoric, Saint-Domingue’s colonists could recognize their own claims to governance as French subjects and citizens. Yet as disruptive and rebellious as they were, the North American colonists still resorted to traditional and familiar dispositions of power and privilege, however subject to interpretation, just as colonists in SaintDomingue did when clamoring to become a province. The impact of Monceaux’s coverage on them probably resembled that of British colonial conflicts on metropolitan Frenchmen: the articulation of the right to resistance by British colonists contributed to a reconceptualization of the relationship between French subjects and their monarch. Publishing the most substantive of the Stamp Act Crisis stories under “American news” suggested that English and French colonials had much in common in their subjection to metropolitan power. Inasmuch as monarchical authority trampled the rights and privileges of Brittany, the Bretons were as much colonists as the peoples of North America and Saint-Domingue. They were all Americans now.
AA, June . Micah Alpaugh, “The Right of Resistance to Oppression: Protest and Authority in the French Revolutionary World,” French Historical Studies , no. (): –. Formulation adapted from Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment and Steve Miller’s commentary on Pierre Serna, “Every Revolution Is a War of Independence,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, ed. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ).
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American Exceptionalism, Political Economy, and the Postwar Order in the Journal de Saint-Domingue
While the Affiches was covering the Stamp Act Crisis, a new periodical appeared that would also advocate for significant change in the relationship between metropole and colony. On November , the Affiches introduced its readers to the Journal de Saint-Domingue as a colonial enterprise modeled on metropolitan magazine-like periodicals. As the king had created agricultural societies in France, so he created them in the colonies. As periodicals had been founded to communicate important information on agriculture, commerce, and finance, so the Petites Affiches Américaines had been established “with the same views towards utility beneath the gaze of Superiors who protect them.” As in the metropolis, the pages of the Affiches could not contain all such “useful” information. Thus, Saint-Domingue, like France, now had its own monthly where readers would find instruction in a “multitude of important subjects.” Direct and indirect evidence shows the royal governor’s and the intendant’s full support of the endeavor. Responding to d’Estaing’s request for comment on the project, Magon de La Villebague, the intendant, judged the prospectus “very good,” and he hoped that its proposers would be able to follow through. He singled out the reprinting of metropolitan works as “useful and agreeable” because not everyone in the colony had the means to obtain them. D’Estaing’s support was indirectly expressed on the Journal’s front page: the epigram, published without attribution, is from his poem, “Le Plaisir, Rêve.” A multi-part allegorical poem published anonymously in , these lines fulsomely praised Louis XV, evoking his Caribbean possessions as the legendary “Fortunate Isles”: a vast and
AA, November . ANOM, DFC , No. , November . Critique and excerpts of d’Estaing’s poem, Mercure de France, April , –. He also authored a tragedy, Les Thermopyles, performed early in the French Revolution. Pierre Force, “Race et citoyenneté dans la carrière et les écrits de Charles Henri d’Estaing (–),” L’Esprit Créateur , no. (): –.
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Table . Breakdown of subscribers by profession () to the Journal de Saint-Domingue* Planters
Merchants{
Officials†
Otherº
* Four subscribers did not identify their profession; some identified as both official and habitant. { Total for category probably slightly higher as some identified themselves in the plural as a firm. † Includes everything from the governor and intendant to the local syndic, military men and militia members, as well as subscribers who only identified as members of a Chambre d’Agriculture. º Includes one religious, a few notaries, two estate managers, two ship’s captains, etc.
well-settled country blessed with the gifts of a “sagacious nature,” including a charming climate and fertile, yielding land. A monthly, the Journal was even more expensive than the Affiches. We know much more about its readership from a subscriber list it published in March (Table .). Subscribers were concentrated in the northern, richest part of the island, underscoring its appeal to a prosperous White, colonial elite (Map .). As with Monceaux, we know little about the editor, Henri DucheminDespaletz, except that he served as a lieutenant stationed on the island. Nicolas Louis Bourgeois (–), who signed the Journal’s approbation, probably shared editorial duties. A member of the Académie des BellesLettres of his native La Rochelle, he had lived on Saint-Domingue from . As “doyen” of the avocats of the Cap’s Conseil and secretary of the Cap’s Chambre d’Agriculture, it is no surprise that the Journal published much on agricultural subjects (Part IV). The Journal is an example of publications Jack Censer categorized as literary-philosophical, which includes metropolitan publications such as Journal des dames, Mercure de France, and Ephémérides du citoyen. Content and approaches varied greatly among them, but all “examin[ed] part of the great seamless web of knowledge for the general elite.” A small format, monthly publication of roughly sixty pages, the Journal comprised two
MdSM, Description, :. “Bourgeois (N.),” Examen critique et complément des dictionnaires historiques les plus répandus (Paris, ), :–. Censer, The French Press, .
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Map .
Distribution of subscribers to the Journal de Saint-Domingue. Based on Jacques Nicolas Bellin’s map of , Library of Congress Geography Maps Division
Creating Enlightened Citizens
Table . Content analysis of nonfiction section, Journal de Saint-Domingue Agriculture
Commerce
Natural History
Book Reviews/Excerpts
Philosophy
sections, nonfiction and literary. Because the Affiches listed the Journal’s contents each month, we know the subjects of its nonfiction articles even for issues that have not survived (Table .). From the first, the Journal aspired to be an “American” publication; it even claimed to represent “America” to Europe. While acknowledging metropolitan precedent, its editors trumpeted the Journal’s novelty and stated their intention to generate original material, not just to reprint metropolitan articles. They asserted that anything relevant to America fell within their journalistic jurisdiction. Living in a New World still poorly understood by Europe, they would correct erroneous information relayed by reputable metropolitan publications. The help of “enlightened observers” ensured that nothing escaped their attention and that all “facts” would be assessed. Correspondents from other American colonies, foreign as well as French, would provide interesting observations and important points of comparison. The editors kept their promise the next month by proposing a replacement for the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique’s entry on Saint-Domingue. Predictably boosterish, its characterization of the colony reveals much about the Journal’s ambitions and agenda. After some straightforward factual information, the anonymous author praised the French side of the island and sharply criticized the Spanish, beginning with the conquistadors’ destruction of indigenes. Yet the natives had been extremely slothful in contrast to the “industrious” French, who produced commodities so useful to the metropole, it “ought to protect [the colony] as the best and most extensive of all it possesses in the New World.” The author touted the number of its sugar refineries, its expanding agricultural repertoire, its native wood ideal for construction, its mineral wealth, the plentiful wildlife of sea and waterways, birds of brilliant plumage, herds
JdSD, November , –. Journal Encyclopédique published the JdSD’s description in February . Conventional notion perhaps most powerfully articulated in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarians, Savages, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
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grazing in the savannahs, and abundant and healthful waters. True, some blamed the climate for the illnesses of new arrivals, but the true causes were “the excess and the intemperance to which [they] abandon themselves because they find it so easy to yield to them.” Truly the Spanish side with its “old and celebrated” capital and a few impoverished small towns could not compare with the stunning opulence of French Saint-Domingue. Patriotism and the improving Enlightenment spirit converged seamlessly for the Journal’s editors, who were firmly committed to the pursuit of useful knowledge. In a lengthy article detailing the zealous patriotism of the Chambres d’Agriculture, Bourgeois asserted that even nature was different in Saint-Domingue, thus required different means of study and adaptation. This was information of critical interest for a “judicious and far-sighted minister” because cultivating profitable East Indies crops in Saint-Domingue would reduce the expense of maintaining a global naval presence. Bourgeois noted that the Chambres were charged with practical matters, not ferreting out general principles like metropolitan men of genius such as Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau. Instead, SaintDomingue’s exceptional diversity in terroir, climate, and water supply demanded rules suited to a particular region, which an intelligent cultivator would prudently apply. While resolutely devoting themselves to the practical, the editors worried about the consequences of other tendencies in Enlightenment thought, which they characterized broadly as “philosophie.” These anxieties found expression on the other side of the Atlantic, too, in Parisian and provincial periodicals and the competitions of learned societies. Monceaux had expressed reservations about philosophie, too, by publishing a lengthy poem that deplored the abandonment of the Christian God for deism in an early issue of the Gazette. The Journal sought to counter this unfortunate intellectual trend with a “Letter on the New Philosophy” in the first issue. Acknowledging the anomalousness of their editorial choice, they still felt compelled to publish an essay that “combatted the most dangerous sophistries of the new philosophy on self-interest,” a
JdSD, December , –. JdSD, November , –. Trénard, Histoire générale, :; Sgard, “La presse provinciale et les Lumières,” ; Trénard, “La presse périodique,” ; Caradonna, Appendix f, The Enlightenment in Practice, at www.jeremycaradonna.com/appendix-f, accessed December . Gaz, March , “Ode à l’occasion du tremblement de terre qui s’est fait sentir au Cap le mars , à onze heures du soir” by Antoine Etienne Ruotte, a martiniquais in public service on Saint-Domingue and member later of the Cercle des Philadelphes. JdSD, November , –.
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“philosophical spirit” effecting “such strange revolutions” in morals and learning. Alas, the anonymous author never specified the work that sparked his outrage, though perhaps it was by Bernard Mandeville, whose provocations French literary journals condemned even before it had been translated. Claiming it was “too well known and too widely available,” he asserted that it exemplified the evils of the “new philosophy” and threatened all civic and moral virtues and social bonds because it argued that “vices are more advantageous to men living in society than the virtues.” A review of the collected literary works of a former colonist, Oeuvres diverses de M.P.*** de F. de S-D, expressed similar concerns. The reviewer was highly dubious about the influence of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse, and he warned the author against adopting “the style in fashion and the paradoxes” of his favorite author. Yet he ultimately judged the work good, because it dispensed sound moral lessons, thus distinguishing his work from other “philosophical productions” that tore “the veil that conceals religion” and disrespected “the most sacred bonds of society.” The reviewer’s emphasis on the moral benefits of the work over its literary qualities was consistent with the practice of metropolitan critics who believed they advanced society by contributing to the improvement of morals. He also struck a patriotic note: “We seize with pleasure such opportunities to render creoles the justice due them: nearly all are born with talents, with intelligence, even with genius, and are capable of succeeding in the most abstract sciences when the happy dispositions with which they are favored are cultivated with care.” Indeed, his assessment, combined with the content and tone of other articles published in the Journal, portrayed colonists as industrious and hardworking, inventive and innovative, creative and moral – a positive view of creole sensibility and capacity that sharply opposed the conventional representations of Caribbean society as brutally libertine and intellectually philistine. Yet this discourse of difference – an American identity and SaintDomingue exceptionalism – did not make the colonists any less French. So claimed a mémoire, “Historical Summary of the European Colonies Compared to Each Other,” from a metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, published in February . It expanded the theme of French superiority and industry beyond the Spanish to every other colonial group in the
Elena Muceni, “Mandeville and France: The Reception of the Fable of the Bees in France and Its Influence on the French Enlightenment,” French Studies , no. (): –. Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, . JdSD, December , –. JdSD, February , –.
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Americas. While readers would be tempted to dismiss his account as patriotic exaggeration, “it becomes the French, in speaking of their Country, to be truthful even in what appears implausible.” He noted how the English were failing in Jamaica, transforming the island into a mere entrepôt for contraband instead of a colony of enviable productivity. Therein lay the difference between French and English “genius”: French laws and customs permitted the colonist “the liberty of inventing, of innovating, of perfecting his works,” while English laws restricted and hindered him. English “liberty” was imaginary, consisting in nothing but opinion. The French were truly free under a monarchy “whose sweet and moderate government” was founded on reason and long experience. In contrast, English liberty led to abuses, like “the troubles” agitating New England. He also urged metropolitan readers to consider colonists and themselves as equally French, equally worthy of the monarch’s paternal care. Although separated by many miles, they were joined into a single polity “from which emanates happiness and public safety when supported with honor and virtue!” No doubt Saint-Domingue’s readers were pleased that the mémoire’s author proudly regarded colonists as fellow Frenchmen instead of a bunch of degenerates. But as my discussion of the Stamp Act Crisis in Chapter suggests, they would naturally perceive those North American “troubles” very differently. The Journal also expressed strong colonial dissatisfaction with the postwar order in a series of articles that began soon after the Affiches began publishing on the Stamp Act Crisis. Like the Affiches, it avoided the controversies in the colony about military governance and the militia; instead, it deployed political economy to engage with perceived metropolitan abuses. Political economy was “the fashionable science,” according to the Mercure de France in . It is also a vigorous field of Enlightenment scholarship that has vastly enriched our understanding of this “ur” discipline of economics and the social contexts in which economic change was debated, often in terms very different from our own. John Robertson demonstrates the portability and adaptability of political economy in two very different kingdoms, Scotland and Naples. Sophus Reinert shows
Quoted in Arnault Skornicki, “L’état, l’expert et le négociant: Le reseau de la ‘science du commerce’ sous Louis XV,” Genêses , no. (): . Helpful background information, Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, – (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), esp. chaps. ten and sixteen. John Robertson, The Case for Enlightenment.
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how translation transformed a Bristol merchant’s treatise into a way for continentals to think through their own economic challenges, prompting them to adopt “emulation” as an animating principle. John Shovlin explores how French “middling elites” put their faith in patriotism and emulation to mitigate the socially corrosive effects of commerce and to transform luxury into a positive good. Paul Cheney explicates the complicated legacy of Montesquieu’s ideas for commerce and monarchy, and he documents the jostling of competing interests of colonists, government officials, and merchants. Pernille Røge recounts how physiocrats challenged official orthodoxies that defined the status of the colonies and restricted their commerce, creating a stock of ideas from which colonials drew in disputes with the metropole that, in the long term, shaped the policies of revolutionary governments vis-à-vis the colonies. Overall, Saint-Domingue’s periodicals published more on agriculture than on commerce during the s. Yet they published more than enough to demonstrate that colonists, like Shovlin’s middling elites, appropriated the right to think for themselves about the economic realities shaping their lives. Some no doubt made space on their bookshelves for influential titles on sale at the Imprimerie Royale: the indispensable Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (); the marquis de Mirabeau’s L’ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population (), which challenged many of the economic orthodoxies of royal policy based in Montesquieu’s ideas; the abbé Coyers’ La noblesse commerçante (), which argued the greater utility of mercantile endeavors over the nobility’s; and Reinert’s subject, the French translation of Cary’s Essay on the State of England. Some no doubt acquired others through connections in France or obliging ship captains. In Saint-Domingue as in France, readers sought information in periodicals, some specializing in economic issues. Indeed, in , demand for the Gazette du commerce, de l’agriculture, et des finances
Reinert, Translating Empire, ; “Discours sur l’émulation,” Mercure de France (November ), –; Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Emulation,” ARTFL. Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue; Paul Schuurman, “Fénélon on Luxury, War and Trade in the Telemachus,” History of European Ideas , no. (): –. Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce. Røge, Economistes, . Jay Smith, “Social Categories, the Language of Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution: The Debate over Noblesse commerçante,” Journal of Modern History , no. (): –. AA, September (Supplement), December , November . Jane McLeod, “The Bordeaux Book Trade to the West Indies at the End of the Ancien Régime,” in Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies, ed. Lawrence J. McCrank (New York and London: Haworth Press, ), –. The West Indies book trade – commercial and informal, British and French – remains understudied (Chapter ).
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(formerly Gazette du Commerce) was strong enough that the publisher was considering a discounted price for Saint-Domingue subscribers and the creation of a special supplement for the island. Like Shovlin’s subjects, Saint-Domingue’s colonists and journalists as eagerly combined their understandings of political economy with discourses of citizenship and patriotism. According to David Bell, a rich print culture created an on-going discussion and redefinition of “citoyen,” “nation,” and “patrie,” giving “French elites new ways of understanding the world around them” and “help[ing] them imagine new roles for themselves in it: as active agents, rather than passive subjects of divine or monarchical will.” Metropolitan affiches, according to Stephen Auerbach, always referred to their readers as “citizens,” “enlightened citizens,” and “true patriots,” not as subjects. Let us remember Monceaux addressing his readers as “citizens” in the Prospectus. Quotations from Saint-Domingue’s periodicals here and in Part IV show how French Caribbean colonists similarly deployed the terms “citizen” and “patriot,” connecting them to the same constellation of virtues. On either side of the Atlantic, these citizens were not conceptualized as atomized individuals obsessed with their own concerns. Ideally, commitment to a common good united and animated them. Nor was the state supposed to step aside to permit the free play of individual wills; rather, according to Shovlin, it or “the political community, was always viewed as the ordering matrix of the economic world.” Certainly, the identities of citizen and of subject sometimes coexisted uneasily in the colony as in the metropole. Saint-Domingue’s colonists were comfortably “subjects,” for example, when mourning the Dauphin in March . That same year, however, the “citizens” of Port-au-Prince welcomed the comte d’Estaing’s replacement, who saluted them as obedient and faithful “subjects.” Everyone claiming to be a citizen devoted to the patrie did not automatically produce harmony, of course. In fact, relations between planters
AA (Supplement), May . David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, – (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), , ; Jeffrey Merrick, “Conscience and Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –; Jeffrey Merrick, “Subjects and Citizens in the Remonstrances of the Parlement of Paris in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): –; Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, –: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ); Smith, “Social Categories.” Auerbach, “‘Encourager le commerce’,” , . Well expressed by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Lambert, “Législateur,” ARTFL. Shovlin, Political Economy of Virtue, . AA, and March . AA, and August .
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and merchants on Saint-Domingue were toxic. “If the merchants saw the colonial planters as a vile and deceiving race of profiteers, unscrupulously defaulting on payments and falsifying both the quality and quantity of their produce for personal gain,” Carolyn Fick writes, “the planters hated the merchants for the unfair (as they saw it) privileges bestowed upon them by French mercantile policy.” In , enmity between the two groups was so great, the original membership of the Chambres – merchants and planters – split, with each group submitting separate, conflicting mémoires to the Ministry. Then and long after, the chief sticking point was whether the wartime expedient of foreign ships calling on the island should continue or whether the Exclusif should be rigorously reimposed. Yet the government faced an impossible task. Where was “an enduring solution” to the conflict between merchants and colonists, Jean Tarrade asks, one that simultaneously “relaxed” the Exclusif for the colonists while maintaining it in principle and that supported mercantile interests in the hope of ending the “morally noxious and financially disastrous” contraband trade. Despite their mutual antipathy, neither planters nor merchants challenged the orthodoxies of colonial political economy. Montesquieu explicated them in the twenty-first book of L’esprit des lois, which the political economist François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais restated in the Encyclopédie’s article, “Commerce”: A colony existed for the benefit of the metropole, which protected it and rightly exercised a monopoly over its trade, and the metropole was obligated to provide necessary “encouragements” to establish the colony on a sound basis. When it traded with foreign powers, the colony literally stole from the state, eroding its real and relative power vis-à-vis other European states. Trade between colonies was permitted if the goods exchanged did not compete with metropolitan products. While metropolitan liberty trumped the colonial, the metropole’s impositions could not discourage colonial merchants and
Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, ), . Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France, :; also see :chaps. seven and eight; Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, –; an overview of the Atlantic trade and French merchants, Forrest, Death of the French Atlantic, –; Laure Pineau-Defois, “Un modèle d’expansion économique à Nantes de à : Louis Drouin, négociant et armateur,” Histoire, économie, et société , no. (): –. Useful survey of eighteenth-century thought on metropolitan–colonial economic relations, Alain Clément, “‘Du bon et du mauvais usage des colonies’: Politique coloniale et pensée économique française au XVIII siècle,” Cahiers d’économie politique , no. (): –.
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residents – worse yet, prompt them to abandon the colony. Yet, however much everyone accepted the rules of the game, everyone differed about how to advance the ball down the field. The Journal argued the colonial case in articles published in February and every issue thereafter. The first, “A Glance at Commerce Relative to Saint-Domingue” by an anonymous lawyer, was undeniably pro-planter – unsurprising given the Journal’s close association with the Chambres and the concentration of subscribers in the north. While the author acknowledged the “intimate reciprocity between agriculture and commerce” and that “commerce was the soul of the state,” he nevertheless warned that commerce was not truly “useful” unless it served the greater good of the nation’s agriculture. The merchant should not seek to restrict the cultivator’s “industry” and enrich himself at his expense. He underscored his intellectual seriousness with a conventional history of agriculture, which “existed long before there were merchants and ship-owners,” and the obligatory nods toward Rome – even if everything had changed with the discovery of America – and referenced Montesquieu. His discussion twisted and turned through royal colonial policy, eventually broaching without elaboration two contentious points: restrictions on sugar processing on the island, and opening the colony’s ports to foreign trade by suspending the Exclusif. Without denying that the Exclusif was a law “rightly adopted by all peoples,” he averred that circumstances always demanded exceptions. His conclusion unequivocally warned the merchant to exercise his métier patriotically by accommodating his interest to the general good. “Such are the desires of all good patriots.” An important editorial note followed this belligerent extension of the olive branch. It announced that the Journal would publish extracts from the mémoires of metropolitan Chambers of Commerce so readers could arrive at their own conclusions. Its duty was to publish “the pro and the con” without judgment – a promise honored more in the breach, frankly. It also invited readers to share their opinions, trusting that the “Citizens” who did would “take the greatest care not to show an offensive partiality” and express their opinions prudently within the limits of conjecture established by governmental policy. The lawyer’s “Glance” perhaps inspired a March article on establishing sugar refineries in Saint-Domingue. The editors declared its views “so wise
François Véron de Forbonnais, “Colony,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, tr. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/. JdSD, February , –.
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and so well argued,” they claimed to have made no changes. The author was from Trou, a town in the wealthier north; he praised the lawyer’s conciliatory spirit (!) and improbably expressed confidence that implementing his ideas would foster friendship between planter and merchant and promote both their interests. Then he launched into a critique of merchant practices, such as the withholding of credit. More than damaging, this threatened the planters’ survival after all they had already endured: wars, fires, epidemics, and disastrous weather. (Merchants would object, of course, that the planters abused their credit and sought permission to trade with foreigners to secure better terms.) But the author’s chief concern was pushing back against any extension of current restrictions on sugar refining to clayed sugar (sucre terré). It was more profitable for the planter because its quality was much higher than partially refined muscovado sugar (sucre brut) – indeed, it sometimes rivaled sugar refined in the metropole. Such a move, the author asserted, would only enrich a few metropolitan refiners. The contribution of the April issue to the debate is unknown because the Affiches did not publicize the Journal’s contents as it usually did. But the Journal probably followed through on its promise to publish mémoires of metropolitan Chambers of Commerce with one from Saint-Malo, because both the Affiches and the Journal ran responses to it. The “Remarks of a Former Colonist” in the Affiches at the end of April bluntly responded to complaints from the Saint-Malo Chamber that French manufacturing was languishing because foreign traders were still supplying the colonies. Confining himself to cloth, the author asserted that its consumption was “prodigious” in a colony of nearly a quarter of a million souls where no one bothered with mending and where even the “lowliest slave” purchased the most expensive goods when he had the means. French manufactures lacked buyers not because the colony lacked customers, but because traders brought foreign goods to their shores. French manufacturers should produce what the islanders wanted, and merchants should conduct business with “as much zeal for the true interest of the metropole” as the mémoires of their Chambers claimed. “[B]ut the love of gain often extinguishes among them all those patriotic reflections.” No longer extant, the Journal’s response was surely as critical.
JdSD, March , –. A long-standing complaint, Saintard, Essai, –. Robert Louis Stein, The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), –. AA (Supplement), April .
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In July , the Journal dived headlong into the Exclusif. The issue has not survived, but it contained the “Mémoire on the extent and the limits of the prohibitive laws of foreign commerce in the colonies” published previously in the Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce, et des finances in December . This was a revised version of a report by Jean Dubuc, a martiniquais whom Choiseul had appointed to head the Bureau des Colonies and who wrote under the Minister’s direction. Urging suspension of some provisions of the Exclusif, it was read to the Royal Council of Commerce and the King in April . In response, metropolitan Chambers of Commerce deluged the Ministry with disapproving mémoires. In September, the government rejected the proposed reforms, though Dubuc’s program would eventually become the basis of the “Exclusif mitigé.” In the meantime, by publishing the mémoire, the Journal de l’agriculture, du commerce, et des finances, which advocated physiocratic views, registered its disapproval of the government’s decision and kept the controversy alive in the metropole. The editors of the Journal de Saint-Domingue did the same when they reprinted the article. Dubuc’s report no doubt pleased many planters. He readily professed faith in the articles of official policy: that colonies existed for the good of the metropole, that trade with anyone else verged on the monstrous. Yet he averred that prohibitions were worse than useless if they impoverished the colonies and that restrictions on commerce sometimes had to be relaxed when circumstances required. The war’s end was just such a moment. It might be different if France, like England, had more commerce than colonies. But France had too many colonies and not enough commerce. In short, merchants had to fulfill their side of the bargain: satisfying colonial needs and ensuring that they could absorb metropolitan production. In the end, weak colonies weakened the state by burdening it with the cost of colonial protection and maintenance. Sooner or later, colonial difficulties spurred unemployment in the metropole and diminished merchant profits. “Men live together; those who consider only their personal interests . . . are poor artisans of their own well-being; [they must acknowledge the necessity] of living for others if one desires to live for oneself.” Then he spelled out the specifics: colonials should be permitted to trade their taffias (rum) and syrops, by-products of sugar processing
On the Dubuc family and Jean’s career, Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France, :–; for nuances and corrections regarding Dubuc’s authorship and his opinions, which inclined to physiocratic views versus the prevailing “mercantile system,” Røge, Economistes, –; Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, –; Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce, –.
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France did not want, with foreign traders and to purchase provisions and (most important) slaves from them. Such legitimate exceptions did not abolish the laws, “but only constrained them within the boundaries of their true utility.” Yes, the foreign trader would profit, but the planter, well-supplied with everything necessary to increase production, would make good that loss by contributing to the national economy. In September , Monceaux published two articles addressing merchants’ complaints that foreign ships were continuing to trade in SaintDomingue. Both were in dialogue with Saint-Malo’s and Dubuc’s mémoires. The first, “Reflections on Some Branches of Commerce and the Means to Improve Them,” was drawn from two issues of the Gazette du Commerce; the second was a letter to the editor by a colonist. The authors of both believed that solving the problem of colonial trade after the Seven Years’ War required accounting for the welfare of the nation as a whole, not that of individuals, though they diverged on how to achieve that end. The first articulated metropolitan views, which interests us because of the commentary that Monceaux very atypically added. The second urged a change in the trade of the island’s taffia and syrups. Monceaux energetically refuted the “Reflections.” He even questioned whether the author possessed the “impartial spirit combined with great knowledge” necessary to consider such questions, and his footnotes responded to what he considered its most egregious points. He rejected unequivocally the characterization of the colonies as all too willing to welcome enemy ships, thus engaging in “revolting conduct . . . contrary to the patriotism that leads every good Frenchman to make the commerce of his nation flourish.” He reminded the reader that such views echoed the Saint-Malo mémoire. He also rejected the author’s suggestion that the island export only muscovado sugar, referring the reader to the Journal’s article on the same subject. The “splendor of the French colonies and the commerce of the metropole” depended on producing clayed sugar. Enriching a few metropolitan refiners at the expense of highly capitalized island manufactories would be enormously unjust. Monceaux even quoted Dubuc without attribution: What the English did in this respect was irrelevant, because “England has more commerce than colonies, and we have more colonies than commerce.”
Historical background, Bertie Mandelblatt, “Atlantic Consumption of Rum and Brandy and Economic Growth in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” French History , no. (): –. AA, September . Ibid.
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But the authors of the “Reflections,” the letter to the editor, and one of Saint-Domingue’s Chambres d’Agriculture agreed on reforming the taffia trade. French manufacturers of eau-de-vie had long and successfully opposed its entry into metropolitan ports except for re-export to Africa, and they capably deployed the discourse of public good to support their case. In , the Chamber of Commerce of La Rochelle asserted that planters were just as guilty of the sin of self-interest, “which nature seems to have placed in man’s heart only to degrade him.” Consequently, they produced this dangerous and disgusting eau de vie. The enslaved had no choice but to drink it to numb their suffering. If neither commercial nor human nor divine laws intervened, perhaps it was even humane “to let them hasten the end of their days by its usage.” But under no circumstances should “this poison [be introduced] into our lands and climates, where the inhabitants, true men, enjoy the favors of humanity.” Even before the war ended in , the Chambre of Port-au-Prince offered a plan to reform the taffia trade – notably when the membership still included both merchants and planters. Its recommendations were savvy: they addressed several persistent economic and social problems in a coherent plan, which accounted for a rival’s activity, African commerce, and colonial agriculture. It salved national pride by seeking to best their no-less-savvy English competitors. It pointed out that New Englanders had been very successful trading slaves for rum and tobacco on the African coast, yet they first had to purchase the commodities they traded there. Saint-Domingue was poised to compete because it already produced rum, and it could supply just as much tobacco once cultivation, through such encouragement, revived. In other words, direct trade between SaintDomingue and Africa was a win-win situation: The colony would have yet another source of slaves to meet its seemingly inexhaustible demand. The trade would increase French shipping, profiting the empire more generally. And increased shipping would provide work for unemployed creole Whites, while Black freemen and gens de couleur would supply sailors “far more suited than whites for navigating the coast of Africa because they can support the rigors of the climate, which to them is natural.”
Stein, French Sugar Business, ; Bertie Mandelblatt, “L’alambic dans l’Atlantique. Production, commercialization, et concurrence de l’eu-de-vie de vin et de l’eau de vie de rhum dans l’Atlantique français au XVIIe et au début du XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société , no. (): –. MdSM Chd’Ag, Séance at Port-au-Prince, June .
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Neither the author of the “Reflections” nor of the letter to the editor offered such extensive and well-thought-out plans. Instead, the “Reflections” asserted that the French could have the best of both worlds. Yes, these products ought to be admitted to French ports only for reexport. But the English demand for rum was so great they willingly risked trading illegally with the French colonies. Why not make it possible for them and other foreign merchants to buy such goods “from our [metropolitan] entrepôt?” Monceaux approved this point and bolstered it in his footnotes by calculating Saint-Domingue’s production and the “considerable” revenue it would generate. In principle, the author of the letter to the editor agreed that colonial trade with foreigners had to end, but again, times had changed. The laws regulating trade had been created for a world in which French Canada provided the island with foodstuffs and wood in exchange for the island’s syrups. When foreign ships provided the island with these goods in exchange for syrups, the colony traded at a loss. The island was at a disadvantage, too, when French merchants sold wood in the island purchased for trade in the Baltic. Was it fair that metropolitan merchants could acquire commodities for foreign trade however they wanted while colonial merchants could not? The colony ended up paying more, and France lost the revenue from trade conducted illegally. The October and November issues of the Journal have not survived, though the titles of four articles suggest that the debate over colonial trade had not ended. The first apparently communicated the opinions of the colonists of Martinique on the mémoire of Saint-Malo, which were probably no more positive than those of their Saint-Domingue counterparts. The October issue published a response – likely quite positive – to Dubuc’s mémoire. The Journal also offered an abridgment in its final two issues of Commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille (). The book’s contents, largely a compilation of royal edicts regulating commerce, were relevant to the debate, but whether the editors commented on them is unknown. The Journal’s last entry into the debate on colonial commerce, published in November , was the most radical: François de Quesnay’s “Remarks on the Opinion of the Author of the Spirit of Laws on Colonies,” probably reprinted from the April issue of the Journal d’agriculture, du commerce, et des finances. So far, everyone who participated in this debate argued within the “paradigm” of current economic orthodoxies, proposing “exceptions” alone. Quesnay cut the Gordian knot, advocating a wholly different conception of metropole–colonial relations and commerce. According to Røge, he arrived at it through collaboration with the marquis de Mirabeau, whose views were deeply informed by the
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experiences and observations of his brother, Jean-Antoine, who had served as governor of Guadeloupe. The resulting physiocratic stance, first elaborated in Mirabeau’s Philosophie rurale (), included a theoretical critique of slavery, which other physiocrats would develop into a pointed attack on Caribbean slavery and a project for establishing the French in West Africa. In Quesnay’s “Remarks,” there is no suggestion of anti-slavery sentiment. Indeed, excepting some visionary musings, there was much to warm the heart of any planter, not to mention men like Galbaud du Fort, who had furiously contested during conflicts with d’Estaing what he considered the “despotic” subjection of the colony (Chapter ). Quesnay rejected one of Montesquieu’s fundamental principles: that “the metropole alone can conduct commerce in the colony . . . because the purpose of its establishment was the extension of commerce, and not the foundation of a city or of a new empire.” Ultimately, Quesnay discarded the metropole/colony distinction altogether, arguing that it was appropriate to a “mercantile republic” such as The Netherlands, but meaningless in a “monarchical empire.” A colony was no different from a province, and provinces had the right to trade with each other and externally. Such freedom of trade enriched both the state and humanity. The consumption of commercial goods available through global trade benefited everyone, and no people had a monopoly on wealth. Indeed, it was part of a divine plan that no nation could satisfy all its needs or desires, thus had to trade with others. This served the Supreme Being’s intention of “uniting in brotherhood all reasonable creatures it created,” rewarding those nations that adopted liberty of commerce with abundance, wealth, happiness, and a growing population while penalizing those that did not with poverty and future ruin. The collapse of the Journal apparently ended the aggressive prosecution of the colonial economic case in Saint-Domingue’s periodicals. As we have seen, Monceaux certainly seconded the Journal, but even before its demise he ran a couple of items in the Affiches that depicted merchants in a more positive light. In one, a group of merchants in Port-au-Prince even severely criticized their fellows in the Cap for undercutting cotton production in the colony by paying less for cotton produced on the Spanish side of the island. “[R]eason instructs all men not to act in ways damaging to their
Røge, Economistes, –, –, –; on increasing support in the metropole for freedom of trade and physiocrats’ general opposition to colonization, Alain Clément, “‘Du bon et du mauvais usage des colonies’.”
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concitoyens,” the merchant who relayed his colleagues’ discussion admonished. Overall, though, Monceaux’s editorial choices suggest a stronger interest in the problem of agricultural improvement (see Chapter ). Yet while the Journal took the lead, both periodicals created a forum for the presentation of diverse views and for a lively debate on metropolitan economic policy. Their reprinting of material published in metropolitan publications or produced by metropolitan Chambers of Commerce was never meant to silence colonial voices; rather, it invited them to participate. Like many metropolitan readers, many in Saint-Domingue no doubt did not appreciate the finer points of duelling economic theories. Their arguments sometimes smacked of intellectual opportunism – even concealed rank self-interest through “specious, transparent, and even tawdry reasoning,” as Cheney characterizes some mémoires by metropolitan Chambers of Commerce. We might well wonder whether the Journal’s republication of metropolitan materials was what the intendant Magon de La Villebague had in mind when he signed off on its prospectus, whether he anticipated how tactical such appropriations of material could be and how colonists could use them to further their own agendas. For us, the materials surveyed in this chapter show that colonists were quite capable of doing precisely what people in Europe did: place their economic situation in the larger context of increasingly complex, global commercial relations and inter-state rivalries; appropriate language and concepts from various publications to analyze their circumstances; then advocate their solutions in the intellectually respectable terms of political economy.
AA, August ; also see Avis (Supplement), September , “Idée générale du commerce & de la ville de Nantes”; AA, November , “Éloge du commerce,” a translated excerpt from Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality. Cheney’s characterization in Revolutionary Commerce, .
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A Slave Named Voltaire; or, Gender and the Making of American Taste
Every issue of the Affiches Américaines published notices of runaway slaves. In March , it announced that one “Voltaire” owned by M. Gardere of St. Marc had gone missing. The descriptor “Congo” was too geographically capacious for us to know the slave’s ethnicity, but he was definitely not creole. If Gardere was a planter, this loss was substantial: at twenty, the slave was in his prime for field work. Typically, he bore his master’s brands, but an atypical name. Slave names generally ranged from the prosaic to the mythological. A ship’s captain might name a slave after his vessel; a planter might choose the African word for a day of the week or a literary character. So there was more than one Télémaque, the son of Odysseus, on Saint-Domingue, but no Fénelon, author of his wildly popular adventures. Why did Gardere choose “Voltaire”? Perhaps to exact a little revenge for the tortured slave in Candide who chastised metropolitans for trading his suffering for a little sugar? Whatever his motivation, the choice reflects the philosophe’s fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, tracking Voltaire’s significance in Saint-Domingue’s periodicals – the Affiches, the Journal de Saint-Domingue, and especially the Iris Américaine – reveals another dimension of their editors’ improving agenda: the acquisition of “culture” and “taste.” This required a facility with literary forms and a capacity for literary appreciation that, in contrast to the discourse of difference explored earlier, enhanced the “American” identity by making it more “French.” Moreover, this cultural agenda was the flip side of the gendered discourse of citizenship. By celebrating the literary arts and seeking to instruct readers in them, the Iris Américaine especially promoted an ideal of White womanhood to complement the White male citizen. Honoring the time-honored dictum, “to instruct and delight,” the periodical entertained and tutored women in good taste and politesse not just for their own
AA, March .
Cauna, Au temps des isles à sucre, –.
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good, but to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. Nowhere in its pages do we see the Black or mixedrace woman and the sexual and familial disorder she allegedly wrought, yet she haunted the idealized family whose emotional economy was to be skillfully managed by the White wife and mother. The contribution of the Affiches to this cultural work could only have been modest given its limited page count and other priorities. Like metropolitan editors, Monceaux included items about cultural events and the institutions that honored their practitioners and furthered their progress. His rewrite of an item on the Salon du Louvre, lifted from a Paris periodical, suggests his editorial policy vis-à-vis the arts. The original began as a review of the exhibition’s catalogue, but Monceaux deleted the descriptions of the artworks. He followed the text quite closely, though, when it described how ancient Greek artists circulated among spectators when exhibiting their work because they believed that viewers could judge intelligently despite not being artists themselves. Monceaux added that Athenian orators similarly circulated in crowds listening to speeches. “This worthy method was followed in all other genres,” because “judgment enlightened by knowledge sufficed to be a critic . . .” Inasmuch as Monceaux followed the original, he reiterated the same confidence in his readers’ judgment expressed in other contexts. But his additions qualified that confidence by requiring “judgement” to “enlighten” knowledge, which an improving press furthered. For Monceaux, then, the task was to develop his readers’ taste, a task deemed critical in the metropole, too. During the eighteenth century, the French public’s wider access to creative work prompted a general concern with taste and its cultivation. Elena Russo and Jennifer Tsien have discussed the philosophes’ chagrin with this democratization and their efforts to set themselves up as the arbiters of “grand gout” versus “goût moderne” (or “petite,” in its detractors’ eyes). Was taste innate or a product of education? Was its chief point apprehending beauty or savoring pleasure? These debates were gendered as philosophes sought to wrest the right of critical judgment from women, negating the idea current since the seventeenth century that taste came naturally to them (at least if they were high status). Thus, according to Jean-Paul Sermain, literature became “a school
AA, February , December , December . AA, January ; on periodicals’ criticism of the visual arts, Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, –. Jolanta T. Pekacz, “The Salonnières and the Philosophes in Old Regime France: The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): –.
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of taste and stimulated reflection or the desire to intervene in [literary] debates.” But cultivating taste was not just a personal matter. Russo writes how it “was consubstantial with national culture and with the degree of civilization in a given nation”; Tsien echoes her point, adding that bad taste “would weaken the French nation.” Monceaux’s chief enthusiasm was theater, a passion common on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, a metropolitan moralist complained how his star-struck fellows spent their lives there. The establishment of professional theater in Saint-Domingue was a colonial manifestation of the postwar boom in constructing public venues and founding companies. From on, colonists living in or visiting Cap-François could attend a professional theater. Although Port-au-Prince and other smaller cities struggled to give theater a permanent footing, it nevertheless became a fixture in the island’s cultural life. Monceaux generally reserved material appearing under the heading “Spectacles” for announcing performances on the island. Unlike metropolitan Affiches, he rarely ran reviews of them, but he sometimes ran reviews of metropolitan productions. Nothing suggests that he took himself as seriously as Russo’s and Tsien’s philosophes, but his choices show that he shared the moralizing taste of metropolitan reviewers. In October , a lengthy review of a play about Cromwell stressed the importance of solid moral instruction in theatrical presentations. It abundantly praised a tragedy that roundly condemned a regicide and usurper whose “fanaticism” resembled that of “cruel Mohammed, and so many
Jean-Paul Sermain, Preface, Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, . Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), ; Jennifer Tsien, The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . Quote from Clay, The Business of Theatre, . Ibid., –; Jean Fouchard, Artistes et répertoire des scènes de Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, ); Jean Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince; État, ); Jean Fouchard, “Minette et Lise. . ., deux actrices de couleur sur les scènes de SaintDomingue,” Revue d’histoire des colonies , no. (): –; Bernard Camier, “Les concerts dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de Musicologie , no. (): –; Bernard Camier, “Jeannot et Thérèse: A Question of Creole Identity,” in Colonialism and Slavery in Performance: Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean, ed. Jeffrey M. Leichman and Karine Bénac-Giroux (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), –; David M. Powers, “The French Musical Theatre: Maintaining Control in Caribbean Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” Black Music Research Journal , no. / (): –; Julia Prest, “Pale Imitations: White Performances of Slave Dance in the Public Theatres of Prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue,” Atlantic Studies , no. (): –; chiefly about the s, Laurence Marie, “Writing about Theatre in Saint-Domingue (–): A Public Voice on a Public Space?,” in Colonialism and Slavery in Performance, –. Auerbach, “Encourager le commerce,” –.
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other tyrants for whom hypocrisy serves as a mask to deceive the people and to ensure the success of their villainy.” The reviews Monceaux reprinted suggest his identification of more “classical” representations with “good taste.” In , he ran an item about the warm reception of a new work at the Comédie Française – and rightly so, according to the reviewer, because its author drew inspiration from Plautus, “the true source of the comedic, for so long abandoned in favor of a false taste for romantic sentiment, which has given us so many jeremiads adorned with the name of comedy.” Taste and a passion for the theater naturally converged in Voltaire. Although the number of his mentions in the Affiches may appear trivial, no other literary figure received as many. This echoed his metropolitan fame. Louis Trénard writes that the Mercure de France “cherished” Voltaire even if it passed over in silence his battle against l’Infâme. Voltaire was a favorite of the Affiches de Bordeaux, for example, second only to the hometown luminary Montesquieu. Monceaux even authored a literary portrait of the philosophe that “combined the merit of novelty with the advantage of having been produced by an excellent pen,” according to a friend writing after his death (Conclusion to Part II). While Monceaux’s essay is lost, the items he chose for the Affiches suggest that Voltaire served as his touchstone of literary accomplishment. In September , after an item on an experimental educational program in Russia, he reminded readers that the “august” princess Elizabeth had invited Voltaire to visit Russia. For his readers’ pleasure, he added “the verses composed on that occasion by that celebrated author,” which had not yet been published. Monceaux plucked it and at least one other item on Voltaire from a less conventional source, the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des Lettres, which circulated in manuscript. Nevertheless, Monceaux did not approve of everything Voltaire thought. Consistent
Gaz, October . AA, February ; a withering critique of the Comédie Italienne, AA, June . Trénard, “La presse française,” –. Auerbach, “Encourager le commerce,” ; Tulchin, “Weekly Enlightenment,” , –. AA, September ; other approving mentions, January ; Gaz, October ; AA, May , June . Mémoires secrets (London, ), ; AA, February . Elisabeth Wahl, “Le fait culturel et la censure dans les nouvelles à main et les périodiques,” and Robert Granderoute, “Jacques-Élie Gastelier: Correspondance, nouvelles à la main et gazettes,” in Les gazettes européennes de langues française (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), ed. Henri Duranton, Claude Labrosse, and Pierre Rétat (SaintEtienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, ), – and –; François Moureau, La plume et le plomb (Paris: P.U.P.S., ), –.
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with his earlier decision to run a poem against deism, he objected to Voltaire’s provocations in Le philosophe ignorant, though “we cannot refuse our admiration for his superior talents, even when we believe ourselves capable of opposing his opinions.” Planters, merchants, colonial officials, and their wives did not have to settle for secondhand accounts of Voltaire’s genius, of course. Residents of Port-au-Prince and visitors could always find a selection of his publications at the Imprimerie Royale. Those living near a theater could attend performances of his comedies and tragedies. While his plays did not dominate, they were consistently performed from the s into the revolutionary period. Between and , seven of his works were staged in eleven productions on the island. Voltaire’s name appears just once in the extant issues of the Journal, but it actively furthered the cultural agenda he personified by publishing colonists’ poetry. Now the literary quality of eighteenth-century French poetry is generally not highly regarded, and the poems the Journal published do not challenge that assessment. But this misses the point, according to Lionel Gossman. Yes, it suffers when compared to earlier and later productions and poetry with greater intellectual and aesthetic ambitions. But it should be appreciated as one does the handiwork of a rococo craftsman, that is, “for the wit of the invention and the skill of the execution.” Poetry and its composition also had social functions. The Journal and the metropolitan publications it emulated, chiefly the Mercure de France, published poems rooted in the “the worldly practice” of the salons. What François Moreau wrote of the Mercure galant earlier in the century holds for its literary descendants: It “offer[ed] the image of a society that loved poetry for reasons that, often enough, have little to do with poetry, but that practiced it daily.”
In Chapter . AA, January ; Mémoires secrets, August , . Advertisements in AA, January , February , May (Supplement), October . Information compiled from Fouchard, Artistes et répertoire des scènes de Saint-Domingue; Julia Prest, “From Tragic Hero to Creole Businesswoman: Voltaire’s Semiramis and Her Parodies in thCentury France and Saint-Domingue,” in The Allure of the Ancient, ed. Margaret Geoga and John Steele (Leiden: Brill, ), –; Bernard Camier and Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaïre, ou le théàtre des Lumières dans l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine , no. (): –. Lionel Gossman, “, December – What Was Enlightenment?,” A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Ibid., . Quoted by Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, ; Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, –.
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The point of a poem, then, was not achieving a high rung on a transcendent aesthetic ladder. Composing poetry was a social practice and recreation. Yet its carefully cultivated playfulness and nonchalance should not distract from the social stakes involved. Creating a poem required understanding the rules and leisure time – as did reading and judging it. Such poetry simultaneously invoked and constituted a knowledgeable community of connoisseurs comprising readers and poets who often enough traded places. A national publication like the Mercure extended the reach of that community beyond the state’s borders, expanding a literary franchise based on language. The Journal addressed a small community whose authors and dedicatees might well have known each other despite claiming anonymity. By writing and submitting poetry for publication, the colonial was playing a metropolitan game while staking a claim to a place in local “polite” society. By publishing domestic poetry and dignifying it with serious criticism, the Journal valorized both the activity and the contributor’s social claims. Like metropolitan monthlies such as the Journal des Dames and the Mercure, the Journal inscribed itself into a project of polite sociability, however diminutive the opportunities to enjoy it. The Journal’s editors introduced their inaugural literary section with a sigh: “It is easier to instruct than to please.” They ardently solicited readers’ contributions, promising to reward them with editorial care. They followed the custom of metropolitan periodicals by publishing critiques. Their seriousness encouraged the authors, arbitered matters of taste, offered examples for emulation, and communicated the importance of skillful versifying to the new, cultivated American. In contrast, they did not bother to critique the enigmas and logogryphes readers contributed nor several poems celebrating d’Estaing’s recovery from a serious illness. The former were merely word games in verse popular on both sides of the Atlantic; the latter was occasional poetry whose aesthetic qualities mattered less than the expression of laudable civic sentiments. The first poem the Journal published took three pages to complain about the impossibility of writing poetry on the island. The editors commented drily that, “by virtue of his epistle, he badly proves” his point. They prefaced the next poem, “Letter to My Study,” with a note
Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, . JdSD, November , . Logogryphes, JdSD, November , , December , , February , , March , ; enigmas, JdSD, December , ; d’Estaing’s illness, JdSD, January , –; Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, –; Tsien, Bad Taste of Others, –. JdSD, November , –. Ibid., .
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that praised the poet, a military officer, for demonstrating yet again how “Mars did not always disdain commerce with the Muses.” Although encouraging his “happy gift of nature,” they cautioned him to tackle more original subjects and not to sacrifice meter to an idea. Generally the editors offered summary judgments, but they provided detailed commentary in February at a contributor’s request. They italicized questionable word choices, indicated obscure phrases and an illogical assertion, and judged his versifying insufficiently harmonious. But their concluding remarks stressed that the poem signaled “the greatest talent.” Indeed, the poet should not fear revealing his identity and “running the risk of a ridicule that, according to him, is more to be feared in SaintDomingue than in France. Select passages of his poem will be savored [here] as they will be everywhere.” “Flowers, An Idyll” stands out because its author was a woman, Mlle Moreau, who published in her own name. It is noteworthy, too, for the editors’ attention, expressions of esteem, and the importance they attributed to it. A prefatory note bemoaned the unhappy situation of writers born after the brilliant predecessors of Louis XIV’s reign. What could they do but imitate or plagiarize? Particularly audacious, the island poetess had written in the genre that Madame Deshoulières (d. ) had pioneered and whose “sweetness, finesse, allegory, and profound moral reflections” were inspired by otherwise frivolous subjects. She even wrote on the same topic as one of Deshoulières’s most popular poems. Well aware that nature had not forgotten to distribute her favors to female colonists “as alluring as [they] are lovable,” the editors were confident that her example would excite their emulation and give them the confidence to share with the Journal’s readers “the first offerings of their pens.” Yet the Journal’s editors confessed in October that their literary section had failed to amuse “the gentle sex, that infallible judge in matters of taste.” They vowed to improve it by publishing work drawn from “the best periodicals in Europe” and poetry “rich in delicacy and sentiment.” Yet though the Journal collapsed before it could follow through, it was not forgotten. In February , a contributor to the Affiches asserted that
Ibid., –; wide-ranging interests of military officers, David Bell, The First Total War (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ), –; participation of military men in SaintDomingue’s Chambres d’Agriculture and agricultural debates in the Affiches, at Chapter . JdSD, November , . JdSD, December , –. JdSD, February , –. Ibid., –. AA, October ; unsuccessful attempts to revive it, AA, March , March , May , August ; more on the collapse, Chapter .
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everyone had lost by the Journal’s disappearance – “the merchant, the planter, the man of letters” – and urged the Affiches to console them by making space for other material, including literature. Perhaps this encouraged Henri Duchemin-Despaletz, former editor of the Journal and editor of the Affiches after Monceaux’s death, to undertake a publishing venture devoted exclusively to belles lettres. In May , the Affiches announced that its subscribers would receive the first issue of the Iris Américaine, henceforth available for a subscription of thirty-three livres. While Duchemin-Despaletz was probably the editor, he likely had help given his responsibilities at the Affiches. The creation of a colonial publication whose male editors explicitly, if not exclusively addressed a female audience is an exciting development for historians of the press. Periodicals catering to a female readership were being published in Europe, too, though scholarly analysis of them is still relatively underdeveloped, especially on the French side. Existing scholarship focuses on publications for women in which women themselves played key roles, for example, the Journal des Dames (–) with its female editorial direction, advocacy of feminist views, and even oppositional politics. Most periodicals were not so challenging. Instead, they reveal the capacity of a press for women both to reflect and shape contemporary social expectations while sometimes providing a forum for challenging them. A dynamic and complex process in metropolitan France, how much more so in a colonial society with an enduring demographic imbalance between White men and White women and by persistent miscegenation even in the face of hardening racial barriers? The Affiches and the Journal had been committed to encouraging the creation of a rational, dispassionate White male citizen committed to the public good. What does the Iris tell us about the female counterpart? What were her larger social functions? Answering these questions is not
AA, February . Sgard-Dict. On the British, Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (rpt. ; New York: Routledge, ); Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, –s, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, ); on the French, Siobhán McIlvanney, Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, – (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), –; Suellen Diaconoff, Through the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New Press, ), esp. –. Nina Kattner Gelbart, “The Journal des Dames and Its Female Editors: Politics, Censorship, and Feminism in the Old Regime Press,” in Press and Politics in Pre-revolutionary France, – and Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France: Le Journal des Dames (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
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easy because we have no “Prospectus” that articulated its objectives. We can make a few inferences, though, from the periodical’s name and its dedication. Resplendent with the colors of the rainbow, Iris was the female counterpart of the god Mercury, a name adopted by many early modern periodicals. “Iris” was an unusual, if flattering choice, and her American-ness was consistent with the intention of the Affiches and the Journal to create periodicals for New World readers. The dedication by an anonymous infantry officer to an equally anonymous habitante of Trou echoes the terms the Journal had used to mollify disgruntled female readers: “Madame, A work that has the colony’s fair sex as its audience and whose objective is to please them must appear under your auspices.” His praise of her singled out the qualities to be emulated by the new periodical’s female readers: a “delicate” intelligence, “refined” taste, and a “kind” heart. Who were the women behind this highly flattering representation? The Affiches occasionally provides a fugitive glimpse. For example, in March , it reported female participants in Easter concerts “whose talents for singing or playing musical instruments obliged them to participate.” Doris Garraway has written that “white women are the least discussed figures of colonial society, almost escaping comment entirely” in later accounts by visitors. When not ignored, they were frequently depicted in deeply negative terms as Jamaican White women were (Chapter ). Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s description of the White creole woman is an excellent example. His Considérations sur l’état present de la colonie française de Saint Domingue () drew on his experience in Saint-Domingue from to . It appears in a chapter on the relationship between the island’s climate and its moeurs (a classic Montesquieuian context) after a lengthier, much more positive characterization of White creole men. Taken together, the females he described resembled a tropical seraglio. “[F]ertile, passionate, and jealous,” they
Only one metropolitan periodical was similarly named, the Iris de Guyenne. Sgard-Dict. A German Iris scarcely survived much longer than her American counterpart. Helga Brandes, “The Literary Marketplace and the Journal, Medium of the Enlightenment,” in German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility, ed. Barbara Becker-Cantarino (Camden House: Boydell & Brewer, ), . IA, dedicatory letter, unpaginated, preceding volume of extant issues at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI. AdC, March ; Andrei Pesic, “The Flighty Coquette Sings on Easter Sunday: Music and Religion in Saint-Domingue, –,” French Historical Studies , no. (): –. Doris Garroway, The Libertine Island: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .
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continued to “seek sensual gratification when age advances and pleasure flees.” Harsh toward the enslaved, kind toward Whites, they were more attractive than one might expect given the climate, but they lacked energy, innocence, and modesty, and passed their days “warbl[ing] graceful songs.” However tender their smiles, however touching their naïveté, “sensuousness is in their eyes, and seduction in their hearts.” Like the Chambre d’Agriculture of Port-au-Prince, d’Auberteuil echoed the request to bring more White women to the island, though he also described marriage as an estate neither White men nor the few available White women entered into eagerly or faithfully maintained. Surely such women would benefit from the gentle instruction the Iris offered – even if they appeared to lack the strength to lift, much less the intellectual wherewithal to read it! No doubt the goal of allaying White male anxieties, albeit unarticulated, figured as prominently in the Iris’s cultural agenda as satisfying White women’s alleged need of entertaining instruction. As with the Affiches, teasing out the editors’ explicit goals requires close analysis of its content. It is unclear when the Iris collapsed, but at least thirty-one issues were published. Unlike the Journal, nearly every item came from metropolitan publications. It resembled the Mercure de France the most. Indeed, at least of its items were plucked from it. An officially approved literary magazine, the Mercure avoided controversial religious and political questions, though it welcomed new authors making their name at midcentury, including the now canonical figures of Rousseau, Diderot, Condillac, Voltaire, and d’Alembert. The Iris even appropriated the Mercure’s original epigram: “Quae colligit, spargit [She scatters what she gathers].” Like the Mercure, which originated in salon culture, the Iris was a miscellany – and that was precisely the point for the Mercure’s promoters and critics. As one scholar puts it, the Mercure followed “the non-linear path of conversation . . . capricious[ly] changing from subject to subject,” offering the reader a “promiscuous mixture” of reading material. This “disorderliness” offended some male critics despite some reorganization at
Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue (Paris, ), :–; Garroway, The Libertine Colony, –; William Max Nelson, “Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering,” American Historical Review , no. (): –; William Max Nelson, “‘The Eternal Power of Reason’ and ‘The Superiority of Whites’: Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment,” French Colonial History (): –. D’Auberteuil, Considérations, :. Ibid., :. Trénard, “La presse française,” Histoire générale, –. Tsien, Bad Taste of Others, –.
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mid-century, and it was one of the elements that gendered it and publications resembling it as “female.” If anything, the Iris accentuated this impression of feminine disarray by excluding weightier intellectual content such as book reviews and reports on academic societies and cultural events. Another significant difference: it did not at first solicit readers’ contributions. At thirty-five items, the Journal Encyclopédique was the second-most important source. Other material came from regularly published anthologies, such as L’ami des muses, and popular compilations, such as Dictionnaire des portraits historiques, anecdotes, et traits remarquables des hommes illustres. As with the Affiches, the editors had to be selective, and their selectivity suggests their objectives. The Iris was a slender pamphlet while the monthly Mercure and the bi-weekly Journal Encyclopédique were plump periodicals of hundreds of pages. Their choices suggest an editorial policy similar to that of the first two (male) editors of the Journal des Dames: prioritizing “those enjoyable diversions of a lively and fertile imagination,” free of pedantry and abstractions. Thus, the Iris generally avoided the taxing in favor of lighter subjects, which ranged from the mildly risqué to the sentimental. Each issue included several short pieces drawn from a spectrum of popular genres: occasional and fugitive poetry; tales marvelous, moral, and orientializing; fables in verse; and brief essays. Making hard-and-fast distinctions between the various genres of short fiction is difficult, though emphasis on the morally edifying increased across the board as the century went on. With a few exceptions, the editors began each issue with the lengthiest item, usually in prose: a conte or tale, sometimes continued from an earlier issue; a compilation of excerpts such as “Historical Anecdotes” or “Bon Mots”; or an essay. This was the main course, if you will, after which the editors offered a choice of digestifs, mostly in the form of short works in verse. Yet the Iris did not neglect its mission to instruct and to delight. A dialogue between a geometer and a “citizen of Paris” credibly handled
On Journal Encyclopédique, Chapter . Quoted by Angus Martin, “Fiction and the Female Reading Public in Eighteenth-Century France: The Journal des Dames (–),” Eighteenth-Century Fiction , no. (): . On these genres in such periodicals, Dumouchel, Le journal littéraire, –; –; Jean-Noël Pascal, Les successeurs de La Fontaine au siècle des Lumières (–) (New York: Peter Lang, ). Henri Coulet, “Destin du conte moral,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction , no. – (): –; also, Katherine Astbury, The Moral Tale in France and Germany, – (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ), esp. chaps. one, three, and five.
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the basic principles of political economy in just thirteen pages. Much of this more substantive material came from the Journal Encyclopédique, including an exceptional fifteen-page article that defined “philosophe” and “philosophie.” Another attributed the short lifespans of the moderns in part to mothers who refused to breast feed; yet another urged women to breastfeed as soon after birth as their infants desired, because English doctors had discovered that the customary delay deprived mother and child of healthful benefits. Breastfeeding was a powerfully charged and gendered social and cultural critique in the metropole – and much more so where Black enslaved women nursed White children. However breezy their tone, many items were not apolitical. An unpopular king like Louis XV potentially transformed any historical reference into political commentary. “Historical Anecdotes,” a masterpiece of cutand-paste, compared the characters and military exploits of the Great Condé, Turenne, and the duc de Rohan. While all were great men, only the latter acted selflessly, believing that “glory and the public good never abide where personal interest commands.” A second round celebrated kings who managed their mistresses judiciously, decreased taxes, and won their wars. A fable in verse, “The Gardener and His Master,” accused the widely despised financial sector of siphoning off riches that should have gone to the state. “The Politic Old Man” attributed the decline in the kingdom’s wealth since Henri IV’s time to the abandonment of agriculture for the production of luxury goods and foreign trade, which enriched “financiers, entrepreneurs, and merchants.” Unprecedented (and unrepeated) was a forceful denunciation of slavery in the Iris’s sixteenth issue,
IA, “Entretien entre un Géometre & un Citoyen de Paris,” –; actually, it was an excerpt from Voltaire’s “L’homme à quarantes écus,” Mercure de France, July . IA, “Sur les mots philosophe et philosophie,” –. IA, “Réflexions sur la longévité,” –; “De l’avantage qu’il y a de donner le sein aux enfans aussitôt qu’ils montrent quelque empressement de têter,” –. A practice criticized by Moreau de Saint-Méry, Garroway, Libertine Colony, . IA, “Anecdotes historiques,” –; assembled from material published in the Dictionnaire des portraits historiques, anecdotes, et traits remarquables des hommes illustres () combined with some material from Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs. The Iris might not have compiled this material, but I could not locate a metropolitan source. On reviews of historical works in metropolitan newspapers “carry[ing] hidden political messages for the present,” Vivian R. Gruder, “Political News as Coded Messages: The Parisian and Provincial Press in the Pre-Revolution, –,” French History , no. (): . IA, “Anecdotes historiques,” –; source appears to be the same as above. IA, “Le jardinier et son maître,” –. IA, “Le veillard politique,” –. This was the first part of Voltaire’s L’homme aux quarante écus, though the editors of the Iris were apparently ignorant of its authorship and source; Roger Pearson, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s Contes philosophiques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), –.
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which was the Journal Encyclopédique’s adaptation of Jaucourt’s article on Black skin for the Encyclopédie. Yet much of the content of the Iris focused on romantic love – if nothing tragic. While the course of true love was frequently impeded, it eventually ran true and generally toward marriage. Even a woman with an unconquerable heart eventually abandoned her pride and eagerly awaited her husband on their wedding night: Hymen “extinguishes the light, and draws the bed curtains; but Love hides behind them.” The selections of the Iris depicted men’s pleasure in marriage, too. One poet wrote that he found instruction in Jean-Baptiste Rousseau’s verse, but received lessons in love from his wife. Another poet gently mocked a philosophical friend for abandoning the cabinet where he contemplated cosmic mysteries: “Adieu universal order, adieu Newton!” Such abstract pleasures could not compete with those of “nature”: his children’s calls for their “papa” and their mother’s tearful tenderness. Yet the clever or steadfast wife had to overcome trials from the trivial to the nearly catastrophic: a couple whose restlessness throughout the night thoroughly irritated each other, a husband inclined to wander, a spouse who treated his wife harshly because he wrongly suspected her fidelity. Many poems unabashedly celebrated the sensual aspects of dalliance. In “The Young Lovers,” the passion that the poet deferred while lacing his lover’s corset in the morning was rewarded by the still more “charming” pleasure of “undoing my work” in the evening. “Letter to my Physician on My Regimen” evoked a seraglio’s charms: “Gods! What a swarm / Of captives young and beautiful / Voluptuous, tender, lively / Alabaster bodies, loveliest breasts . . . / Would we were sultans!” In more than one hundred lines, another poem celebrated the “insufficiently caressed” neck of his lover. If the sight of Sylvie had not captivated another poet, he would have emulated the “libertine butterfly,” flitting from flower to flower, “more ardent than amorous, more gallant than faithful.” Worldly without being cynical, the Iris offered an emphatically secular worldview that promoted a virtue that was respectable, attainable, and not
IA, “Réflexions sur la peau des nègres,” –. IA, “À Madame la Comtesse de B . . . pour le jour de son marriage,” . IA, “À ma femme,” . IA, “À un ami sur son marriage,” –. IA, “Les deux mariés et le fagot. Conte,” –. IA, “Le rendez-vous inutile, conte,” –. IA, “Anecdote intéressante de la fin du règne de Louis XIV. Ne jugeons point selon les apparences,” –. IA, “Les jeunes amans,” –. IA, “Épître à mon médécin sur le régime,” –. IA, “Autre [épître] sur le cou de Mlle,” –. IA, “Madrigal,” .
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self-denying. Not only was virtue compatible with happiness, it helped the reader achieve it. Indeed, the editors apparently believed the pursuit of happiness so important they devoted nearly the entire eighteenth issue to a lengthy essay on the topic. Its anonymous author argued that happiness was possible, indeed deserved, but its attainment required understanding. He initially sounded a Rousseauian note by enumerating the reasons why “[w]e were less happy than those Americans and those Savages we boast we have civilized.” Yet happiness did not require renouncing civilization, he continued, but, rather, the tempering of passion and the identification of pleasure with virtue. In the Iris, the task of reconciling pleasure with virtue was never dour. “[C]ombining comfortable thinking with comfortable living standards,” it resulted instead from knowing what truly mattered. As one tale put it, the point was to pursue a “simple and true philosophy, which does not seek happiness in wealth or titles, and which finds it . . . in the enjoyment of the goods nature offers to all her children, [that is,] in love, in friendship, and in the practice of virtues that bring together men in making them each other’s benefactors.” While Christian morality was not excluded, according to Katherine Astbury, most moral tales advocated “a secularized humanitarian set of values.” Thus, in “Joy Born of Unhappiness,” new family and friends literally made life worth living for a protagonist who found relief from suicidal despair in their generosity. In the orientalizing “Wishes,” a genie offered seven to the humble Sadak, who was discontent with his impoverished life spent helping pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Six brought wealth, virtuosity in letters, high office, military achievement, and the hand of a beautiful princess – but no happiness. The seventh restored him to his former life in which he found sincerity and joy. But it was Voltaire – or, rather, the Voltaire of the Iris – who promoted these values best. The editors’ enthusiasm is clear in the number of items by or about him. Of the twenty-nine extant issues, seventeen contained items connected with him. Of all the items published in the Iris, roughly a quarter were by or about him or partially
IA, “Lettre sur le bonheur, par M.R.,” –. Geoffrey Brereton, French Comic Drama from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, ), . Quoting Lezay-Marnésia’s L’heureuse famille, Astbury, Moral Tale, . Astbury, Moral Tale, . IA, “La félicité née du malheur. Histoire véritable,” –. IA, “Les souhaits. Conte traduit de l’Arabe,” –; also see IA, “L’ambition vaincu par l’amour,” –, and IA, “Le père avare. Histoire morale,” –.
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authored by him, sometimes without acknowledgment. (This tally does not include items by Voltaire that they published ignorant of his authorship.) The Iris ran many poems that praised Voltaire, for example, sometimes accompanied with his responses. In the fifth issue, the editors asserted that “[e]verything that comes from that celebrated man’s quill is sure to interest,” and they proudly proclaimed they published verse not found in his collected works. Yet however much they praised Voltaire’s “everything,” they carefully determined the “everything” that appeared in the pages of the Iris. This Voltaire was more the exemplar of taste than a satirist, historian, tragedian, or outraged defender of humanity against injustice. He expressed himself most in the verse at which he excelled: “those short works that we call ‘fugitive,” according to Maurice Allen, “which required only fluency, gracefulness, and wit,” and whose charm derived in part from their appearing dashed off rather than struggled over. This Voltaire complimented the literary endeavors of young men and women, solicited the friendship of a departing female guest, declined invitations to join a circle of admirers in the country and a monarch in his northern capital, and thanked the Nantes merchant who named a ship after him. Consistent with the ethos of items already discussed, the Iris’s Voltaire regarded philosophy with some skepticism, though this was not the “philosophie” that the Affiches and the Journal mistrusted for its disrespect of religion, even atheism (Chapter ). Instead, the Iris was concerned about the nature of true wisdom, happiness, and virtue, and who would more likely possess them. In a “Chinese” tale, for example, they were discovered not among conceited literati, obfuscating authors, devotés of epicureanism, or moralists who counseled pitiless punishment of the starving poor, but in the heart of a scorned and exiled court official who had discovered gratitude and the true joys of a simple rural life. A successful pursuit of happiness meant limiting the power of philosophy.
IA, . IA, . Maurice Allen, Anthologie poétique française, XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, ), ; notable exceptions to their overall lightness, “Epître de M. de Voltaire à M. de Saint-Lambert” (IA, –), a heartbreaking memorial to their mistress, Madame du Châtelet, and an over-the-top poem of praise by François de Neufchateau, lifted from the Journal Encyclopédique. IA, “Épître de M. de Voltaire à Madame de Fontaines, auteur du Roman la Comtesse de Savoie,” – and “Vers de M. François, jeune Poëte, à M. de Voltaire, en lui envoyant un exemplaire de ses Ouvrages,” –. IA, “À Madame de S. J. sur son depart de Ferney,” . IA, [Saint-Lambert], “Vers à Mr. de Voltaire,” –; “Lettre au Roi de Dannemarck,” . IA, “Vers au Voltaire, vaisseau de tonneaux, construit à Nantes en ,” –. IA, “Le bienfaiteur & le philosophe. Conte chinois,” –.
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Creating Enlightened Citizens
We have already noted the young man drawn from his study by the tender joys of family life: “descending” from contemplation of the cosmos to the welcoming embrace of a charming wife, the poet’s young friend found happiness by succumbing to “weakness.” Voltaire put it directly and concisely: “You, philosopher! What a project! / Doesn’t it suffice to be loveable? / You prefer, in effect, the air / Of an aged and venerable thinker? . . . Wit, imagination, / The graces, pleasantries, / The love of truth and good taste, / Voilà your philosophy!” The point was not lost on the author of one of the few examples of local poetry published in the Iris, which the editors termed the “least bad” of all they had received. A native of mercantile Bordeaux, he dismissed those “proud” and cold philosophers who condemned his love as “a dangerous delirium”; he spurned the merchant’s gold, demanding to know whether the heart was more joyful in a grandiose palace; he invited his “seductive shepardess” to join him in that “mysterious wood,” always verdant and cool, to complete his happiness. Taken together, the selections of the Iris retailed a secular, sweet, and voluptuous virtue. It echoed a mid-century metropolitan mode of life in which “[p]leasure was the shared endeavor of individuals savoring what their senses perceived as well as of a larger community knitted together by the expression and communication of its pleasures.” Guillaume Faroult writes how reforming intellectuals advanced a familial morality in which conjugal love acquired a new luster, and poets and painters promoted an aesthetic of sensual pleasure that converged with sincere sentiment. Together they evoked an “amorous empire [empire amoureux]” that made “loving comportment the standard of national French identity, of its cultural refinement and, in a word, its civilization.” What Thomas Kavanagh calls “Epicurean Stoicism” legitimated bodily desire and delight while constraining passion, the shipwreck of happiness and reason, by taming the tumultuous with the exquisite. Neither ideological nor internally consistent, the privilege of its practice obviously belonged to the privileged, and its relationship with libertinage is equally clear. But what
IA, “À un ami sur son mariage,” –. Also see IA, “Vers presentés à M. le Comte de SaintFlorentin avec une Pendule,” ; IA, “Anecdotes,” –. IA, “Réponse de M. de Voltaire à la lettre à M. de Voltaire, par Mme la Marquise d’Antremont, en lui envoyant quelques ouvrages en vers,” ; . IA, “Épître à Thémire,” –; also see IA, “Vers à F. M.,” –. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicurianism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, ), , . Guillaume Faroult, L’amour peintre (Reigate, England: Cohen & Cohen, ), –. Ibid., .
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A Slave Named Voltaire
Kavanagh and Faroult describe had little in common with the cruelties of a de Sade even if its literary and visual depictions readily slid from the erotic to the pornographic. Nor did it sacrifice female pleasure on the altar of the male ego; if it continued to privilege a masculine heterosexual norm, it was also “fascinated with female pleasure.” Thus, artists from Watteau to Fragonard explored the subtleties of sentiment and amorous practice; Boucher’s art epitomized this ethos, depicting “voluptuousness without torment” and exalting “painting’s ability to provoke the surprises of pleasure.” But what could this modus vivendi mean when transposed to SaintDomingue’s slave society? Visitors and residents alike rooted the colony’s reputation for libertinage in the sexual disorder of White men consorting with enslaved or free women of color. Recall how the Journal ducked responsibility for this behavior by blaming “new arrivals” who abandoned themselves to “excess” and “intemperance.” Recall the Chambre d’Agriculture clamoring for the importation of White women into the colony. Nor was there anything new about this critique. Decades earlier, missionaries had decried White men’s “libertinage,” “debauchery” and “detestable abuse.” But Garroway has tracked how the slaveholder’s responsibility for abusing his power was gradually displaced “onto the figure of the black woman, conceived as a sexual predator who accrues benefits from the pursuit of free lovers.” As the century progressed, the free woman of color was most lavishly tarred with this very broad brush. In , a colonist in Saint-Domingue condemned enslaved women whose opportunism, lustfulness, and impurity tempted White men to their beds. Asserting that mixed-race women exercised an empire over White men, d’Auberteuil asked how many enslaved women had profited
Ibid., . Ibid., . Quoting Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Kavanaugh, Enlightened Pleasures, . Ibid., . Garroway, The Libertine Island, . Ibid., ; Sherri V. Cummings, “‘They Are Delighted to Dance for Themselves’: Deconstructing Intimacies: Moreau de Saint-Méry’s ‘Danse’ and the Spectre of Black Female Sexuality in Colonial Saint Domingue,” Journal of Caribbean History , no. (): –; evolving views of women of color and White creole women, stereotypes and reality, Jennifer L. Palmer, “The Fruits of Their Labours: Race, Gender and Labour in the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean,” French History , no. (): –; a still useful assessment of historiography on Caribbean women, White, Black, and mixed race, Cécile Vidal, “Femmes et genre dans les historiographies sur les sociétés avec esclavage (caraïbes anglaise et française, XVIIe-mi-XIXe siècle),” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire, no. (/); –; Frédéric Régent, “La répresentation de la ‘négresse’ au travers du prisme de ses relations avec l’homme blanc dans les colonies esclavagistes françaises des Antilles (XVIIe-XIXe siècles),” in Poétique et politique de l’altérité, ed. Karine Bénac-Giroux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, ), –. Garroway, The Libertine Island, . D’Auberteuil, Considérations, :
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Creating Enlightened Citizens
from the right of slaveholders to free their enslaved concubines and legitimize their children through marriage. The women were then well situated to appropriate “the entire fortune of their masters,” who, “stupefied by libertinage,” paid the price of debauchery by sacrificing their family’s wealth to passion. Obviously there is brutal irony as well as injustice in the displacement of guilt onto the enslaved Black or free woman of color, beginning with the origins of the word “libertin” in the Latin term for a freed slave. How could it be that these White colonial “libertines” were enslaved to Black and brown women, dominated by an “unruly” passion that the law should constrain, according to d’Auberteuil and other contemporaries? With its celebration of life’s charms in poems and fables strewn like semi-precious stones on a coverlet, the Iris pursued a different strategy: the subduing of passion by pleasure, the “colored” woman by the White. For she alone could preside over this world of refinement, of delicate emotion exquisitely expressed, and she bore the cultural responsibility that Voltaire defined in the Iris’s thirteenth issue. In an essay that responded to Horace Walpole’s criticism of his characterization of Shakespeare, he defended French tragedy and the French literary culture he exemplified. Paris trumped Antiquity, he asserted, because culture was the business of “thirty thousand souls” who devoted their lives to judging good taste. Voltaire freely acknowledged the critical role women played in this cultural ascendency. Because of them, men had become more delicate, decorous, and refined – in short, more civilized. This was the White female colonial worthy of the new American citizen: She was desire domesticated, a spirited, if submissive companion who could inspire her husband’s passion, his familial devotion, and his cultivation of the gentle, literary arts. Such civilizing objectives arrived in the Iris’s pages in metropolitan terms, but they assumed more point in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality rather than esteemed for its kindness and the art of dalliance. The cultural objectives of the Iris were consistent, too, with the exaggerated optimism expressed earlier in the decade by the Conseil Supérieur and the royal governor, which resembled the cultural aspirations of provincial towns across France. But in Saint-Domingue, they inevitably spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the
Ibid., . Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures, . A missionary’s characterization a century before the Iris, Garroway, The Libertine Island, . IA, “Lettre de M. de Voltaire à M. Horace Walpole. À Ferney, juillet ,” –.
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ubiquitous concubinage of White men with enslaved Black women or free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and all White colonists vastly outnumbered by Black slaves. Thus, like the scientific efforts in Jamaica described in Part I, the Iris and her journalistic brothers engaged in a politics of culture, distinguishing Whites on the basis of civilité and politesse, not just brute power.
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Conclusion to Part II
In Part II, I have speculated that Duchemin-Despaletz, the former editor of the Journal de Saint-Domingue and editor of the Affiches Américaines after Monceaux’s death, might have found inspiration for the Iris Américaine in a reader’s lament of the Journal’s demise. The reader registered his disappointment in the context of a debate about the viability of an academic society on the island. Published in the Affiches in early , it appropriately concludes “Creating the Enlightened Citizen” because it brings us back to Hogu’s celebration in of the colony’s emergence from a buccaneering past into a civilized present. The debaters’ positions provide contrasting views of just how much progress the colony had made toward fulfilling the potential Hogu extolled, while the final intervention of a “slave” underscores the exclusion of the Black population and people of color from the Enlightenment project furthered by the Affiches, the Journal, and the Iris. We join the debate in medias res because we do not have the text of Lerond’s proposal for an intellectual society. But the response of his opponent Delile, published on February , communicates its contents. Delile had nothing but praise for Lerond, “a good patriot and friend of the arts.” He admitted, too, that nothing could be more glorious and fitting to rouse lethargic minds and revive the “taste for literature” than such a society. Yet Delile rejected the possibility, suggesting that the Affiches expand its content to console readers for the Journal’s loss. Three weeks later, he further argued that the island and its society lacked “enlightened subjects” who had the leisure, “unanimous encouragement,” and the freedom of thought essential to cultivating “a truly philosophical soul.” A (White) public that leapt at the chance to return to France, that was burdened by quotidian cares, and whose hearts were ruled by “egotism” would not adequately support such an endeavor. Whatever
AdC, February .
AdC, February .
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Conclusion to Part II
intellectuals existed in the colony would always be too jealous of their time to spend it in meetings. Lerond was correct that provincial cities as well as great capitals supported academies, but they also had collèges and universities. Nor was Lerond’s comparison with ancient Athens apt: “Everything there converged to make it great . . . one lived a long life, [and] everyone divided his time between study and business.” In Saint-Domingue, “[t]he shadows of ignorance” had not yet dissipated, a “tedious boredom” presided in the island’s gatherings, the chat of young creoles suggested nothing scholarly, and good taste was a newcomer. From Sparta to India, Portugal to Tibet, every place had its distinctive character and customs. Saint-Domingue was most amenable to commerce and agriculture. Again, he urged the expansion of the contents of the Affiches; as Monceaux’s literary heir, he even promised to contribute the editor’s portrait of Voltaire. Before refuting every one of Delile’s points, Lerond referenced Voltaire’s witty dismissal of the press in L’Écossaise, speculating that he and Delile were doing nothing more than amusing the colony’s readers. He expressed incredulity at Delile’s complaint about the lack of intellectual freedom. Did he really envy the liberty Londoners enjoyed with impunity? How did being less licentious prevent anyone from being truly philosophical? He was also angered by Delile’s imputations of cultural backwardness. That was true fifty years ago. But the island now had all the elements of a civilized and refined existence: theatrical productions, concerts, libraries, “sumptuous festivals, where gaiety and wit together oppose ‘tedious boredom’.” Elegance had replaced rusticity, and “the love of learning has joined that of luxury.” Where before there had been illiteracy, there were poets, rhetoricians, and men of science, and “printing, an establishment as honorable as it is useful to the nation,” crowned the island’s cultural achievements. Let the Dutch erect statues to the inventor of salt herring. “[Saint-Domingue] is capable of much more than keeping account books and boiling syrup; the luminous state in which we find ourselves . . . decide the matter in my favor.” Yet Lerond’s eloquent defense of Saint-Domingue’s cultural capacities could not silence a “slave” who had the last word on March. I use quotation marks because a White author had clearly adopted this persona to satirize the debaters’ views. To say the least, it is improbable that “Toussaint, Maître-d’Hôtel de Monsieur Lerond,” would have written to the paper without his master’s knowledge or that the paper would publish
AdC, March .
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AdC, March .
Conclusion to Part II
a text that, if authentic, insulted both Lerond and Delile. It is improbable, too, that a slave who introduced himself as a “poor Negro” of little reading would quote Boileau or Madame Deshoulières. Toussaint began with an autobiography that burlesqued the ideal colonial career: his owner, a procureur, had flourished in the colony, returned to France, became a gentleman, and established himself as a “great Seigneur.” He brought along Toussaint, who received his education along with the owner’s stupid son. He cultivated his talents in secret; “although among my comrades the Congos, I am no idiot, they do not know all my savoir faire.” When his owner died, the moronic son consoled himself by purchasing a seat on the Sovereign Court. He forgot about “poor Toussaint,” who was shipped back to the Caribbean and sold for six hundred livres. “I rode in France, and every day here I ride horses worth more than me.” Happily, he was purchased by Monsieur Lerond, whose trust he amply rewarded. His many duties – valet, cook, butler, groom, coachman, and lackey – still left him a little time for writing. The reader might wonder at this long “boring” preamble. “Well, what do I know. I only want to prove that I know how to write, and passably for a Negro, as you see. Beyond that, do you have to have a reason to write?” But Toussaint did have a reason: reconciling the dispute between his master and Delile. However rascally a “Negro,” “I will be impartial and fair.” He declared them both right: An academy could be established, but it would not survive. The failure of the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the intellectual paucity of the Chambres d’Agriculture proved as much. (The Affiches refuted his characterization of the Chambres in a footnote!) Yes, the island had intellectuals, but colonists, while loving and cultivating the arts, did not want to emulate them. They admired and envied a planter’s accomplishments more than Homer’s magnificent verse and genius. Toussaint then assessed the intellectual styles of Delile and Lerond. The former had more erudition than the latter, though Toussaint suspected some of it was borrowed goods. But Delile was wasting his time. Proving that an academy would fail in Saint-Domingue did not require “look[ing] for reasons in China, on the coasts of Coromandel, in India, Formosa, Laos, Tonkin.” Indeed, Toussaint preferred Lerond’s “bonhomie,” his education unburdened by wit. “Our hills inspire in us thoughts more
McClellan, Colonialism and Science, –; Fouchard, Les plaisirs, –. Similar ventriloquism in the British Caribbean context, Thomas W. Krise, “True Novel, False History: Robert Robertson’s Ventriloquized Ex-Slave in ‘The Speech of Mr John Talbot Campo-Bell’ (),” Early American Literature , no. (): –.
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Conclusion to Part II
solid than agreeable, . . . [but] he’s calling me, . . . perhaps he’ll flog me. I’ll let you know in my next, if my correspondence pleases you; I have many more subjects to discuss, which should nevertheless not outweigh the treasures preserved in the portfolio of Monsieur Delile.” Toussaint’s intentional rusticity delineated unambiguously the charmed circle of the White public of allegedly rational citizens and their elegant White wives whom the periodicals of Saint-Domingue simultaneously conjured and addressed. The enslaved Toussaint might learn to read – but never more than “passably.” Perhaps we could read his essay as a sly critique of slavery: that a human being would be valued less than a horse or that a master’s tuition might be better spent on his slave than his dullard son. Not to mention, Toussaint’s almost chuckling allusion to the possibility of a flogging underscored the continuous violence of the slave regime. Yet the ridicule the pseudonymous author heaped on Toussaint makes such an interpretation unlikely. While Toussaint’s intellectual accomplishments perhaps impressed other enslaved, he cut an absurd figure among Whites. He was meant to hold the line, not cross it, between a White public that could participate in informed debate and refined amusements and the Black masses who (it was suggested) innately lacked the capacity to do the same.
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Tristram in the Tropics: or, Reading in Jamaica
. . . or is there not A tongue in every star, that talks with man, And woos him to be wise?
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “A Summer Evening’s Meditation”
. . . what you put into your readings is better than what you find in them, and your active mind makes from the book another book, sometimes better than the first. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloïse
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Introduction to Part III
Vignette : In , several Jamaicans used the sale of a deceased merchant’s stock to add to their book collections. In addition to a mahogany bookcase, one of them purchased the Universal History, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Shakespeare’s plays, Sir Robert Walpole’s Critical History, a two-volume history of America, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, and Aphra Behn’s plays. Another bought Matthew Prior’s poetry, several volumes of the Spectator (that Bible of polite society), translations of two French novels, several volumes of Alexander Pope’s works and of two other periodicals, and a popularizing work of science, Abbé Pluche’s Spectacle de la Nature: or, Nature Delineated. Vignette : In February , Samuel Hayward, a merchant in Savannah-la-Mar and friend of Thomas Thistlewood, received a personal shipment. It included Pierre Bayle’s Biographical Dictionary, Francis Bacon’s Works, a harpsichord, flute, silver soup ladle, and half-a-dozen silver tablespoons. Vignette : In March , James Brands advertised the sale of his “small collection of books” before leaving the island. The advertisement conjures up an image of him drawing a volume from his mahogany bookcase or peering through his “very fine double microscope” while seated in his mahogany chair at his mahogany desk – all on sale, too, along with a mahogany card and backgammon table. Vignette : In April , Thomas Thistlewood copied a recipe for “East-India Soye, or India Ketchup” from John Ellis’s Directions for Bringing over Seeds and Plants, from the East-Indies and Other Distant Countries in a State of Vegetation (). He sent it to his neighbor,
“Inventory and appraisal of the goods chattels and rights and credits of ALEXANDER MACKINTOSH late of Kingston merchant deceased,” JFSGR. MONSON /, February . Cornwall Chronicle, March .
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Introduction to Part III
Mrs. Hannah Blake, with the loan of John Mitchell’s The Present State of Great Britain and North America (). Vignette : In March , the young Scot William Taylor emulated Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in a meandering letter to his friend “Mr. Tom,” a merchant shipman anchored at Montego Bay. A newly minted physician seeking employment in Jamaica, Taylor would find that and a wife soon enough. Meanwhile, he was homesick. After Graham sailed, Taylor asked him to send The Gentle Shepherd and Allan Ramsay’s “other poems, & some such books as will keep me in remembrance of that northern country, which we are too apt to forget here.” These vignettes suggest that acquiring publications was as important for Jamaicans as it was for people living in Britain and colonists living in North America and that they did so for similar reasons. John Brewer has written that the book became “almost as common a prop as a spouse, a house or an animal in genteel paintings” in eighteenth-century Britain. According to James Raven, “men and women of property regarded [books] as vehicles of enlightenment and instruction, but also, in consequence, as instruments of social and cultural assertiveness.” Books satisfied another need in the Atlantic world: “respond[ing] to the needs of [North American] colonists to participate in authentic Englishness,” as Jennifer Myland puts it. Raven seconds her, writing that book imports were “lifelines of identity . . . direct material links to a present and past European culture.” Assuming the same held true in Jamaica seems natural enough. Yet Mary Ricketts, the wife of a Jamaican planter, would disagree; in , she sniffed that her family would be carrying its books back to England “as a taste for literature Does by no Means Prevail in this country.” Testimony thirty years later would appear to confirm her dismal view. In Bibliotheca
MONSON /, April . William Taylor to Thomas Graham, March , fol. r, Airth Papers, MSS , NLS, Edinburgh. Ibid., March , fols. r–r. Ibid., August , fol. v. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, ), . James Raven, “Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” Library & Information History , no. (): . Jennifer Mylander, “Early Modern ‘How-To’ Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies , no. (): . James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, – (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, ), . Quoted by Roderick Cave, Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies (London: The Pindar Press, ), .
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Americana (), Leman Thomas Rede followed a paean to the state of letters in the United States – its writers, readers, newspapers, intellectual institutions, circulating libraries, and press – with a dispiriting characterization of the West Indies. “Every gentleman almost takes out his own library with him.” Once in the islands, his sources of books were limited to those merchants who imported a few “with their other goods,” and someone in the island’s capital who “calls himself a bookseller, who binds, deals in stationary, and keeps a few books” to sell at inflated prices. My vignettes show that a dozen years before Ricketts wrote, at least a few Jamaicans had serious reading tastes and had found means other than Rede’s to satisfy them. The question of what books were coming into Jamaica, how many, and how they were acquired matters a great deal because publication was the most important way for Jamaicans to connect with Enlightenment intellectual culture. Yet while there has been vigorous scholarly research in the histories of the book and reading for Great Britain and North America, the colonial Caribbean has been neglected. While there are pioneering works by Frank Cundall and Roderick Cave, the British Caribbean does not appear at all in the authoritative The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (). The reputation for philistinism probably accounts for some of this neglect. But securing evidence – from what books were coming into the island to who was buying them – is difficult to find and, once found, is often fragmentary. Despite such difficulties, “Tristram in the Tropics” reveals the same dynamic in Jamaica with respect to reading as in Parts I and II: the continuation in the colony of metropolitan trends and their adaption to suit colonists’ needs and purposes. A first, impressionistic chapter ranges from the late s through the late s, chronological boundaries roughly based on the “reading lives” of Thomas Thistlewood and Robert Long. It focuses on “how” and “what” questions: How did White Jamaicans – men and women, overseers, merchants, lawyers, physicians, and planters – acquire the publications British presses were churning out in abundance, and what did they want? Here books figure in a larger story about the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, including the “gentrification” of the library. It is the same world of intellectual and cultural consumption in which Jamaicans, like their French counterparts,
Leman Thomas Rede, Bibliotheca Americana (London, ), . Cave quotes Henry Lemoine, Gentleman’s Magazine (), who drew on Rede. Cave, Printing and the Book Trade, . On British publication growth, David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, ), .
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Introduction to Part III
found room for globes, telescopes, and microscopes in their parlors, wrote to newspapers, and attended theater. Chapters and explore Thistlewood’s and Long’s reading practices, shifting the focus to the “why” and “how” questions of reading. Answering these questions is difficult because the evidence tends to be idiosyncratic, resisting generalization. William Taylor’s letter to Mr. Tom tells us a great deal about the importance of reading and the significance of particular authors to that young man. But such evidence is a lucky find and requires contextualization. Commonplace books, in which readers recorded their reading and (sometimes) their reactions, also tell us a great deal about past readers. As we will see with Long and Thistlewood, they are no less idiosyncratic and no more transparent. Yet however particular, commonplace books capture that intensely personal, unpredictable interaction between reader and text, which social, political, and cultural contexts inform, but cannot determine. As Alberto Manguel puts it, reading is not “an automatic process of capturing a text in the way photosensitive paper captures light, but a bewildering, labyrinthine, common and yet personal process of reconstruction.” The ubiquity of commonplacing has made it possible to connect the personal with the social and the political in some situations. Analyzing the evidence for how English men and women “read” the Scottish Enlightenment, David Allan has shown how reading contributed to the creation of a British identity. Similarly, because many commonplace books were produced in the North American colonies, Mark Towsey has established the importance of reading historical works to eighteenthcentury readers, how it enabled them to accomplish important intellectual and cultural work, such as constructing political identities. In other
Quoting Alberto Manguel, Mark R. M. Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, – (Leiden: Brill, ), ; John Brewer, “Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, “Introduction,” and Richard Wittmann, “Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, ), –, –. David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, – (New York and London: Routledge, ). Mark Towsey, Reading History in Britain and America, c. – (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, ). Also see Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, ); The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover, ed. Kevin Berland, Jan Kirsten Gilliam, and Kenneth A. Lockridge (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); John Fea, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), esp. chaps. and .
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words, Allan and Tansey overcome the problem of generalizing from deeply personal sources because so many of them exist. Scholars will hopefully locate more such evidence of reading in the British Caribbean. Yet the rarity of the evidence we do have does not nullify its utility – indeed, it makes Thistlewood’s and Long’s abundant reading records that much more precious. While analyzing them cannot support the kind of larger claims made by Allan and Towsey for Britain and North America, they suggest a spectrum of Jamaican reading practices and readers’ concerns, which resembled those of metropolitan counterparts and were informed by their colonial context. Most important, they reveal a central Enlightenment dynamic in action. Enlightenment authors wrote to change people’s minds – an inescapably personal and largely invisible event, yet one whose consequences potentially extended far beyond the individual. As Allan writes, “the Enlightenment itself was no neatlypackaged product” that grateful readers passively received; it was “nothing more than whatever a man or woman reading . . . at that point actually construed [Enlightenment] as being.” I would add that the Enlightenment was nothing less than these acts of personal appropriation, whose diversity these chapters document. So when we analyze Thistlewood’s and Long’s notes, we peek over the shoulders of readers at precisely those moments of intellectual engagement and potential transformation. In these chapters, we see them changing their minds – or not! – by focusing on how two subjects surfaced in their notes: one of particular concern to us, race and slavery, a second of concern to them, religion.
Adapting Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, .
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Allan, Making British Culture, .
Whence, Whither, and Which Books?
Acquiring books in Jamaica was no doubt more challenging and expensive than in the metropole, thus requiring some creative adaptation of metropolitan practices. Whatever the amenities of Spanish Town and Kingston, the “cultural infrastructure” of urban life was comparatively underdeveloped, and the potential market for books was small compared to that of most North American colonies. Race is obviously a poor proxy for literacy. Not every White was literate, some few slaves would have been, and even more free people of color no doubt were. Yet even working from this flawed assumption, the Jamaican market was small. At mid-century, there were roughly twelve thousand Whites in Jamaica. South Carolina’s White population was more than double that, and Virginia’s, more than ten times Jamaica’s. Striking advantageous deals with metropolitan suppliers with respect to credit and discounting was complex for North American vendors. Was it any easier in Jamaica? If we credit Giles Barber’s figures for British book imports into Jamaica, their number was comparable to that of New York, which had a White population of nearly , (Figure .). Barber himself tendered his statistics and analysis cautiously, and scholars since then
From Pitman and Brathwaite, Douglas F. Mann, “Becoming Creole: Material Life and Society in Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica” (PhD dissertation, University of Georgia, ), . James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, –; James N. Green, “The British Book in North America,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume : –, ed. Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; Nick Wrightson, “Bookmen, Naturalists and British Atlantic Communication, c. –,” in Books between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, –, ed. Leslie Howsam and James Raven (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –.
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2000 1800
CWT (hundredweight)
1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0
1750 1751 1752 1753 1754 1755 1756 1757 1758 1759 1760 1761 1762 1763 1764 1765 1766 1767 1768 1769 1770 1771 1772 1773 1774 YEAR Jamaica
New York
Figure . British book exports from London to Jamaica and New York, –. Based on Barber, “Books from the Old World to the New”
Tristram in the Tropics
have raised concerns. Yet it seems safe to conclude that more books were coming into Jamaica than its reputation for philistinism would lead us to expect. Douglas F. Mann’s statistics suggest reasonably widespread book ownership in Jamaica. This is just one of the categories of consumer goods he analyzes over several decades of Kingston probate inventories. As not all probates included the same kinds of information, comparison is difficult. Also, he analyzes only the estates of Kingston residents, revealing more about city dwellers than people living in the countryside, though planters kept city homes, too. Caveats aside, he found that percent of the nearly four hundred households he studied possessed books between and . The average by decade dipped from a high of percent in , paralleling drops in nearly all categories of goods as the American Revolution slowed the economy and Saint-Domingue offered increasingly stiff competition. Statistics represent groups, of course, but Mann’s work can reveal more about individuals when considered in the context of the affordability of books and the incomes of White Jamaicans. Books remained expensive during the eighteenth century, so building a collection required a greater investment proportionally than it does now. In Table ., I estimate what Brands paid for the titles he put up for sale in , though we must keep in mind that prices depended on factors such as format, edition, whether the book was new or used, etc. – none of which is known for the books Brands was selling. Caveats aside, the eight titles he mentioned total more than £ of the value of what he described as a “small collection.” Robert D. Hume stresses the enormous difficulty of converting eighteenthcentury prices into contemporary buying power. Here I provide a range, the bottom based on the National Archives calculator, the top on Hume’s low-end conversion factor, which he developed expressly for cultural
Giles Barber, “Books from the Old World and for the New,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , no. (): ; caveats, Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” :; on possible re-exports from Barbados, David McKitterick, “Books for Barbados and the British Atlantic Colonies in the Early Eighteenth Century: ‘A Catalogue of books to be sold by Mr. Zouch’,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society , part (): ; Jamaican imports of Scottish books, Warren McDougall, “Copyright Litigation and the Rise of the Scottish Book Trade,” Edinburgh Bibliographical Society (): ; Warren McDougall, “Scottish Books for America in the Mid-th Century,” in Spreading the Word: The Distribution Networks of Print, –, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester, UK: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, ), esp. table . Mann, “Becoming Creole,” –. Ibid., . J. E. Elliott, “The Cost of Reading in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Auction Sale Catalogues and the Cheap Literature Hypothesis,” ELH , no. (): –, esp. , .
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Table . Estimated value of books advertised for sale by James Brands Titles Chambers’ Dictionary of the Arts & Sciences Beawe’s Lex Mercatoria Lyttleton’s History of Henry II Robertson’s History of Scotland Rollin’s Ancient History Hume’s Essays Sully’s Memoirs Total
Value in British currency
Approximate buying power today
l s*
–
l s d** l s* l s** s* l s* s
– – – – – –
l s d
£–,
Range: rounded values from National Archives currency converter and Hume’s low-end conversion factor. * Value from William Cater, A Select Catalogue of Books (London, ). None of the values are for editions after , and some were secondhand. When more than one edition was available, I selected the less expensive. ** Value from William Bent, A General Catalogue of Books (London, ).
goods. Their value in twenty-first-century terms, nearly £, for just eight titles, is staggering even using the conservative National Archives conversion factors. If Brands were an attorney or merchant serving the local trade, he enjoyed an income of £,–, in local currency, so could afford it. But income disparity among the White population was great. Respectable vocations of schoolmaster or surgeon earned £, while an overseer on a small estate and a surgeon working on an estate would earn the same, though neither paid room and board. Jamaican Whites might appear to have been doing well overall given that only . percent of families in England and Wales earned £ or more in . But the cost of living in Jamaica was extremely high. Trevor Burnard, Laura Panza, and Jeffrey Williamson have calculated that the same “bare bone” basket of
Robert D. Hume, “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power – and Some Problems in Cultural Economics,” Huntington Library Quarterly , no. (): –; National Archives currency calculator, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currencyconverter/. Jamaican pound=. pounds sterling. Trevor Burnard, Laura Panza, and Jeffrey Williamson, “Living Costs, Real Incomes and Inequality in Colonial Jamaica,” Explorations in Economic History (): , .
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Table . Frequency and average value of books in Kingston estates, – (Jamaican currency) Wealth Decile (£) >, ,–, ,–, ,–, ,–, –, – – – –
Frequency of Books (%)
Average Value of Books (£)
Average Value of Estate (£)
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
,. ,. ,. ,. . . . . . .
Based on Mann, “Becoming Creole,” –,
necessities cost nearly £ in Jamaica, nearly £ in London, and just over £ in Boston in . Mann’s research mirrors this extreme inequality of wealth with deciles ranging from £ to at the bottom to the highest at more than £, (Table .). The average value of estates from the first to the second decile is a cliff. The differences between the remaining deciles are not as dramatic. The average value of books in estates from to varied widely, depending on decile. Yet Mann found inventories recording book ownership at every wealth decile across the decades, ranging from nearly percent for the bottom decile to nearly percent at the sixth (£,–,). The average value of books in estates in the first decile is ten times the lowest. But the seventh and eighth deciles exceed the highest with £. and £., respectively. The significance of this is unclear, and perhaps we should not make too much of it given the problematic nature of Mann’s sources. Still, this may reflect these groups’ greater sense of social and cultural striving while the unspeakably wealthy top decile simply did not have to try as hard. Just what purchases an individual could make at each income level depended on many factors, including whether they bought new or used, the markup on imported publications, the differential between Jamaican
Ibid., . Ibid.
Mann, “Becoming Creole,” .
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Ibid., .
Ibid., .
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and British currency, etc. Nonetheless, if we are satisfied with using Hume’s English prices, a reader in the lowest decile could still have purchased pamphlets and broadsides. They could even have afforded to weep over Richardson’s Clarissa or Pamela, though they would have paid dearly for the privilege. A small-format Shakespeare at £ would have exceeded the means of many, if not most people in Mann’s lowest decile. On the other hand, while the three-volume, three guinea edition of Tobias Smollett’s Complete History of England (–) would have been out of reach of many Jamaicans, many would have been able to afford it through the much cheaper sixpenny instalments. All this makes Raven’s assertion that West Indian libraries were generally small unsurprising. North American libraries were usually small, too. Indeed, for most middle-income metropolitans, “the decision to compile anything more than a small shelf of literary titles would not have been made lightly,” and what they did compile often became a point of pride. So when Robert Long commented in the early s that there was “scarce a set of books in the country deserves the name of a library,” he spoke the truth, though no doubt to congratulate himself on his own collection. Wil Voerhoeven’s “well-heeled West Indian planters” no doubt did the same as, “increasingly taking on the airs of English gentlemen,” they backed up their social pretensions with a “well-stocked library.” Yet when Robert recorded his condescending observation, many of the great houses of his caste were not that great. Things had changed by the time his brother Edward noted in the History of Jamaica () how “greatly improved” houses in town and country alike had become. Merchants led the way, but planters did not drag their feet when it came to extensive building projects that figured in their
Hume, “The Value of Money,” –; Mann, “Becoming Creole,” –. Towsey, Reading History in Britain and America, . Raven, The Business of Books, . Burnard noted few books in the Jamaican wills he reviewed. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire, n. Elizabeth Carroll Reilly and David D. Hall, “Customers and the Market for Books,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, :. Elliott, “Cost of Reading,” . Gary Kates, The Books That Made the European Enlightenment: A History in Twelve Case Studies (London: Bloomsbury, ), . Kates’s chapter is a useful overview of the development of the reading public during the eighteenth century. BRIS-Ms, “Reflections,” . Wil Voerhoeven, “The Global British Novel,” in English and British Fiction, –, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), :. Quoting Edward Long, Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), .
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“self fashioning as refined British citizens.” Louis Nelson’s descriptions in Architecture and Empire in Jamaica do not mention libraries, but their owners certainly acquired books and no doubt shelved them, if not in a room apart, then in handsome furnishings as one of those “material acts of refinement employed to resist the violence and provincialism that so clearly marked Jamaica throughout the eighteenth century.” Did Phillip Pinnock neglect to create space for books in his “spacious and elegant mansion near Half-Way Tree,” inspired by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio? Would Charles Price, who expended so much energy and lucre making his plantation “picturesque” and who owned a collection of forty-eight prints and landscapes, overlook books? One of those well-stocked, patrician libraries belonged to Ballard Beckford. Its value of £ dwarfed Mann’s average of £ for his highest decile. The inventory deserves a closer look because it includes titles, thus conveys some information about reading preferences; it also makes an illuminating contrast to the more modest, if still substantial contents of Samuel Hayward’s library. Beckford (–) was a member of the planter dynasty; he had a library at Frontier Estate in St. Mary’s parish, which he inherited from his father, also a Ballard. Ballard senior had been both infamous on account of a scandalous affair and notable for his service in the Assembly of Jamaica and as Justice of the Peace. He had been dead four years when his Valley estate was attacked in the early phase of Tacky’s Revolt (in fact, the revolt’s leaders, Jamaica and Tacky had both been slaves on the family’s Frontier estate). Ballard junior died soon after its violent suppression. The inventory, which dates from , gives the impression of stolid seriousness. It suggests that Ballard senior had kept his books from his studies at Oxford, where he matriculated in . The presence of Greek and Latin dictionaries and grammars, as well as classical works in Latin, attests to the continuing importance of classical texts in educational curricula.
Ibid., . Ibid., ; also, Robertson, “Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism,” –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Many thanks to James Robertson for Beckford’s inventory. Trevor Burnard, “‘A Matron in Rank, A Prostitute in Manners’: The Manning Divorce of and Class, Gender, Race, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Verene A. Shepherd (New York: Palgrave, ), –. Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, , ; also see Introduction to Part I. Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, – (Oxford, ), . John Gilmore, “The British Empire and the Neo-Latin Tradition: The Case of Francis Williams,” in Classics and Colonialism, ed. Barbara Goff (London: Duckworth, ), ; Alicia C. Montoya,
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Research has also shown that this category of books was not merely present, but robust throughout the eighteenth century. This was due in part to the vigorous production of translations, many of which graced Ballard’s bookshelves. We should note as well the social reasons for Antiquity’s persistence: The ancient world was considered “a domain to be acquired as a polite accomplishment,” and knowledge of classical poetry was a badge of status, sometimes even identified as “manly” knowledge. Seventeenth-century works also found eighteenth-century readers as attested by the presence on Ballard’s shelves of such works as Robert Boyle’s writings and French classics by Bishop Bossuet and Molière. Yet the Ballards did not neglect eighteenth-century authors, such as Ephraim Chambers’s indispensable Cyclopaedia and the ubiquitous Works by Alexander Pope and by Voltaire. In the evening, family members might have taken turns reading aloud Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, even shedding tears for its sentimental heroes. Father and son perhaps perused together two very influential, popularizing works of science, John Theophilus Desaguliers’s Course of Experimental Philosophy and de La Pluche’s Spectacle de la Nature; they could also consult practical works on trade and commerce, medical problems, surveying, gardening and horticulture, and the law. The lack of overlap in contents between Ballard’s library with Samuel Hayward’s is striking. Inventoried by Thistlewood in , it contained roughly half the number of titles, though was nothing to sneeze at. Hayward also owned serious works, such as John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Rousseau’s Social Contract, translations of a few classical works, volumes on medicine, and practical how-to books on brewing and tailoring. Overall, though, the collection lacked historical or scientific works. Instead, belles lettres and novels occupied much shelf space. Indeed, Hayward’s library warns us against settling for simplistic characterizations of female and male reading interests, especially the notion that women were the novel’s chief readers. Despite all the
“Enlightenment? What Enlightenment? Reflections on Half a Million Books (British, French, and Dutch Private Libraries, –),” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –. Montoya, “Enlightenment?,” ; also, “The Enlightenment Books Project at Pomona College: A Bibliographical Checklist of Eighteenth-Century Editions,” https://kates.itg.pomona.edu/books/ index.php. Klein, “Politeness,” n. Penelope Wilson, “Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (Leicester and New York: Leicester University Press and St Martin’s Press, ), –. Montoya, “Enlightenment?,” –. MONSON /, –.
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public handwringing about their deleterious effects on women, scholarship suggests that men read novels avidly while novels comprised just a portion of women’s diverse reading fare. But asserting that Hayward liked novels says little. A capacious genre, its subjects ranged from the scurrilous to the sentimental, the vicious to the edifying, the raucous to the refined. “Sentimental” novels, that “lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes” of readers, were neither the most numerous nor even the most popular among metropolitan readers. Hayward owned the trailblazer of this sub-genre, Richardson’s Clarissa (). Yet he also owned several works by Henry Fielding, including Amelia, which Richardson claimed he could not read because the “characters and situations [are] so wretchedly dirty and low.” Hayward’s shelves accommodated other antitheses to sentimental literature, such as Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle and Roderick Random (). These “ramble novels” entertained readers of both sexes with cruel pranks, scatological humor, broad satire, violence, and misogyny. Translation brought continental, if mostly French, works to Hayward’s bookshelves, including Voltaire and Smollett’s popular translation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Given the size of his collection, Hayward perhaps devoted an entire room to it as his friend Thistlewood did, though obviously neither library would have been particularly grand. They would have been exceptional, too, as Abigail Williams asserts that most of the English “middling-sort” would not have had libraries at all. Instead, they housed their books in the parlour, “the place of entertainment, with its card tables, gaming boards, [and] musical instruments . . . often arranged to facilitate groups sitting together.” Indeed, the furnishings Brands advertised for sale suggest just such a multipurpose room, and Mann’s research confirms the Jamaican hunger for furniture that would reflect their owners’ gentility while accommodating the needs of business, socializing, and private domesticity. In Britain, the manufacture of library furniture fueled a growth industry that satisfied a “boom in the fashioning and equipping of domestic libraries, from the palatial attempts of the great (and often new) wealth
Williams, Social Life of Books, . Hayward perhaps purchased some materials for his daughter, fifteen, though many titles do not appear age appropriate. Thomas Keymer, “Sentimental Fiction: Ethics, Social Critique and Philanthropy,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, –, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . E. J. Clery, “The Novel in the s,” in English and British Fiction, –, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), :. Ibid. Williams, Social Life of Books, . Mann, “Becoming Creole,” chap. , –.
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to the emulative ventures of provincial gentlefolk and well-to-do tradesmen.” Jamaican readers replicated this metropolitan “gentrification” of the library, combing through advertisements in their local newspapers for modest bookcases with glass doors to more impressive, expensive furniture, such as a multipurpose, “elegant mahogany cloaths press, bureau, & bookcase with Chinese door, nine feet high and seven long.” Indeed, Jamaican advertisements tutor the scholar in the growing list of requisite appurtenances, services, and amusements that enabled colonists to participate in the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. Along with their North American and metropolitan counterparts, they had apparently “tasted comfort and luxury and increasingly called it happiness.” I have already noted how Hayward’s copies of Bayle and Bacon arrived with a flute and harpsichord. By , the Weech’s, another merchant family of Savannah-la-Mar, owned a harpsichord, too. The colonial family that could not afford one might get lucky at a raffle or settle for a secondhand one. Failing that, one could still while away the evening with musical entertainment. In June , the printing office at Montego Bay advertised the sale of “German flutes,” guitar and fiddle strings, “a parcel of Italian and English music by the best composers,” and even ruled music paper for aspiring composers. Musical instruments brought music masters. In February , Jacob Sanguinetti advertised instruction in the German flute “after a most easy and expeditious method.” In , a young lady could display her musical accomplishments in rooms painted in colors after “the much admired plan at present use in the most polite parts of Europe.” In , educational institutions and tutors stood ready to teach islanders’ sons the classical languages “so essentially necessary to a critical and perfect knowledge of the English tongue, and to a genteel and finished education”; they also taught modern history and natural philosophy, which would “enlarge their minds” and “fit them for conversation.”
Raven, “Debating Bibliomania,” ; Raven, “Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading, –. Jamaica Gazette, January ; Jamaica Mercury, – January and June . T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . MONSON /, April . Cornwall Chronicle, January . Royal Gazette, July . Cornwall Chronicle, June . Royal Gazette, February ; also, Additional Postscript, – March . Royal Gazette, October and April . Wolmer Free School’s curriculum, Jamaica Mercury, June ; similar North American advertisements, Carl Robert Keyes, “Selling Gentility and Pretending Morality: Education and
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These accomplished men and women would leave their well-appointed homes in their custom-painted coaches for an evening out, frequently at the theater. The cultural claims of the island’s theaters were formidable. In , a performance in Kingston began with a prologue that celebrated it as a “faithful mirror” that would reflect the “blooming virtues” of the audience: “Long may they flourish – long in vigour bloom, /’Till fair rival Greece and Rome!” When Montego Bay opened its own theater in , the local newspaper crowed how the town had acquired what “the wisest and most learned men of the present age” considered “a matter of the highest utility.” Theater was not only “the most rational entertainment human nature is capable of enjoying,” it was also “highly conducive to enlarging the mind, [and] polish[ing] the manners.” In other words, people with the wherewithal to purchase books did not do so simply because reading provided useful information, pleased them, or satisfied their curiosity. Books figured amongst other cultural commodities – musical and scientific instruments, globes and maps, prints and paintings, concerts and theatrical performances – that along with chinaware and mirrors signaled politeness. This serves as a warning, too, against overestimating readers’ intellectual engagement with their reading material. As one contemporary put it in , “a fashionable writer makes a fashionable book, and creates a number of fashionable readers – readers who pay more attention to the fashion of the writer, than to the fashion of the book.” But how did Jamaicans get books? They could resort to the two means Rede mentioned: merchants who imported them along with other merchandise and bookselling operations usually associated with printshops. In December , for example, Quick and Brewer announced the availability of “volumes of entertaining history, spelling books and primers, [and] humorous prints” at the end of a long list of merchandise that included cider, “Negro” hats and pipes, and garden seeds. In July , William
Newspaper Advertisements in Philadelphia, –,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , no. (): –. Royal Gazette, July . Poem in Gentleman’s Magazine () by Dr. Benjamin Moseley, author of A Treatise on the Diseases of Tropical Climates. Cornwall Chronicle, February . On increasing amenities, especially in Kingston, Robertson, “Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism,” esp. –; Wilson, The Island Race, –. Quoting S. Paterson, James Raven, “Libraries for Sociability: The Advance of the Subscription Library,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Volume : –, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Cornwall Chronicle, December .
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Angus and Co. had a wide variety of books “just arrived” from London in “all the arts and sciences” along with novels and plays – all “approved” and many “choice.” The advertisements of booksellers did not usually include titles, either. An exception of April announced dictionaries and materials useful for training merchants and managing shipping; Samuel Martin’s An Essay on Plantership, which will show up frequently in this discussion; Peter Miller’s Gardener’s Calendar, unsurprising given what we learned in Part I about Jamaican horticultural interests; “some Bibles”; Tobias Smollett’s History of England and John Campbell’s Concise History of Spanish America, both proven sellers. More typically, the Montego Bay printing office ran an advertisement in June that simply announced “a few new books” on sale with “Negro knives,” “Speckled silk stockings,” and other merchandise. Jamaican printers also followed metropolitan precedent by establishing circulating libraries. The first had been founded in England in Bath in the s; at mid-century, they took off despite complaints that inappropriate reading materials were getting into the wrong hands, that is, women or the socially undistinguished. Some were impressive, chic emporiums; many became centers of polite sociability. In North America, four were established between and . Four opened in Jamaica in the decade after . William Aikman, a loyalist who immigrated to Jamaica, established the first, no doubt expecting the same success he had enjoyed with a circulating library in Annapolis. Yet his and two others failed within a short time, though one survived well into the nineteenth century. Perhaps the greatest contribution these intellectual entrepreneurs made
Cornwall Chronicle, July . St. Jago Intelligencer, April . Cornwall Chronicle, June . Raven, “Libraries for Sociability,” . David Allan, “Circulation,” in English and British Fiction, –, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; Jan Fergus, “Eighteenth-Century Readers in Provincial England: The Customers of Samuel Clay’s Circulating Library and Bookshop in Warwick, –,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , no. (): ; Edward Jacobs, “Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History,” Book History (): –; K. A. Manley, “Booksellers, Peruke-Makers, and RabbitMerchants: The Growth of Circulating Libraries in the Eighteenth Century,” in Libraries and the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, ), –; Manley, “Scottish Circulating and Subscription Libraries”; James Raven, “From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading in Eighteenth-Century Libraries,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, –; Raven, “Libraries for sociability,” from ; Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, chap. three. Calhoun Winton, “The Southern Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” –; Ross W. Beales and James N. Green, “Libraries and Their Users,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, –. Cave, Printing and the Book Trade, –.
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to Jamaican readers was the sale of their stock – hardly trivial given the size of the Jamaican market. But the alert Jamaican reader also acquired books secondhand as metropolitans did. An advertisement of suggested a collection for sale upon departure of “ volumes of modern books, on most subjects.” Estate sales brought secondhand books onto the market, too, such as the sale at the Royal Gazette’s office of a “choice Collection of BOOKS” in November . In February , the successful merchant William McMurdo was auctioning off a substantial collection – indeed, it included a long list of titles that reads like a canonical representation of eighteenthcentury literature. Yet even if newspaper advertisements yielded more information about book imports and sales in Jamaica, it would still underestimate the amount of published material coming into the island and would not represent the spectrum of Jamaican preferences. Like William Taylor, Jamaicans asked relatives and friends to send books. Simon Taylor, “one of the most powerful and controversial slaveholders ever to have lived in the British Empire,” stressed his preference for largely informative reading materials when asking his brother in to send no more plays as he had no time to waste. They ordered books through metropolitan agents, made their own purchases on trips to the metropole, and lent to and borrowed from other colonists. Again, the evidence for such transactions is fragmentary and dispersed. In London in , for example, Joseph Lee listed three books at the end of a page-and-a-half shipment destined for a relative in Jamaica. How many other such addenda have disappeared? Two much longer orders of give insight into this means of acquisition as well as the diversity of Jamaican interests. When Thistlewood arrived in Jamaica in , he brought books. He added to his collection nearly every year with requests to Henry Hewitt, his London agent. He usually received his orders in the spring, which often arrived on the same ship, and he usually recorded their contents in his journal. In April , he received twenty titles. By this time, he owned his own home and land and thus could indulge his horticultural passion
On secondhand market, Raven, “From Promotion to Proscription,” ; Elliot, “Cost of Reading,” . Royal Gazette, September , January . Royal Gazette, November . Royal Gazette, – February . Petley, White Fury, , . “ Invoice goods to Jamaica from Joseph Lee,” A Parcel of Ribbons, http://aparcelofribbons.co .uk/collections/. MONSON /.
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and set up a library. His choices for the year ranged widely, but they were all nonfiction, except for the popular poem The Shipwreck by William Falconer. Several titles attest to his interest in botany and horticulture, but these were not his only scientific interests. He followed up on an earlier reading of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity with Benjamin Wilson’s Observations upon Lightning (), and he received specialized works for his stargazing. A Voyage towards the North Pole by Constantine Phipps attests to the contemporary enthusiasm for travel accounts. His selection of John Trusler’s An Easy Way to Prolong Life, by a Little Attention to What We Eat and Drink (?) reflect contemporary worries about personal health, which were even more acute among Caribbean colonists. An interesting choice perhaps related to Thistlewood’s religious concerns (Chapter ) was The Philosophical Essay on Man, authored by the future French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. In it, Marat attempted to defend the existence of an immaterial and immortal soul in the face of two influential views of human physiology, one that, according to Keith Baker, “found the soul everywhere in the body” and another materialist vision that “found it nowhere.” Purchasing William Russell’s Essay on the Characters, Manners, and Genius of Women reflects the ambivalent, sometimes misogynous views expressed in his commonplace books, though this was, in fact, a liberal translation of Antoine Thomas’s Essai sur les femmes and expressed more positive views of women’s civilizing role. But what drew Thistlewood to The Wonders of the Little World, an oft-reprinted seventeenth-century compendium of erudition by the divine Thomas Wanley? Thistlewood’s shipment also included four very different periodicals. The Annual Register, which he ordered nearly every year, “enjoyed a reputation as a highly objective publication that provided expansive information.” In contrast, the “trademarks” of Town and Country Magazine were “celebrity sexual exposés and transcripts from adultery
MONSON /, December . Ann Savours, “‘A Very Interesting Point in Geography’: The Phipps Expedition towards the North Pole,” Arctic , no. (): –. Keith Baker, “Was Marat a Vitalist?,” in Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Jenna M. Gibbs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Natasha Lee, “Sex in Translation: Antoine Léonard Thomas’s ‘Essai sur les femmes’ and the Enlightenment Debate on Women,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –; Mary Catherine Moran, “L’essai sur les femmes/Essay on Women: An Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Journey,” History Workshop Journal, no. (): –. Merethe Roos, “Struensee in Britain: The Interpretation of the Struensee Affair in British Periodicals, ,” in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals as Agents of Change: Perspectives on Northern Enlightenment, ed. Ellen M. Krefting, Aina Nøding, and Mona R. Ringvej (The Netherlands: Brill, ), .
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trials.” Covent Garden Magazine was salacious, containing “sexy stories and advertisements for prostitutes and brothels (including prices).” In contrast, Copper Plate Magazine, which Thistlewood purchased for three years, fostered cultural literacy by combining visual and verbal representations of estimable men, historical moments, worthy edifices such as stately aristocratic country homes, and scenes from classical mythology and Fenélon’s Telemachus, the ever-popular account of the adventures of Odysseus’s son. Nathaniel Phillips no doubt arranged for a book shipment during a trip to England. His list suggests a serious reader, too, though one who made very different choices. Born in England in , Phillips was the illegitimate son of a merchant trading in Kingston. He arrived there in and set up a partnership, which saddled him with debt when his partner died. Purchasing a half share of a plantation, he had the savvy to marry the daughter of the planter who owned the other half. He eventually inherited his father-in-law’s sugar estate, and he went on to purchase three other properties, retiring to Wales in a wealthy man. We do not know how large his collection was when he arranged his order, but he was probably not starting from scratch. Clare Taylor characterizes Phillips as not “widely read,” but this does not mean indifference to reading. Why else order the Critical Review, comprised chiefly of book reviews, and James Robson’s A Catalogue of Very Valuable Books in All Languages and Sciences? Later we will see how Thistlewood looked to books to help him take on his new duties as a plantation overseer. A merchant-turned-planter, Phillips also sought expertise from books: that classic of the Agricultural Enlightenment, Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, John Mortimer’s The Whole Art of Husbandry, Nathaniel Kent’s Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, Martin’s Essay on Plantership, William Donaldson’s Agriculture Considered as a Moral and Political Duty (), and a “French treatise on sugar refining.” Martin’s Essay contrasts sharply with the others because it specifically addressed the region’s agriculturalists. So
Ibid., . Roy Porter, “Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), . Kenneth Morgan, Introduction to the Jamaican Material in the Slebech Papers, “The West Indies Slavery, Plantations, and Trade, –,” British Online Archives. Cave, Printing and the Book Trade, n, inventory at . Clare Taylor, “The Journal of an Absentee Proprietor, Nathaniel Phillips of Slebach,” The Journal of Caribbean History , no. (): .
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did the French treatise, which was most likely Duhamel du Monceau’s Art de rafiner le sucre, a publication of the Académie Royale des Sciences that covered the process of sugar refining in sixty-four pages and ten plates. These “how-to” works differ greatly from the book by Donaldson, former secretary of a Jamaican governor. It was largely a historical work, which the Monthly Review characterized as “the patriot’s contribution toward relieving his country from the growing evils brought upon it by the increase of luxury, the dearness or scarcity of the necessaries of life, and the consequent multiplicity of the national poor.” Living in the multilingual Caribbean, Phillips ordered many dictionaries and grammars in French, English, and Spanish. His order included important educational works by Thomas Sheridan and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. This perhaps reflected at-a-distance concern for his children’s education for he had sent them to England after his wife’s death. Other works suggest an interest in natural philosophy: the Philosophical Grammar, which focused on “experimental physiology or natural history” authored by one of the most successful scientific popularizers during the eighteenth century, Benjamin Martin; Baron Bielfeld’s The Elements of Universal Erudition, a three-volume analysis of “all branches of learning”; Patrick Browne’s The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica, familiar to us from Part I; and (perhaps) Martin’s Micrographia nova: or, A New Treatise on the Microscope. Given the order’s year, it is not surprising to see four publications generated by the crisis in the North American colonies – indeed, they underscore the absence of such material in Thistlewood’s list. Phillips’ shipment also included the inevitable, venerable Blackstone’s Commentaries and Richard Burn’s The Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, which became an eighteenth-century classic. Presumably, Phillips relaxed with reading one of three European travel narratives or a historical memoir by a participant in the English Civil War. Only two choices show any interest in literature: Laurence Sterne’s Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions, and The Works of George Lord Lyttelton, which included poetry and an epistolary novel emulating Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Yet readers had access to even more books through borrowing. “Extensive and unquantifiable,” such activity is an important dimension of the history of the book. Giles Mandelbrote has suggested that the
Monthly Review, July , –, at . Walker, Social Lives, . Quoting R. A. Houston, Mark Towsey, ‘“I can’t resist sending you the book’: Private Libraries, Elite Women, and Shared Reading Practices in Georgian Britain,” Library & Information History, , no. (): –; Mark Towsey, “‘The Talent Hid in a Napkin’: Castle Libraries in
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designation “private library” misleads us about just how much such activity was going on in Georgian England. In Britain, these exchanges brought together individuals of different social status and genders in networks operating in town and country. “By the mid-eighteenth century,” Raven writes, “the domestic library and its extension into something to be shared by friends and neighbours was emulated by many hundreds of English gentlemen who were regular book purchasers and bought and arranged books with increasing concern to display their trophies to others.” Much borrowing and lending went on in the corner of Westmoreland parish occupied by Thistlewood, his friends, and his neighbors. Together, they unintentionally transformed individual collections into an ad hoc community library. Self-generating and self-regulating, it was their response to a local scarcity of intellectual resources. Savannah-la-Mar was too small to support the commercial establishments of Kingston, Spanish Town, and later Montego Bay. The population density could not support options such as a circulating library or a subscription library, a noncommercial option in which members pooled resources to create and manage a collection under mutually agreed-upon rules. By , the year Thistlewood began his commonplace books, borrowing and lending activity was already fairly brisk; it continued into , the year he died. An analysis of his exchanges between and
Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” in The History of Reading, Evidence from the British Isles, c. –, ed. Katie Halsey and W. R. Owens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), :–. Giles Mandelbrote, “Personal Owners of Books,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ; David Allan, A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (London: British Library, ), –; Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, –. Raven, “Libraries for Sociability,” ; D. R. Wolf, Reading History in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, . David Allan, “Politeness and the Politics of Culture: An Intellectual History of the EighteenthCentury Subscription Library,” Library & Information History , no. (): –; Rebecca Bowd, “Useful Knowledge or Polite Learning? A Reappraisal of Approaches to Subscription Library History,” Library & Information History , no. (): –; Stephen M. Colclough, “Procuring Books and Consuming Texts: The Reading Experience of a Sheffield Apprentice, ,” Book History (): –; K. A. Manley, “Rural Reading in Northwest England: The Sedbergh Book Club, –,” Book History , no. (): –; Manley, “Scottish Circulating and Subscription Libraries”; Raven, “Libraries for Sociability” and book-length study of Charleston Library Society, London Booksellers and American Customers; Mark Towsey, “‘All Partners May Be Enlightened and Improved by Reading Them’: The Distribution of Enlightenment Books in Scottish Subscription Library Catalogues, –c. ,” Journal of Scottish Studies , no. (): –.
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reveal forty-three partners and exchanges. An exchange was an occasion when a participant handed over printed materials; the total does not signal number of titles as multivolume works generated multiple exchanges. The number of participants increased when Thistlewood became an independent proprietor, perhaps because, no longer subject to a plantation’s stringent work regime, he had more leisure time. The participants became more diverse as the parish became more settled and prosperous, attracting more professionals. The greatest number of exchanges by far was always between Thistlewood and Hayward. Thistlewood esteemed Hayward so much, he was one of very few people who borrowed more from Thistlewood ( titles) than he lent () during that period. Membership changed as individuals passed away or relocated, and the number participating in any year varied from a low of six in to a high of sixteen in . Excluding Hayward, eleven individuals constituted a “core group,” that is, individuals who exchanged more than five titles with Thistlewood between and ; excluding Hayward, eleven individuals exchanged titles during the decade. No year is typical, but conveys how the exchange network worked (Figure .). That year, Thistlewood and ten partners initiated twentyeight exchanges. John Cope, Thistlewood’s former employer and a core partner, did not participate, though his daughter Polly did. Three partners were connected with Savannah-la-Mar’s merchant community: Hayward, Jeremiah Meyler, and Mrs. Weech, a merchant’s wife. The physician Richard Panton, the lawyer John Chambers, the schoolteacher Daniel Hughes, and the planter William Antrobus participated, as did two overseers, Thistlewood’s business partner Samuel Say, and one “Mr. Parker,” who was working at Egypt, the same plantation that had employed Thistlewood. Of these, all but Parker and Chambers were “core members.” By , the overall character of the publications exchanged had shifted from a decade before. Thistlewood’s loan of Quintus Curtius Rufus’s Life of Alexander the Great was the only representative of the classical tradition – a more robust category a decade earlier. As more “moderns” were taking their places on bookshelves in Great Britain, France, Italy, and the Dutch Republic, so they were assuming a larger role in the books exchanged by
April G. Shelford, “Of Mudfish, Harpsichords and Books: Libraries and Community in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, ed. Kyle B. Roberts and Mark Towsey (Leiden: Brill, ), –. Kenneth Morgan, The Bright-Meyler Papers: A Bristol-West India Connection, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
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1772 TO SAY: Dr. Emerson’s Principles of Mechanics TO SH: Hill’s Review of the Works of the Royal Society FROM Antrobus: Tristram Shandy, vols 3 & 4 FROM Antrobus: Tristram Shandy, vols 5 & 6 FROM Mrs Weech: Supplement, Gentleman’s Magazine (1771); Gentleman’s Magazine & London Magazine (Jan 1772) TO SH: Annual Register (1770); Dossie’s Memoirs of Agriculture; Robinson’s Treatise on the Virtues & Efficacy of a Crust of Bread FROM Mrs Weech: History of Lady Julia Mandeville FROM Panton: Bancroft’s Essay on the Natural History of Guiana TO Mrs Weech: The Whisperer FROM Antrobus: Tristram Shandy, vols 7 & 8 FROM Hughes: Cadogan’s Dissertation on the Gout; A Collection of Voyages & Travels; Atkins’s A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, & the West-Indies BOOKS REC’D: Annual Register (1770); Town & Country Magazine (1769-1770); Guthrie’s New Geographical, Historical, & Commercial Geography; Nautical Almanac; Dossie’s Memoir of Agriculture, vol 2; Milne’s Botanical Dictionary; Adventures of a Jesuit; Dean’s Essay on Future Life of Brute Creatures; Bridge’s Adventures of a Bank Note; Robinson’s Treatise on the Virtues & Efficacy of a Crust of Bread; Parker’s Ephemeris TO SH: Dean’s Essay on the Future State of Brutes; Bridge’s Adventures of a Bank Note TO SH: Adventures of a Jesuit; Barrow’s [New & Universal Dictionary of Arts & Sciences] TO SH: [One of Benjamin Martin’s Scientific / Mathematical Works?] FROM Miss COPE: Guthrie’s Friends, a Sentimental History TO SH: [Stillingfleet’s Miscellaneous Tracts?] TO SH: Hinton’s Dictionary; Town & Country Magazine (1769, vol 1) TO PARKER: Present State of Great Britain; Gordon’s Geography TO SH: Entick’s History of London, vols 1 & 2 FROM MEYLER: Webb’s Thoughts on the Consitutional Power …
TO SH: Entick’s History of London, vols 3 & 4 TO SH: Fuller’s Introductia ad Prudentiam; Sportsman’s Dictionary FROM ANTROBUS: Tristram Shandy, vol 1 FROM CHAMBERS: The Wonderful Magazine (1764); Book of Remarks (extracts of Miscellanea Curiosa, ms. by “old Mr Cope”)
FROM ANTROBUS: Sterne’s Yorick’s Sermons, vols 1 & 2 TO PARKER: Rufus’s The Life of Alexander the Great FROM SH: Collier’s Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting FROM ANTROBUS: Sterne’s Yorick’s Sermons, vols 3 & 4 1772 Jan
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Thomas Thistlewood’s book exchanges, . Created with Timeline Maker Pro v
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Thistlewood and his friends. Novels surged. Thistlewood himself purchased Thomas Bridge’s Crysal, or Adventures of a Bank Note – and promptly lent it out. “[P]erhaps the most influential and popular itnarrative of the century,” Crysal retailed pessimistic tales written from the perspective of an object or a pet that “loathes their owners, and can hardly wait to unmask their hypocrisy, their base motives and petty connivances, their vices and their crimes.” Thistlewood continued reading Tristram Shandy, which he borrowed from the planter Antrobus one or two volumes at a time; he apparently liked it well enough to borrow Sterne’s Yorick’s Sermons from him. The two female participants, Mrs. Weech and Polly Cope, lent him two important sentimental novels, Frances Moore’s History of Lady Julia Mandeville and William Guthrie’s The Friends, A Sentimental History. Dr. Panton’s loan of Edward Bancroft’s Essay on the Natural History of Guiana and schoolteacher Hughes’s of John Atkins’s A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies show again how Jamaicans acquired works about their corner of the globe as they became available. Periodicals were prominent. Thistlewood was lending out recently arrived issues of the Annual Register and Town and Country Magazine while he borrowed the Wonderful Magazine from Chambers and Gentleman’s Magazine and London Magazine from Mrs. Weech. She was exceptional in the network not just because of her gender. Like Hayward, she borrowed more than she lent to Thistlewood. Her eclectic choices – histories, popularizations of astronomy, and a novel – suggest the power of an ideal of “polite accomplishment for both men and women” that included “the display of generalist knowledge about historical figures, botany, or astronomy.” But they exchanged periodicals the most with her loans outnumbering her borrowings. How typical was all this borrowing and lending in Jamaica, not to mention, the Caribbean? There is evidence of similar activity in the Leeward Islands far to the east: Soon after the Scottish physician Jonathan Troup arrived in the diminutive Dominica in , he was
Montoya, “Enlightenment?,” –. Lynn Festa, “It-Narratives and Spy Novels,” in English and British Fiction: –, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, ), , ; The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, ). Quote from Williams, Social Life of Books, . MONSON /, January ; /, July ; /, May . MONSON /, January ; /, June ; /, April .
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borrowing from and lending to colonists. But the question is mal posée. Book borrowing and lending was typical in the metropole, and there was nothing atypical about Thistlewood’s exchange partners. With the exception of clergymen, this “colonial petty bourgeoisie” resembled groups in the metropole who banded together to create subscription libraries. In other words, the desire for books was in colonists’ cultural DNA. Thistlewood’s journals record activity that began and ended with him, so his partners might have exchanged books with other people inside or outside his network. As his exchanges reflected his interests, so would the reading profiles of those other, lost networks. Thistlewood cultivated friendships with physicians, which gave him access to serious scientific works, but these friends had wider interests, too. John Wedderburn, a Scottish physician of doubtful professional qualifications who became a substantial landowner and planter, loaned Thistlewood nine books in five years, including Smollett’s Travels through France & Italy, several histories, and one of the most important sentimental novels of the period, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. Dr. King became his personal librarian of the Scottish Enlightenment, loaning him works by Hume, John Millar, William Robertson, Gilbert Stuart, and Adam Smith. The indigo planter William Pommells had a substantial enough library that Thistlewood dismissed the sixty titles he inherited from him as “sad trash scarce worth the fetching” – then listed forty-five titles that he knew Pommells had owned and that he clearly coveted. Books in Thistlewood’s corner of Jamaica bolstered colonists’ claims to gentility not just through ownership, but by providing grist for conversations at polite gatherings. Samuel Johnson had urged a female friend to read The Tatler because “[t]hey are part of the books which every body
Journal held by the University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Kylie Rachelle Peacock, “‘To live up to the Character of my Profession’: Jonathan Troup’s Enlightenment and the Politics of Reputation in Eighteenth-Century Dominica” (Master’s thesis, Dalhousie University, ); Brooke N. Newman, “Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the EighteenthCentury Anglo-Caribbean World,” Gender & History , no. (): –, esp. –. Cecilia Green, “Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Geographies of Empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barretts of Jamaica,” New West Indian Guide/Nieuw West-Indische Gids, (): –, ; Tadmor, Family and Friends, ; Manley, “Rural reading in northwest England,” –; Towsey, “All Partners May Be Enlightened”; Towsey, “The Talent Hid in a Napkin.” For example, Herman Boerhave’s Elements of Chemistry in , Milne’s translation of Linnaeus in , and Nicolas Jacquin’s Selectarum Stirpium Americanarum Historia in . After his return to Scotland in , his enslaved servant Joseph Knight successfully sued for his freedom in the famous Knight v Wedderburn case in . MONSON /, December ; /, May ; /, January and November ; /, May . MONSON /, –.
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should read, because they are the sources of conversation.” As historian Richard Bushman writes of North American colonists, “Reading raised a person’s conversation above the boorish talk of rustics.. . . Conversation gave a social point to books.” Indeed, as Kenneth Lockbridge notes, “it was in conversation that a gentleman proved himself.” Unfortunately, Thistlewood did not detail the conversations at social gatherings he hosted or attended. Did the local schoolmaster Daniel Hughes share what he claimed to know personally about “Johnson the author of the noted Dictionary” in a chat about their latest reading? What prompted John Prynold to say that he had it on “excellent authority” that the breadfruit illustration in Anson’s Voyage was inaccurate at a dinner hosted by Pommells in April ? What was the content of that “great deal of improving discourse with Mr. Barnet” inspired by a shared love of books? In January , when Mr. Hytton called, did he bring his copy of The Sentiments of a Foreigner on the Disputes of Great Britain and America to continue an earlier conversation? Did a discussion of William Guthrie’s The Friends at the Copes in May prompt Thistlewood to read it for himself? Did Thistlewood send a volume of Voltaire’s poetry to Miss Cope and Miss Hannah because it fittingly concluded a conversation over Sunday tea in November ? Whatever their content, such discussions probably transpired at gatherings showcasing other cultural and intellectual interests. Like the London “middling sort” who enthusiastically made music at home, Miss Cook sang and performed on the Weech’s harpsichord at a gathering in . In December Thistlewood demonstrated his “large telescope” by fixing it on Saturn after a dinner at Egypt Estate with Cope, Polly, Miss Hannah, and Wilson. A few days later on New Year’s Eve, he dined there again, bringing along a telescope to show “Mrs. Cope and the Miss’s Jupiter’s Satellites, his Belts, etc.” Thus, science was “domesticated” in
Robert DeMaria, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ), ; Eve Tavor Bennet, Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America (New York: Knopf, ), ; also David S. Shields, “Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, . Lockridge, The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover, . MONSON /, October . MONSON /, /. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, . MONSON /, January . MONSON /, May . MONSON /, November . Klein, “Politeness,” . MONSON /, April . MONSON /, December . MONSON /, December .
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parlors in Jamaica as well as in England and Scotland, the “pursuit of polite science” complementing “the pursuit of politeness itself.” Such social gatherings make a fitting conclusion to a chapter that has ranged from the desks of agents in London and Edinburgh to the “English made” mahogany desk Thistlewood installed in his Westmoreland library in and the mahogany desk that James Brands was selling off with his books as he prepared to leave Kingston in . It has told a story of consumerism, both material and cultural, that enhanced the lives of Jamaicans who could afford it and that bolstered their claims to gentility. The value Jamaican readers ascribed to publications shows in the alacrity with which they bought up a deceased merchant’s inventory and circulated what they owned so they could borrow what they lacked. Their means and their ingenuity ensured access to every type of publication – from the scientific to the scurrilous, the classics to the current, the useful to the recreational. The types of analyses here cannot tell us, though, what Jamaican readers thought about the varied publications they acquired through various means. For that, Chapters and turn to the reading lives of two Jamaicans, Thomas Thistlewood and Robert Long.
Alice Walters, “Conversation Pieces: Science and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England,” History of Science , no. (): –, also Williams, Social Life of Books, –.
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“Truth Hard to be Discovered” The Commonplace Books of Thomas Thistlewood
On November , Thomas Thistlewood, the father of a mixed-race toddler, borrowed John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education from Samuel Hayward. By the time he returned it in March , he had filled nearly eight pages of his commonplace book with transcriptions. Thus, Thistlewood secured a copy of what many contemporaries considered an indispensable text while incurring a social, not material, cost: the obligation to lend to his friend, which he satisfied abundantly over the years. The preceding chapter was concerned chiefly with books as physical objects that could be collected, displayed, borrowed and lent, and as one cultural signifier among many. Yet though books were part of a wave of consumer goods surging across the Atlantic, they were not consumed in the same way as a set of silver spoons or a looking glass. Books could enter the lives of their owners as well as adorn their homes; they could become friends as well as glorified wallpaper; they were good for thinking, not just good things to own. This chapter takes its title from a passage in Thistlewood’s commonplace books. There are four volumes of them, and they contain hundreds of pages of transcriptions from publications he borrowed between to shortly before his death in . Even a superficial examination challenges Burnard’s assertion that “[i]t was the book as object as much as the contents
MONSON /, November . On influence of Locke’s educational treatise, Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, – (New York: Pearson Education, ), –; Margaret J. M. Ezell, “John Locke’s Images of Childhood: Early Eighteenth Century Response to Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (–): –; Anne Jamison, “Children’s Susceptible Minds: Alicia Lefanu and the ‘Reasoned Imagination’ in Georgian Children’s Literature,” Studies in Romanticism , no. (): –. MONSON /, March . MONSON /, .
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of the book that most impressed Thistlewood.” Indeed, they indicate how thoroughly Thistlewood had internalized a contemporary admonition from Isaac Watts, who taught generations of Britons to think well through reading, that the mind must be cultivated to avoid becoming a “barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown with Weeds and Brambles.” Commonplace books predate the eighteenth century. Instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, they had long helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. All these purposes continued into the eighteenth century, infusing reading with utility, the supreme secular virtue. In David Allan’s words, reading became “a key not only to personal wisdom but also to mutual tolerance and cultural advancement in society at large . . . a fulcrum – perhaps the fulcrum – upon which both individual improvement and social progress hinged.” The commonplace book was also, according to Mark Towsey, “remarkably well suited to the processes of self-improvement and selffashioning.” During the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson asserted that the ideas that came to readers through books could not be obliterated, but exerted “a secret influence on the understanding.” The reader of scientific works became “more knowing,” and the reader of moral or religious treatises “imperceptibly advance[d] in goodness.” But only disciplined reading secured such good effects, requiring reflection, self-evaluation, and the good taste and critical sense that reviewers modeled (theoretically, at least). Certainly not all eighteenth-century readers achieved these feats of intellectual heroism or even aspired to them. But the survival of so many commonplace books by men and women of various social ranks suggests that many tried. Thistlewood was one of them. So when he transcribed passages from Locke’s Thoughts, he engaged in an intellectual act both common and exemplary. He did so confident that reading would make
Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire, . Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: or, A Supplement to the Art of Logic (London, ), . Thistlewood owned the edition of this very popular work. On Watts’ importance, Bennet, Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading, –. Lucia Dacome, “Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of Self in EighteenthCentury Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): –; Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. –,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): –; Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading, –; Bennet, Manners of Reading, –. Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading, . Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, . Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, . Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, .
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him a better father and that becoming a good father was a socially useful ambition. Through commonplacing, he furthered a good, if limited education; by commonplacing the books he borrowed, he extended the borders of his little empire of learning beyond what he could afford or chose to spend. Thistlewood took notes on his reading before , but that year he began organizing them according to Locke’s method. He probably learned it from the article “Common-Places” in his copy of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Chambers’s examples of commonplaces were straightforward transcriptions, not paraphrases, and they appeared without readers’ commentary. Locke also urged the reader to provide complete bibliographic details for the source and a topic heading for each transcription. The latter, according to Towsey, was particularly significant because it “develop[ed] independent critical and orderly thinking rather than [circulated] a stable body of established knowledge.” Shortened to initial consonant and first vowel, they also were used to index the contents of the commonplace book (Figures .a and .b). For example, quotations from Ovid’s and Franklin’s descriptions of “Thunder” would appear under “T/u.” Thistlewood’s commonplace books give additional insight into how early modern people read. Rolf Engelsing’s schema of “intensive” versus “extensive” reading, with the latter superseding the former, has given way to more nuanced views. Darnton’s hilarious exploration of the reception of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse proves that eighteenth-century readers sometimes read secular works just as intensively as religious works. Because they frequently sought moral strictures, not just entertainment, in novels, we cannot assume a straightforward correlation between a reader’s seriousness and the genre he was reading. Nevertheless, Samuel Johnson begged to differ: he identified the reading of novels and periodicals with “curious reading” and “mere reading,” as opposed to “hard study” or “perusal.”
Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading, –, –; MONSON /, . Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment, . Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau,” The Great Cat Massacre, chap. . Elizabeth Carroll Reilly and David D. Hall, “Customers and the Market for Books,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ; Michael Norton, Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness (London: Roman & Littlefield, ), ; Reinhard Wittmann, “Was There a Reading Revolution?,” in A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartrier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), . Quoted by Blair, “Reading Strategies,” –; Williams, Social Life of Books, –.
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Figure .a Commonplace indexing in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (), digitized by University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries
Thistlewood read in all these and other ways – intensively, extensively, curiously, casually, diligently, purposefully, pruriently – for mundane to transcendent reasons. He sometimes read the same text in different ways, and he construed texts in ways that their authors neither intended nor imagined. Even when Thistlewood engaged with reading material closely, he never engaged with all its contents equally closely. He continuously made choices about what deserved recording. The result was the “ultimate in bricolage”: a reader assembling from “the grab bag of bits and pieces which any culture makes available” an adaptation suited to that moment in their life. Through commonplacing, Thistlewood took “possession of a pool of common knowledge and values”; he thought through problems from the prosaic and practical to the philosophical. Reading his
Adapted from Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage, . The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover, .
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Figure .b Indexing page from first volume of Thistlewood’s commonplace books. Thomas Thistlewood Papers. James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
commonplace books is like dipping a bucket into a rushing stream and bringing up some tadpoles and rotting leaves, a few pebbles and sticks. Everything in the bucket was in the stream, but in the stream, everything moved, dynamic as thought. In the bucket, everything is still. We fixate on what settles to the bottom, while the medium – the process of thought that bore it – is invisible. Because Thistlewood rarely recorded personal reactions, determining his opinions on any given subject is difficult. Yet we can get a sense of what he cared about and how his thinking evolved by considering commonplaces that cluster around particular themes. Intellectually rich, his notes suggest many candidates: Thistlewood as a reader of Locke, Samuel von Puffendorff, David Hume, or Samuel Richardson; his attitudes toward women; the nature of his scientific interests – to mention just a few. Here I focus on the intertwined topics of slavery and race and the subject of religion. Not surprisingly, his reading in the former began with texts related to his job as overseer, then expanded to include wider questions,
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such as the justice of the institution per se and its reform. With religion, Thistlewood’s commonplacing suggests real anxiety about the immortality of the soul and the fate of his own. Thistlewood’s commonplace books show that he puzzled over slavery, the defining feature of Jamaican society, and the nature of Africans even in the last year of his life. But note: taken together, his transcriptions, ranging from one line to lengthy excerpts, total just twenty citations across four volumes. Note, too, that he satisfied his curiosity with borrowings. He added just two of the works mentioned below to his library, Samuel Martin’s Essay on Plantership and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane. Anything else on his bookshelves that even broached these topics, for example, the histories of Edward Long and Abbé Raynal, was rare. He definitely kept current – if by our lights, he sometimes read perversely, sometimes dully. Little in England would have prepared Thistlewood to become an overseer on a sugar plantation. He sought advice in texts, all of which without exception exhorted humane treatment of slaves – painfully ironic given Thistlewood’s brutality. The first two also show how manuscript and published materials by planters for planters circulated in the British colonies, a practice common among French planters, too (Part IV). Even before he began commonplacing à la Locke, in he took extensive notes in his journal on Richard Beckford’s instructions for estate management. Richard Beckford was a fabulously wealthy member of the Jamaican planter dynasty, and nearly one thousand slaves worked on his Westmoreland estates. He considered slavery a necessary evil – indeed, he expected that the enslaved’s “unhappy” situation would inspire “every generous breast with sentiments of compassion.” Thus, it was the master’s duty and his interest to treat them “with justice and benevolence” to make their lives “as cozy as their condition will permit.” While Beckford certainly did not consider slaves his equals, he did not consider them brutes, and he rejected the notion that “[t]heir colour and condition” justified “not treating them as rational beings.” The overseer or master who offended their keen sense of justice risked revenge or desertion. Sometimes necessary, punishment always had to be exemplary, because overly harsh punishment inspired hatred of the person inflicting it. Nearly a decade later in , Thistlewood transcribed another manuscript
MONSON /, –. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, ; Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War (London: Windmill Books, ), .
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treatise on plantership, this one by the overseer John Pulley Edwards. Clearly possessing an “improving spirit,” he made many of the same points, if less grammatically than Beckford. He was unsentimental about the nature of Caribbean agriculture: the plantation “ought to be considered as a well-constructed machine compounded of various wheels, turning different ways, and yet all contribute to the great end proposed.” Yet like Beckford, he believed that humane treatment was not opposed to efficiency, and he thought little of his peers, whose brutality he condemned. “I have been told I had not devil enough in me to manage Negroes (‘Tis a horrid expression from the mouth of a Christian or free born subject).” By , Thistlewood was commonplacing following Locke’s method. His first volume of commonplaces includes borrowings up to mid-, and it includes two publications that seconded Beckford’s and Pulley’s advice about humane treatment. Apparently, he first encountered both in a publication printed in Spanish Town that, according to his note, contained an “extract” of James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane, “intermixed” with material from Samuel Martin’s treatise. No longer extant, the publication does not appear in Frank Cundall’s compilation of domestic publications. Who in Spanish Town saw an opportunity for profit in the recent publication of these works in London? Unknown, but his initiative attests to the lively interest of British Caribbean planters in Martin’s work beyond Antigua. It is also unknown how much of Martin’s Essay or Grainger’s poem the printer lifted because many pages of commonplaces are missing at this point, though the excerpts impressed Thistlewood enough that he purchased copies for his own library. Both authors urged humane treatment of slaves in unambiguous terms. Like Beckford and Pulley, Martin’s authority was bolstered by his experience as a planter and as a leader of Antigua’s White community. His essay
UCL; MONSON /, March ; Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire, . From the rich literature on Grainger, John Gilmore, Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane () (London: Athlone Press, ), –; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, – (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), –; Anna M. Foy, “Grainger and the ‘Sordid Master’: Plantocratic Alliance in The Sugar-Cane and Its Manuscript,” The Review of English Studies , no. (): –; Tristan J. Schweiger, “Grainger’s West Indian Planter: Property and Authority in The Sugar-Cane,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –; on Martin, Richard B. Sheridan, “Innovating Sugar Planter of Antigua, –,” Agricultural History , no. (): –; Natalie A. Zacek, “Cultivating Virtue: Samuel Martin and the Paternal Ideal in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” Wadabagei , no. (): –; Roberts, Slavery and Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, –. MONSON /, /. Cundall, History of Printing, –.
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was published at least twice in Antigua ( and ); its fourth edition was published in in London. Thereafter, it appeared in new editions several times in the metropole and the Caribbean. So Thistlewood almost certainly read Martin’s admonition that slaves were “rational beings . . . [who] ought to be treated accordingly; that is, with humanity and benevolence, as our fellow creatures, created by the same Almighty hand.” Thistlewood also knew that the expression of such sentiments predated Beckford, Martin, and Pulley. He transcribed a couplet from a poem published in Caribbeana that similarly criticized the brutal treatment of slaves – along with an editorial note that the poet unfairly condemned planters as a group for individual behaviors. While none of these authors were hostile to slavery as an institution, it is noteworthy that their meliorist calls considerably predated the rise of abolitionist sentiment in the s. In contrast, Grainger’s Sugar-Cane made a principled argument against the institution itself, advocating for free Black labor. Grainger’s emulation of Virgil’s Georgics in his didactic poem appears bizarre now, but into this old vessel he poured the wine of his own experience as a physician in St. Kitts. Some of Thistlewood’s transcriptions reflected professional concerns: the chemistry of refining; Grainger’s advice about purchasing slaves of particular African ethnicities, a typical topic in such literature; restraining an enslaved foreman; and notes on the medicinal uses of various plants. But he also transcribed Grainger’s encouragement to “let humanity prevail” when managing slaves and verses that urged the planter to imagine the slave’s happy life in Africa and the trauma of enslavement. In a dozen verses, Grainger unequivocally condemned slavery as tyrannical and “heart-debasing” because it deprived the freedom that made all men of “every Colour and of every Clime” in God’s image. Thistlewood definitely read the passage. He might well have considered it in the context of a passage he had earlier transcribed from “On Slavery” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract: “I enter into an agreement with you, altogether at your own Charge and Solely for my Profit, which I will observe as long
Martin, An Essay on Plantership, . MONSON /, /. Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, . Gordon Goodwin, “Grainger, James (–),” rev. Caroline Overy, ODNB. Pagination of first volume of the commonplace books suggests the disappearance of nearly thirty pages, some of which may have included transcriptions from the Spanish Town edition of Martin. The transcriptions pick up with Grainger’s poem in medias res. MONSON /, /–/ .
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as I Please, and which you are to observe also as long as I think Proper.” For Rousseau, slavery was not just logically absurd, but impossible because it violated nature. No individual could ever renounce his “natural liberty,” because it meant “renounc[ing] one’s very being as a man . . . not only the rights but even the duties of humanity.” But Thistlewood transcribed only Grainger’s concluding couplet: “Servants, not slaves; of choice, and not compell’d; / The Blacks should cultivate the Cane-land isles.” Later transcriptions confirm Thistlewood’s disinterest in criticizing slavery as an institution, but also his curiosity about reforming it by compensating slaves. We should note: Thistlewood made these transcriptions in the shadow of Tacky’s Revolt, which had broken out in Jamaica in and was the most serious slave insurrection before the Haitian Revolution (see Introduction to Part I). During the same decade he read Grainger, Martin, and Pulley, he transcribed a passage from a discussion of the Berbice revolt in Surinam in that counseled exactly the opposite treatment of slaves: only “rigid treatment” by “annihilating every hope of liberty, renders [the slaves] content with the enjoyment of slavery.” Anything else resulted in the enslaved “attempt[ing] the perfect recovery of liberty.” The author acknowledged the terrible consequences of this advice: slaves living in misery, subject “to the tyranny of the imperious, and lust of the libidinous, and to an incessant toil.” Yet “however repugnant to humanity,” such practices were critical for “self-preservation” – and that was precisely the heading Thistlewood chose for his transcription. The most puzzling transcription about slavery was prompted by Captain Blake’s loan of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws in March . Over three months, Thistlewood filled six pages of his commonplace book with transcriptions. He regarded it highly enough to purchase his own copy, which he was lending to friends in . Everyone read Montesquieu, of course, but Thistlewood’s transcriptions demonstrate how circumstances
MONSON /, –. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact; or the Principles of Politic Law (London, ), . White anxiety clear in Thistlewood’s transcription of material from a report by the Assembly of Jamaica that investigated Maroon participation in a failed Coromantee uprising in St. Mary’s Parish in . MONSON /, /; Devin Leigh, Clifton E. Sorrell III, “How to Control the History of a Slave Rebellion: A Case Study from the Sources of Blackwall’s Revolt in St. Mary’s Parish, Jamaica, ,” Journal of Caribbean History , no. (): –. MONSON /, /. On borrowing, MONSON /, March and July ; /, /–/.
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and character shape reception. Living in the tropics, he showed particular interest in Montesquieu’s discussion of the effects of climate on the human body and moral character, copying out “Of the Difference of Men in different Climates.” Did he worry that warm climates made men timid and cold climates made them brave? Did he find an explanation – even “scientific” absolution – for his sexual rapacity in Montesquieu’s association of lust with a “warmer climate” where sex “is liked for its own sake, it is the only cause of happiness, it is life itself.” And he transcribed Montesquieu’s characterization of New World slavery in its entirety: WERE I to vindicate our right to make slaves of the Negroes, these should be my arguments. The Europeans, having extirpated the Americans, were obliged to make slaves of the Africans, for clearing such vast tracts of land. Sugar would be too dear, if the plants which produce it were cultivated by any other than slaves. These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose, that they can scarcely be pitied. It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black ugly body. It is so natural to look upon colour as the criterion of human nature, that the Asiatics, among whom eunuchs are employed, always deprive the blacks of their resemblance to us by a more opprobrious distinction. The colour of the skin may be determined by that of the hair, which, among the Egyptians, (the best philosophers in the world,) was of such importance, that they put to death all the red-haired men who fell into their hands. The Negroes prefer a glass necklace to that gold which polite nations so highly value; can there be a greater proof of their wanting common-sense? It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men; because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow, that we ourselves are not Christians. Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans. For, were the case as they state it, would the European powers, who make so many needless conventions among themselves, have failed to enter into a general one, in behalf of humanity and compassion?
There is more than one way to read this justly famous passage. A French gentlewoman in Paris, ensconced in a cozy, exquisitely tasteful sitting room, pauses in her reading to scoop a teaspoon of sugar, stirring it into a cup of hot chocolate or coffee. Comfortably distant from the brutal
Ibid., –. Considered in a larger context, Montesquieu’s views of Africans and slavery were more complex and less unequivocal. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness, –; Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, –.
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reality that produced her refreshment, she delights in Montesquieu’s use of the subjunctive, which gives the passage a delicious irony; she tut-tuts another instance of religious hypocrisy. But the passage could arouse everything from impassioned outrage to clueless literalism. Publication several years into the slave insurrection on Saint-Domingue without context or attribution, as in a issue of the Chester Chronicle, no doubt encouraged a literal reading. Back in , what was the impact of translating the passage not just from one language to another, but across the sea to an island where slavery was daily combat, not a distant abstraction. Could Montesquieu’s wit challenge the colonist’s mental universe? Or would a former overseer and current slaveholder take it as confirmation of his experience and prejudices? Three of the seven transcriptions about slavery in Thistlewood’s second volume of transcriptions were decidedly practical, recording advice from locals on remedies for slave diseases and on an overseer’s duties. Other, more substantive transcriptions reveal how he reacted – or not! – to Hume’s infamous footnote, continued to ponder the merits of paying slaves, and expressed anxiety about slave insurrection. Years earlier, Thistlewood had shown an interest in Hume, whose essays were enormously popular. In a very rare personal comment, he had praised Hume’s “Essay on Public Credit” as a “Master Piece of its Kind.” He had also transcribed two passages from different works praising Hume’s History of England. In , he took a deep dive, borrowing Dr. King’s copies of Hume’s Essays, Moral and Political, which he kept for more than a month, and Political Discourses. Thistlewood transcribed Hume’s condemnation of slavery from the essay “On the Populousness of Ancient Nations.” While slavery in antiquity was his chief subject, Hume used contemporary and ancient practice to illuminate each other, merging critiques of American and ancient slaveholders. Hume stressed the deleterious moral effects of slavery on the slaveholder, whose children became accustomed to
Chester Chronicle, April MONSON /, –/np- and /; //. MONSON /, /; /, /–/. MONSON /, /. On Hume’s popularity, Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book, –, ; Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, ; Towsey, “All Partners May Be Enlightened and Improved by Reading Them,” ; Mark Towsey, “‘Patron of Infidelity’: Scottish Readers Respond to David Hume. c. –,” Book History (): –; Ross W. Beales and E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy and Schoolbooks,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ; Kates, Books that Made the Enlightenment, chap. . David Hume, Essays, Moral and Political (London, ), MONSON /; Political Discourses (), MONSON /, /–/.
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brutality and the trampling of human nature. Indeed, slavery was the source of the “barbarous manners of antient times,” because it transformed “every man of rank” into a “petty tyrant,” liberating the master from “the reciprocal duties of gentleness and humanity.” In contrast, the ability of a free man “in modern times” to contract as a servant with a master ensured “checks” on behavior that were “mutual, suitable to the inviolate and eternal laws of reason and equity.” Let us remember, however, Hume’s infamous footnote to “On National Characters” (Chapter ). Thistlewood would not have read it in King’s copy because Hume added it to a later edition. But he did learn of it when James Beattie quoted it in a defense of African capacity published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in . Thistlewood did not transcribe the Hume quotation, however, but Beattie’s postscript, which discussed Francis Williams, a free Black Jamaican educated in England who had a considerable reputation for learning. Beattie harshly criticized the Royal Society for denying him membership “for a reason unworthy of that learned body, viz. on account of his complection . . . such philosophers as Mr. Hume, and those of Crane-Court might have known that souls are of no colour, and that no one can tell, on viewing a casket, what jewel it contains.” Thistlewood surely knew about Williams, but was it only the local connection that intrigued him in Beattie’s discussion? Was Beattie’s critique at all persuasive, or did Hume’s reasoning carry the day? Thistlewood’s few transcriptions from John Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, which he borrowed from King in May , resonate with his earlier transcriptions. Millar cited Hume’s essay on population when he condemned Caribbean slavery as an unacceptable archaism for an advanced, industrious, and prosperous people. But he stopped short of calling for its abolition. Instead, he seconded the advice of an author writing on the American colonies that “Small
Thistlewood took a few factual notes, including that the annual decrease in the West Indies slave population would result in total collapse without the importation of new slaves. James Beattie, “Strictures on Mr. Hume’s Character of the Negroes,” Supplement to the Gentleman’s Magazine (), . Ibid., –. Most of our information about Williams comes from Edward Long’s deeply racist characterization in The History of Jamaica (), :–; Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?,” Early American Literature , no. (): –; on Williams’s neo-Latin poetry, Gilmore, “The British Empire and the Neo-Latin Tradition,”, –; on Williams’s successful opposition to an act of the Jamaican Assembly in that would have stripped free Black people and people of color of “any semblance of common law rights,” Brooke N. Newman, Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –. MONSON /, /–/.
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Wages should be given the Negroes, as an encouragement to Industry.” Indeed, the author was astonished that such a measure had not been proposed before “after the good effects of them have been so fully illustrated in the case of the villains in Europe.” Thistlewood definitely liked this idea, heading his transcription, “An Excellent Proposal.” Thistlewood’s anxiety about slave revolts clearly motivated one of his transcriptions from Louis Sebastien Mercier’s Memoir of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (), the proto-science fiction adventures of an eighteenth-century Frenchman. He was especially interested in the passage where the tourist-to-the-future viewed a monument memorializing the leader of a slave revolt that had ended New World slavery: “In going from this place, I observed toward the Right, on a Magnificent Pedastal, the Figure of a Negroe, his head was bare, his arm extended, his eye fierce, his attitude Noble and Commanding; round him were Spread the broken relicks of twenty Scepters; and at his feet I read these words: To the Avenger of the New World, etc.” Thistlewood added a passage from the next paragraph: “At the same instant, they poured forth the blood of all their Tyrants; French, Spanish, English, Dutch and Portuguese, all become a prey to the Sword, to fire, and to poison. The Soil of America drank with Avidity that blood for which it had long thirsted.” Thistlewood gave this transcription a chilling heading: “A Prediction.” Thistlewood’s third volume of commonplaces, which he began in September , contains little about slavery and race. He began the last full year of his life by inscribing the final volume of his commonplace books, “January , .” He devoted five of its ninety-nine pages to James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. With Ramsay, Thistlewood again encountered the surge in metropolitan anti-slavery sentiment he read about in Beattie. A surgeon-turned-clergyman, Ramsay knew the sufferings of Caribbean slaves from personal experience as a naval surgeon and pastor on St. Kitts. A foundational figure in the British anti-slavery movement, he nevertheless proposed gradual abolition to prepare slaves for freedom. Thistlewood’s indifference toward Christianity is confirmed by his few transcriptions from Ramsay’s more religiously themed chapters. Instead,
MONSON /, –; on Millar’s Observations, Nicholas B. Miller, John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, ). Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Norton, ), –, –. Monson /, . MONSON /, –; –. J. Watt, “Ramsay, James (–),” ODNB.
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he selected passages that criticized brutality and urged humanity if only to serve the planter’s interest. His chief concern, though, was Ramsay’s discussion of who should supervise slaves and how. One transcription criticized the English for their inappropriate choices of an overseers; another severely criticized their harsh, even sadistic punishments and their neglect of the enslaved’s physical needs, especially the infirm’s. Thistlewood transcribed much about a manager who allegedly transformed an underperforming estate into a place where “the slaves [are] more healthy, the deaths fewer, the crops greater, the rum in an higher proportion, and the sugar better and higher priced, than in the plantations around it.” The secret of his success was a “method” that included generous rewards for diligence as well as consistent and measured punishments for infractions. Under the heading “Method & Moderation,” Thistlewood noted Ramsay’s advice on discipline, which scrupulously distinguished “between strictness and cruelty.” He even transcribed Ramsay’s rhetorical question: “How frequently may interest, or rather her accursed phantom, selfishness, be seen dragging a human creature in a chain, naked, starved, and raw with stripes, and demanding, with threats, that tale of labour, which cruelty has rendered the wretch incapable of performing.” Thistlewood transcribed Ramsay’s footnote, too, which contrasted ancient with modern slavery. Ancient slaves, however brutally stripped of their liberty, were not blocked from cultivating learning, because their masters took no “insolent pride” in imagining themselves a superior race. Indeed, a slave might even look forward to freedom. The situation of Caribbean slaves was entirely different: they were “savages ravished from their huts, and their country, to till, like brutes, a strange soil, in a strange climate, among people of a strange speech, without rights, without privileges, without enjoyments.” European pride blocked “every generous wish. Emulation is frozen; expectation is dead; the heavenly spark lies smothered in anguish and neglect, while all around in darkness and doubt.” These transcriptions from Ramsay certainly had a practical bent. But did they also prompt Thistlewood to think of enslaved Africans as human beings like himself with similar abilities and intellectual capacities? Perhaps. But other transcriptions from Ramsey suggest that Thistlewood was inclined to view physiological differences as significant – a spectacular
James Ramsey, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London, ), –. MONSON /, . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid.
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example of a reader coming to precisely the opposite conclusion intended by the author. For Ramsay utterly rejected the significance of physiological differences, directly challenging Hume’s footnote and refuting at length Edward Long’s racist arguments in The History of Jamaica (). Thistlewood did transcribe Ramsay’s dismissal of the notion that such differences justified the superiority of the “tyrannic European,” but little else of his argument. Instead, under the heading “Differences between Europeans and Africans,” he transformed Ramsay’s discussion into a list. Nor was he much interested in what Ramsay had to say about Long’s History, which Thistlewood had borrowed in and later added to his collection. In short, Thistlewood’s transcriptions on race and slavery are intriguing, yet inconclusive. They certainly reveal his awareness of important debates about slavery and race, even suggest his inclinations, but not the sides he ultimately chose. His own experiences as an overseer, slaveowner, and veteran of a terrifying slave revolt no doubt informed how he read these texts, but the texts he read no doubt changed how he thought about his experience. In terms of bulk, the transcriptions on these topics occupy a modest amount of space in his commonplace books. But quantity is not quality, and the ideas they expressed might well have occupied a good deal more of Thistlewood’s intellectual space. Thistlewood’s transcriptions about religion suggest a somewhat different relationship between him and the texts he read. For one, his concerns appear more urgent, concentrated most in the first two commonplace books. While not obsessive, they do intimate a reader’s active, highly motivated, even anxious quest for certainty. The transcriptions neither gather practical information nor entertain sides in a debate. Rather, they suggest a chronology, even a narrative arc, and a resolution of his intellectual doubts and emotional agitation. Again, Thistlewood commonplaced only those publications he borrowed, not those he purchased, and even a cursory review of his library makes clear that travel and scientific works swamped explicitly religious texts. He owned few explicitly Christian publications, such as sermons,
Long, The History of Jamaica, :–; Suman Seth, “Materialism, Slavery, and The History of Jamaica,” ISIS , no. (): –; Seth, Difference and Disease, –; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), esp. chap. . Literature on the emergence of racial thought during the eighteenth century is enormous. See Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness; Londa Scheibinger, “The Anatomy of Difference,” EighteenthCentury Studies , no. (): –. MONSON /, inventory has its own numbering of –.
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though he did not own much in the way of explicitly heterodox ones, either. Yet a variety of eighteenth-century genres – novels, travel accounts, and fictionalized travel accounts – toyed with iconoclastic, even atheistic views. Thistlewood was very interested, for example, in a critique of Christianity and the deistic views of a Chinese character in Simon Tyssot de Patot’s The Travels and Adventures of James Massey (). Thistlewood also owned an English version of Bayle’s Dictionary, Voltaire’s “arsenal of the Enlightenment,” which contained much to challenge Christian complacency. Yet the commonplace books strongly suggest that anxiety, not just intellectual curiosity, pushed Thistlewood away from Christian orthodoxy into an idiosyncratic deism. Inspired by his astronomical interests, it even encouraged hopes of personal transcendence and immortality. In other words, he took the business of forging a “religion for himself” quite seriously. In spirit, he quietly joined that freethinking rabble excoriated by the Reverend John Lindsay in a sermon in Spanish Town in : “Hear me, thou vain, blasphemous pretender to Free-thinking; thou saucy, grumbling mortal who ridiculously applies thy poor insignificant line of Reason to fathom the infinite depths of God’s council.” Thistlewood’s thoughtful approach to religion is particularly intriguing given the Caribbean’s reputation for irreligion. In August , Sir Peter Parker, the widely traveled rear-admiral and commander-in-chief at Jamaica, expressed his opinion that the island was the most irreligious of any he had ever known. The author of a letter to the editor of the Cornwall Chronicle would have vehemently agreed. Signing himself “A Moralist,” he insisted that providence was behind “every calamity that befalls a community, or an individual” and that Jamaica surely had earned divine displeasure because of its near “total neglect of moral and religious duties.” Significantly, he rejected the excuse of the effects of “climate and country,” and he insulted fellow Whites by comparing them to the Africans they had enslaved: “Even in the most rude regions of Africa, religion and religious days are treated with respect; but, in this part of the
On English church, Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, –. Thistlewood owned three copies of the Bible, one each in Latin, English, and French; the Book of Common Prayer; and a few works of explicit apologetic intent, such as Hugo Grotius’s The Truth of the Christian Religion () and William Derham’s Physico-Theology: Or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation (). MONSON /, –. Pierre Bayle, A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (London, –). Higman, Proslavery Priest, –. Jones, Diary, .
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world, we are superior to Christianity, and common decency . . . For shame, Gentlemen of Montego-Bay!” Yet an earlier contribution to the Cornwall Chronicle suggested that some Jamaicans were more thoughtful and less censorious about the islanders’ religion – or lack thereof. “A Constant Reader” tacked between personal autonomy based on a reasonable assessment of one’s needs and the imperative to adopt some common standard. He agreed that “[h]uman nature was undoubtedly created for happiness” and that every man should employ “his own understanding” to investigate and pursue those means most appropriate to him for securing it. Yet he objected that men were “often deceived,” so should be open to “advice offered with an honest intention.” Despite diversity of circumstances, all men were alike in their humanity and the need to coexist, “which ought to regulate all the rest.” Ultimately the stakes in personal choices were high, because “[l]ife is a journey towards death, and death an entrance upon a new and everlasting life . . . [But] [t]he way to everlasting misery is unfortunate though strewed with flowers; that ending in eternal happiness, fortunate and good, though beset with thorns and briars.” As with race and slavery, Thistlewood’s interest in religious questions predated his commonplacing. Notes on A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances () announce themes echoed later in the commonplace books. Unlike much advertised as “true” during the eighteenth century, this was an authentic correspondence between Elizabeth and Richard Griffith, which blended “sentimental romance . . . with witty exchange and moral bite.” Thistlewood took notes on thirty-nine out of more than three hundred letters; of those thirty-nine, three queried the nature of divine punishment. The male correspondent “Henry” did not mean to advance anything heterodox, much less anti-Christian. But he appropriated the right to think through the conundrums posed by eternal punishment, to dispute with theologians, and to offer his own interpretations of Scripture when it “shock[ed] his reason.” He concluded that eternal punishment was impossible; a soul might initially suffer but would eventually join the blessed. Such literary musings took place in the more tolerant English religious environment despite the presence of an established church. But
Cornwall Chronicle, August . Cornwall Chronicle, September . Elizabeth Eger, “Griffith, Elizabeth,” ODNB; Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd, and Bernadette Whelan, eds., Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounters and Exchange, – (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), –. MONSON /, , –, .
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Thistlewood’s commonplacing of the Independent Whig in late suggests he entertained far harsher views of Christianity. Edited by Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, the Independent Whig promoted views typical of deist radicals, such as John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal: that religion was meant to benefit men, that God made plain what he required of them, and that God was neither arbitrary nor capricious in his expectations of human beings. The periodical’s editors and its writers closely connected political with religious tyranny; suspicious of the established church, they expressed anticlerical views and supported religious toleration. Originally published in , the later editions Thistlewood borrowed from Colonel Cope contained many additional articles. While reading the third volume, Thistlewood paused to transcribe passages under the headings “Religion,” “Faith,” and “Conscience.” These strenuously defended the individual’s right to decide for himself religious questions – even if he arrived at conclusions opposed to the teachings of the established church. As a kind of summation, he included a quotation from Jean Gerson, a medieval theologian: “To what purpose have I Conscience of my own, if the Conscience of another Person must be my own Rule of Living and Dying?” He transcribed a response to a sermon preached in the House of Commons by a bishop in that, among other things, claimed that a deist acting sensibly and humanely was a better member of society than a trouble-making bigot. Thistlewood transcribed a lengthy paragraph about how easy it was “to raise Phantoms, and to frighten the Croud, generally infatuated with Superstition and false Zeal,” an allusion to the reputation of the Hellfire Club for dissolute and irreligious behavior, which the response dismissed as an absurd and baseless tumult and panic. Transcriptions from volume four similarly lashed out against popery, religious bigotry, clerical hypocrisy, intellectual arrogance, and superstition. Thus, by Thistlewood was skeptical of Christian orthodoxy and suspicious of ecclesiastic authority. Yet he eschewed atheism. Nor did he sever the link between religious belief and moral action (theoretically, at least) or become a materialist. Instead, he retained a belief in spirit or soul
Jeffrey R. Wigelworth, Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), . Rachel Hammersley, English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), –. MONSON /, /–/. The Independent Whig (), :. Ibid., . MONSON /, /–/.
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as something distinct that survived death and that, as Henry’s letter speculated, might even expiate sins committed in this life. Thistlewood’s enthusiasm for astronomy was central to his evolving religious views. He brought to Jamaica compendia that included discussions about it and works devoted exclusively to it. Like microscopes, telescopes had become popular consumer goods as “experimental philosophy” became a “virtuous recreation.” By , Thistlewood owned pocket- and full-size telescopes produced by England’s leading manufacturers. Over the years, he added to his collection of astronomical titles and equipment, and he was alert to astronomical information published in his favorite periodicals. Friends and neighbors shared this passion, admiring and lending each other’s telescopes. Drawing on Newtonian physics, deistic authors were confident of God’s willingness to abide by the laws of nature he had established; they connected an intelligible nature with a God who, in Tindal’s words, was “infinitely happy in himself, infinitely good and wise,” thus required “nothing of us, but what makes for our Happiness.” Investigating nature through astronomy was a way for a human being like Thistlewood to apprehend the power and the limits of human rationality and to experience exaltation and humility, terror and transcendence. His transcriptions show how powerfully English and especially French authors evoked the stakes in a perilous intellectual and spiritual quest, raising disturbing issues one by one before he encountered Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar, who satisfactorily resolved them. A lengthy paragraph transcribed from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa suggests his worries about divine retribution for immoral behavior. There Belford, the close friend of Lovelace, Clarissa’s rapist, reminded him that God’s judgment turned on how we treated each other. Didn’t God’s gift of mercy require our merciful treatment of others? What, then, could Lovelace expect? The passage is especially intriguing given
MONSON /, , . J. A. Bennett, “Social History of the Microscope,” Journal of Microscopy , part (): . MONSON /, August ; Henry C. King, The History of the Telescope (London: Griffin Press, ), chap. ; J. R. Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument-Maker, and ‘Country Showman’ (The Netherlands: Noordhoff, ). Supplement to the Gentleman’s Magazine () and a issue of the Tatler. MONSON /, /–/; /, August . MONSON /, June and July ; December ; /, March and May ; /, June . Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, and chap. , quoting Tindal, . MONSON /, /.
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Thistlewood’s shameless sexual exploitation of his female slaves. Its preachiness, somewhat anomalous in Thistlewood’s transcriptions, is that much more compelling considered alongside an equally anomalous, preachy passage from Caribbeana. Thistlewood transcribed a long paragraph that asserted that no man would knowingly purchase an eternity of suffering for even “the richest Pleasure that refined Epicurism knows” and the “highest Sensual Satisfaction.” In this life, he would suffer the physical effects of dissipation; in the next, unceasing bodily torment and spiritual anguish. Other transcriptions detailed the torment of uncertainty. A passage from Pascal’s Thoughts, borrowed from Hayward in November , descanted on the limitlessness of human ignorance. Thistlewood headed it “Knowledge,” though Pascal despaired of that: “Who has sent me into the World I know not, what the World is I know not; nor what I am myself.” Indeed, his self was as unknown to him as “these frightful Spaces of the Universe” that surrounded him. Certain only of his own death, he little understood what he could not evade: falling into eternal nothingness or “into the Hands of an incensed God.” Under the same heading, a second lengthy passage situated man between “two vast Abysses of Infinite and Nothing,” the universe and the microscopic world. Elsewhere, Thistlewood found hopeful instead of despairing notions of immortality, which transformed a wondrous universe into a cause for exaltation, not terror. From the Earl of Orrery’s critique of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he took the argument that immortality liberated the soul from its “corporeal frame,” freeing it to soar through the universe. Echoing the physico-theological arguments discussed in Part I, the Earl added that the soul not only empowered human beings to acquire knowledge, but to “admire, and imitate the wise benevolence which reigns” everywhere. Thistlewood apparently found a passage from “Natural and Revealed Religion Explaining Each Other” so engaging, he did not even try to excerpt it; he simply indicated title and page numbers. It proposed a vision of divine justice that limited punishment after death, thus absolved God of cruelty. Indeed, His wisdom, justice, and goodness made inconceivable the condemnation of “Millions of Creatures, formed after God’s own Image, to dreadful and never-ending Misery.” Far from excluding anyone from salvation, God sought to purify the errant so they could reunite with him as “Children of Light.” Thistlewood found an equally consoling vision of eternity in Mercier’s Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand
Ibid., /. MONSON /, /, /. MONSON /, /. MONSON /, /. The Harleian Miscellany (London, ), :.
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Five Hundred. Certainly the irredeemably vile and brutal would be plunged into a terrible darkness to be reborn as miserable beasts. But “noble and generous souls, who have made the happiness of their brethren the rule of their conduct” ascended to the heavens and progressed through worlds “as by a gradual and brilliant ladder, that leads, at every step, to the highest degree of perfection.” They came to love God “with a more enlightened ardour, and at last plunge[d] into the ocean of his immensity.” Another chapter, “The Communion of the Two Infinites,” made the universe and the microscopic realms sources of transcendence, concluding that even if the whole universe passed away, there was no cause for fear because “we must necessarily fall under the protection of God.” Such readings suggest that Thistlewood was bringing together disparate elements to create a rationally consistent, yet emotionally satisfying personal theology that reconciled divine mercy with justice and that found proof in the natural world of marvelous regularity. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, which he borrowed from Dr. Bell in , he completed the task. It seems that “The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” so seamlessly synthesized and resolved his concerns, he did not even attempt to commonplace it. Instead, he headed the bibliographic information, “Excellent.” In addition to approving intellectually of the vicar’s theology, Thistlewood probably found much in the Savoyard’s life that resonated with his own circumstances and personality. First, the vicar identified himself as “a poor peasant,” initially destined for husbandry. Thistlewood’s family had chosen the same for him. Perhaps he identified with the scandal prompted by the curate having impregnated a woman; in England, he had been brought to court for the same. Perhaps he found some justification for his concupiscence when the curate wrote, “we shall feel but little remorse for doing any thing to which a well-regulated natural instinct excites us, how strongly soever prohibited by reason.” And he almost certainly identified with the vicar’s intellectual independence and his abandonment of institutional orthodoxy for a non-materialistic deism. He could claim to have proceeded as the vicar did to reach his views of natural religion: trusting his own reason, transcending his own limited education, and learning to read the book of nature, whether perusing his growing library of scientific works, cultivating the garden he was transforming into a horticultural wonder, or peering into the tropical
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius (Edinburgh, ), :. Ibid., :–.
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Ibid., :.
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sky with his telescope. Commonplaces already cited strongly suggest that Thistlewood found the same transcendence in contemplating nature that the curate did. He found divinity revealed there as “grand,” as “noble,” as “dazzling,” as “confounding,” which compelled him to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge. The vicar’s speculations about the afterlife and divine punishments echoed Thistlewood’s earlier readings. The human moral order was necessarily grounded in the natural, and the spring to moral action lay in the natural inclination of human beings to humanity: “There evidently exists, therefore, in the soul of man, an innate principle of justice and goodness; by which, in spite of our own maxims, we approve or condemn the actions of ourselves and others.” In a stirring peroration, the vicar anticipated the “desirable state of happiness, power, and liberty” his soul would enjoy once it had “shake[n] off this encumbrance of body” and had truly become itself. Until then, he devoted himself to “sublime contemplations,” meditating on the order of the universe less to explicate than to admire it and to adore its creator. The book closed on Emile, Thistlewood’s commonplace books contain nothing else substantive on religious issues, though he remained captivated by the image of soaring beyond earth and moon into the solar system. He transcribed twenty-seven lines from “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” in which the visionary poet Anna Letitia Barbauld sailed “[o]n Fancy’s wild and roving wing” to where “ten thousand suns appear.” From “Some New Observations on Cometical Astronomy,” published in May in Scot’s Magazine, he lifted the author’s fantasy of “transporting myself in imagination to one of them . . . with a party of philosophical friends” who would “follow these tremendous bodies in their travels,” considering them “sent forth from the hand of omnipotence.” This fascination with escaping Earth, combined with an increasing awareness of his own mortality, perhaps account for Thistlewood’s purchase of Emanuel Swedenborg’s A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell (). Swedenborg had a productive career as a scientist before experiencing a conversion in the s; he subsequently devoted his life to writing strikingly original and mystical theological works. While Thistlewood was certainly curious about life beyond the grave, would he have accepted the
Ibid., :. Ibid., :. Ibid., :. Ibid., :–. MONSON /, /; Rob Browning, “Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ and the Cosmic Voyage since Paradise Lost,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –; Daniel P. Watkins, Anna Letitia Barbauld and th-Century Visionary Poets (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ), –. MONSON /, .
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Swede’s more extravagant notions uncritically? Indeed, one of his favorite periodicals, the Monthly Review characterized Swedenborg as “a visionary and enthusiast” – not exactly approving terms in an English context – while another termed Swedenborg’s account of conversations with angels and spirits “the productions of a disordered brain.” Yet Swedenborg’s cosmology, which postulated a plurality of inhabited worlds, might well have been catnip for the aging amateur astronomer. When Thistlewood directed his telescope heavenward, what intellectual commerce did he imagine with those distant beings “who afterwards become spirits and angels” and who “from the love of truth and useful knowledge [were] allowed to converse with the spirits from other worlds”?
David Dunér, “Swedenborg and the Plurality of Worlds: Astrotheology in the Eighteenth Century,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science , no. (): –. Emanuel Swedenborg, A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell (London, ), –.
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Containing the Overflowing Fountain of His Brain Robert Long’s “Reflections”
The differences between Thistlewood’s stolid commonplace books and Robert’s anarchic “Miscellaneous Reflections” underscore how individual readers participated in and appropriated Enlightenment intellectual culture, each in their own way. Many of Robert’s reflections were clearly not inspired by any particular publication; many others no doubt were, but insufficient identifying information makes it impossible to track them down. Rare specific references are often incomplete, even inaccurate. Nailing down when he wrote a particular comment is difficult, too, because the “Reflections” contains so few dates and there is no corroborating material like Thistlewood’s journals. Finally, while transcribers like Thistlewood were hardly passive, Robert was an active, impatient reader. He riffed on his reading like a jazz musician transforms a popular melody; Thistlewood, insecure in his claim to learning, piled up transcriptions tirelessly, even tediously, like a student running through scales. Quick to criticize, Robert even dabbled in original writing, crossing the line into authorship. His freeform adaptation of the commonplace book also more clearly reveals how reading became a “[mode] of achieving an autonomous self,” while Thistlewood’s more dogged approach often obscures how his reading affected his thinking, feeling self. The poem Robert inscribed on the title page, “The Commenter,” situates reading as central to his intellectual life and reminds us of its transatlantic dimension. Composed by Charles Long, it is the only evidence of his beloved brother’s literary ambitions. “Happy the Man possess’d of Pen and Ink!,” it begins, “And paper, tho’ it be but whity brown!” Such a reader disdains the “Dunce,” who trusts his memory too much. In contrast, the savvy reader, “[f]rom the o’er flowing Fountain of his Brain,”
BRIS-Ms. On Foucault, commonplacing, and self-fashioning, Lockridge, The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II, .
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compiles learned observations and shrewd remarks on everything he reads until “the mighty Comment / Has gather’d up each Nothing in its Way!” In the concluding lines, Charles likened this activity to a schoolboy who fashions a snowball, which his mates roll along until it becomes a “Vast and immovable . . . Mound Immeasurable!” A remark deep in Robert’s “Reflections” depicts much less cheerfully the intellectual project Charles described so humorously. Clearly Robert’s commentary was intended to discipline a mind teeming with ideas, making them useful and endurable; it was an alternative to death, that “freedom and release” from the “solicitations” of an unruly crowd of thoughts. Directing his “speculative pains and toil” into “useful consequence” made it possible to “relish life”; failing to do so was shameful. But how did he transform his roiling thoughts into something useful? Through support of Anthony Robinson’s endeavors and collaborations with his brother Edward, Reverend MacKay, and Andrew Peter Dupont (Chapter )? The “Reflections” gives no clue. But the passage suggests a despair that undermined Robert’s sometimes insufferable self-confidence. Yet he persevered, heartened perhaps by his brother’s poem: he could only add to that enormous mound of learning, but somehow, someday it would amount to something through collective effort. Before delving into how Robert read and what he thought about race and slavery and religion, we must come to terms with his obsession with politeness. “Politeness” is a protean term in current scholarship, reflecting its multiple and frequently imprecise meanings during the eighteenth century. John Brewer elegantly sums up its larger social and cultural aspirations and the demands it made upon the individual: [Politeness] was at once a philosophy, a way of life to which one committed oneself, and the means to understand oneself and one’s place in the world. Embracing every aspect of manners and morals, it was a complete system of conduct . . . [Its aim] was to reach an accommodation with the complexities of modern life and to replace political zeal and religious bigotry with mutual tolerance and understanding. The means of achieving this was a manner of conversing and dealing with people which, by teaching one to regulate one’s passions and to cultivate good taste, would enable a person to realize what was in the public interest and for the general good. It involved both learning a technique of self-discipline and adopting the values of a refined, moderate sociability.
BRIS-Ms, . Passage too brief to determine whether it is suicidal; other comments on suicide at , . Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, .
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A social performance, politeness paradoxically demanded mastery and display of a sophisticated repertoire of social skills as if they came naturally. As a father wrote to his son, “The Difficulty of Learning Politeness consists in its Ease. It ought to be so simple and natural that it should not be, must not appear to be, acquired. To learn is to use art, inconsistent with simplicity.” Its demands transformed everyone into tireless spectators of themselves who required spectators to confirm their success at acquiring it. As Richard Bushman wrote of the North American colonies, “Gentility heightened self-consciousness . . . [and] life became a continuous performance, perpetually subject to criticism.” Robert’s “Reflections” was a tool for training himself in this dialectic of deeply critical subjectivity and shimmering superficiality. However demanding, politeness served his social aspirations wherever he was, though the stakes in any given social situation differed depending on his location. Firmly ensconced in Jamaica’s elite, in England he lacked noble birth. Ultimately, he was a creole who wanted to be an English gentleman. But “politeness” could burnish social distinction everywhere. In England, it had a way of “levelling up,” embracing a duke and his tailor. In Jamaica, it reinforced the claim on elite status for “new” men like him beyond brute strength and wealth. Robert also deployed politeness to distance himself from White creole society, especially women, whom he criticized in terms similar to those discussed in Part I. And while the nature of hierarchy on either side of the Atlantic differed, it was an organizing principle in both worlds, making Robert almost obsessively sensitive to what distinguished inferior from superior. Robert was well aware of the challenges of politeness. These could be physically painful by making conflicting demands on the body, as in fencing versus letter writing. He acknowledged, too, that its dictates risked losing the “self” in a funhouse of appearances. Showing too little or too much “passion by your countenance, voice, gesture, attitude and action” undercut the appearance of “the person you should seem to be.” Yet he usually explicated rather than criticized its demands, transforming parts of his “Reflections” into a courtesy manual. Managing personal behavior was
Ibid., . Williams, Social Life of Books, . Quoting Bushman, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, . Paul Langford, “The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (): . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, .
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key to managing how others perceived you. Thus, while Robert’s graphic descriptions of bodily functions verge on disgusting, they communicate an urgent disciplining of the body to avoid inspiring unpleasant associations in other minds. For example, neither the master nor the mistress should be suspected of having accomplished “the offices of the call of nature” before a meal as guests would inevitably have “nasty thoughts.” No gesture was meaningless. A companion could interpret as cold indifference to what they were saying should you even “[button] your coat when you observe anything displeasing.” One always composed “a face to meet the faces that you meet,” an ambition in tension with the imperative to communicate authenticity, too. Thus, Robert wrote how “studied expressions” were untrustworthy because the “truly sorrowful have neither leisure nor will to frame them. Art has little to do with the language of truth and the heart’s dictates.” Conversation demanded special vigilance. Praising an absent person had to be avoided because it indirectly commended oneself. Being “dogmatic” or contentious could be interpreted as enhancing the value of one’s own thoughts by characterizing everyone else’s as “nonsense.” Robert’s obsession with politeness frequently gives his “Reflections” a didactic tone, which extends to his opinions on literature. He liked playing a critic wary of his era’s innovations. As we saw, Thistlewood did not invest as much time and money in novels as his friends, but he nevertheless owned some, borrowed others, and attended closely to some of the most popular. Robert’s notes do not even register the existence of Richardson’s Clarissa, much less comment on it. Indeed, he apparently dismissed fiction altogether: “Romance seems a description . . . of extraordinary perfect persons, acts, or things, good or ill. It’s a new world – a world of fancy.” Especially revealing are comments on literary forms Robert considered beneficial or injurious to a child’s developing moral sense, especially “incitements to pride.” Thus, children should only attend plays that were “the feast and entertainment of reason.” He approved tragedies “most solemn and interesting, representing subjects of weighty concern.” He utterly condemned the “tragicomic” as “too loose and wanton,” teaching only deceitful and dishonorable behavior
BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (). Similar social anxiety apparent in George Washington’s transcription of the seventeenth-century Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior and in William Byrd’s commonplace book. BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, .
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that deluded and debauched “the credulous [and] the virtuous.” Comedies could “encourage friendship, honor, honesty, benevolence, generosity and every social and private virtue”; if they did not, children had to be inoculated against “[mistaking] vices for virtues and learn[ing] follies and absurdities.” He approved of Shakespeare’s and other historical plays for their agreeable, exemplary instruction in the ways of nations. But he savaged works focused on “love” for subverting the “artless love” of “nature’s dictates,” “spoil[ing] the best part of man’s nature, innocent and artless affection.” Instead, they created “so many coxcombs and Sir Foplings, so many coquettes and Flirtillas, so many bad and unequal matches, so many false lovers, faithless fair, false husbands, and false wives, so many cuckold makers and so many horned beasts with two legs.” He disagreed with contemporary criticism of the gravedigging scene in Hamlet, considering it the noblest moralizing in the play and “reflections worthy [of] any prince.” Satire was most proper entertainment for children because it investigated “manners and men, public or private,” with Fielding’s Tom Thumb the Great an outstanding example. It benefited adults, too, because it confronted “the foolish and wicked” with mirrors in which they could see their actions and sometimes a microscope through which they could discover “hidden vices or vanities . . . otherwise too minute to be discover’d.” Not surprisingly, Robert was a demanding reader. “So soon as I come to a monstrous lie in Travells or History,” he wrote, “I immediately drop the Book, concluding – Here begins Chap. . Of Impossibilities.” Irritated, he would flee his library until he calmed down. He was aggravated by authors who presented absurdities to enhance their cleverness, wasting their readers’ time and insulting their intelligence. He lost patience when another author habitually depicted his “fair characters” very positively – only to qualify with a but, if, or only. What characters did not have “some Buts or Exceptions,” he asserted, then quoted John Dryden to underscore human weakness and self-delusion. In addition to respecting their readers’ “precious” time, writers should avoid ornament, be concise, and
BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . Hamlet: A Critical Reader, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, ), ; Hardin L. Aasand, “‘Pah! Puh!’: Hamlet, Yorick, and the Chopless Stage Direction,” in Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions, ed. Hardin L. Aasand (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, ), . Also see Jack Lynch, “Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, .
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choose only the “most expressive and intelligible” words to convey their views. However critical, even contrarian, Robert obviously savored reading. One could take one’s time, closing a book to consider and “[unravel] every knotty part.” This made a book a better companion than a human being, who could not be silenced while you weighed his points. Yet reading should not be cultivated solely as a private pleasure or to impress the “Ignorant.” Like his contemporaries, he believed that it should be put to use “improv[ing] others,” not simply to please or inspire admiration. Robert rarely engaged with any specific work for long, so it is arresting when he did. The four pages he devoted to Thomas Blount’s The Academie of Eloquence show how even an engaged reader might pervert, subvert, and challenge an author’s agenda. Reprinted four times after its publication in , it was typical of rhetorical education during much of the seventeenth century. This suggests a certain fustiness, but also underscores my earlier observation that eighteenth-century readers had hardly closed the book on the seventeenth century. Typically, Robert did not cite the title correctly, though he seems to have been drawn to the book for precisely what the author offered: instruction in expressing one’s self in conversation and writing, which obviously dovetailed with the project of politeness. He drew most from the chapters of oratorical formulas and exemplary letters, plucking out phrases and words as if compiling a vocabulary list, sometimes reworking them or commenting briefly. But this exercise in selfeducation went awry when the formula “Let Venus speed his plough” prompted a series of free and increasingly salacious associations. Blount’s selection of commonplaces about women were overwhelmingly positive, but Robert ignored those. Instead, he focused on the section “Women discommended,” especially the description of an old crone drawn from George Rivers’s celebration of female heroism, Heroinae (). Rivers’s description of the ancient villainess Calbia was repulsive enough.
BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . Barnaby Ralph, “‘Therein Intermix’d’: Psyche and the London Restoration Stage,” in London and Literature, –, ed. Barnaby Ralph, Angela Kikue Davenport, and Yui Nakatsuma (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, ), ; also see, Ian Mortimer, “Blount, Thomas (–),” ODNB. Thomas Blount, The Academie of Eloquence (London, ), ; BRIS-Ms, . Ray Nadeau, “Oratorical Formulas in Seventeenth-Century England,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (): . Blount, Academie, ; BRIS-Ms, . Deborah Boyle, “Fame, Virtue, and Government: Margaret Cavendish on Ethics and Politics,” Journal of the History of Ideas , no. (): .
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It compared her body to a “carcass” so “blasted by lust [it] would make the heart of youth recoil into an infant continence.” But Robert’s rewrite stressed her debauched sexuality by adding details such as teeth “as decayed and black as her virtue and chastity” and asserting that she did not just repulse youth, but was “the very antipode to desire and antidote to venery.” Yet in the midst of his reworking, he exploded with criticism: The passage was “full of vile antitheses.” It was “true Bombast and Swiftian Bathos” – a nod to Alexander Pope’s hilarious satire of contemporary poets, On Bathos, or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry () – and “a ridiculous patchwork and interleaving” of linguistic affectations. In short, Robert the reader began with assiduous study, was distracted by his prurience and misogyny, and ended by challenging Blount’s selection and thoroughly subverting his intention of lauding female heroism and virtue. Like a multitude of eighteenth-century readers, Robert was interested in Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws. But he was not that interested, and what interested him did not interest Thistlewood. Indeed, the “Reflections” strongly suggests that Robert was content with an excerpt published in four issues of the Monthly Review in . The editors prefaced it with enthusiastic praise: The Spirit was “the best, or rather the only book extant of this kind, in which the human laws are simplified and traced to their fountain head.” Indeed, no writer had probed the subject more deeply and analyzed it “with more candour, correctness, strength of judgment, and liberty” than Montesquieu. Alas, they could only publish a sample of this “solid, manly genius,” so chose material that would no doubt engage their readers: a discussion of England’s constitution, which showed how “the principles of the constitution of a free people” informed “the natural character” of the English and their customs. Robert clearly found the excerpt engaging, though he disagreed with the editors’ esteem for the French philosophe. Of the four parts of the excerpt, only the third installment, published in September , inspired him to take any notes at all, but he returned to it three times in a running argument with the Frenchman. While querulous, his response was not trivial. It not only challenged Montesquieu’s characterizations of the French and the English; it took issue with the links he had forged between governance, mores, and morals.
BRIS-Ms, . Monthly Review (July ), and . Monthly Review (September ), –.
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In his first set of notes, Robert responded to three passages: Montesquieu had asserted that “[i]f this nation [England] sent any colonies abroad, it would be more with a view to extend its trade than its dominion.” Robert drily remarked, “But the first is generally productive of the last.” Where Montesquieu wrote that there would be “more sense than taste” in England, Robert commented that “true taste and good sense should go hand in hand” unless Montesquieu meant the kind of taste that was frivolous and unconstrained by “a sound judgment.” He strongly disagreed that “an absolute or despotic government produces idleness and [that] idleness begets politeness.” Certainly the Turks were idle, but definitely not the French. Robert granted that the French, like everyone else, possessed a “peculiar genius, humour, and constitution,” which informed their actions. But though subject to arbitrary rule, they were anything but idle. Indeed, “[t]heir minds are ever busied with mischief [that] is much more consequential than idleness.” After devoting nearly nine pages to other subjects, Robert returned to Montesquieu’s association of despotic or absolutist governance with idleness and politesse. If Montesquieu meant a lack of engagement with public affairs and “the idleness that begets politeness, it’s just.” To be sure, the “busy mind” of a man excluded from politics would naturally turn to cultivating civility and politesse in society. Then he backtracked to one of Montesquieu’s earlier pronouncements. Montesquieu had asserted that England, “constantly [agitated by public concerns], would be easier led by its passions, than by meer [sic] reason, which never produces great effects on the mind of men.” Robert rewrote this as “Man may be easier led by passion than mere reason.” He noted the banality of the observations with a terse, “Else they were not men,” though agreed that men regarded reason more often as “a busy and impertinent intruder” than a welcome mediator. Fragments plucked from Montesquieu’s next paragraph asserted that the English were so “passionately fond and jealous of its liberty” as a “real sensible good,” they willingly submitted to more burdensome taxes than any “arbitrary prince” would dare impose on his subjects. Robert disagreed vehemently. Montesquieu was not describing the “nation,” but the “English mob,” and history had shown just how “sensible” it had been to the “good” of “liberty.” It had tolerated well enough the “tyranny” of the hereditary ruler Henry VIII, while rejecting
Monthly Review (September ), ; BRIS-Ms, . Ibid., Monthly Review, ; BRIS-Ms, . Ibid., Monthly Review, ; BRIS-Ms, . Ibid., Monthly Review, . BRIS-Ms, .
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the “wise government of a usurper” Richard III. Clearly, the defense of liberty was inadequate to explain “the manners and opinions of the people” at different historical moments! After three pages of musings on other topics, Robert concluded his quarrel with Montesquieu. He paraphrased Montesquieu’s text: “the politeness of our morals [rather] than of our manners should distinguish us from the nations reputed barbarous.” Robert disagreed: “[I]n too many instances these [barbarous] nations excel us in [morals].” Rather, morals and manners should accompany each other, and the English should possess a “due mixture” of both. His final comment on Montesquieu untypically judged his own sex harshly. Montesquieu had asserted that male participation in a regime of liberty would diminish mingling of the two sexes. Women would become more modest, while men, no longer obliged to be gallant, would freely indulge their sexuality, while possessing fully their time and liberty. Robert countered that men authorized to participate in public life as appropriate to their stations would become tyrants in the home. The fact is, despite his misogynous views, he disliked tyrannical power wherever he found it, whether in the parlor or the cane fields. What did Robert make of Montesquieu’s commentary on slavery, which Thistlewood so carefully transcribed? Neither the “Supplement” nor the “Reflections” suggests he even read it. To be fair, as we move into Robert’s views on race and slavery, much of the material Thistlewood commonplaced was not available to Robert, who died before anti-slavery sentiment had gained much traction. But he could have sought out advice on plantation management in Samuel Martin’s and William Belgrove’s treatises, and he almost certainly could have secured a copy of Beckford’s manuscript. He could have read Rousseau’s Social Contract and Hume’s essays “On the Populousness of Ancient Nations” and “Of National Character,” including its infamous footnote. Maybe he did, but he left no notes. In fact, while sensitive to suggestions of planter cruelty, he showed no interest in slavery qua slavery. Like Jamaican flora and fauna, creole ladies, and fellow planters, slaves entered Robert’s range of vision and prompted observation, but they never exerted the fascination even of insects. Generally speaking, Robert apparently found blacks physically repugnant. The listings for his portfolio of drawings included “ very exact drawings of very ugly negroes” as well as “a mulatta girl’s hermaphrodite
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parts.” He lavished the same kind of lurid attention on describing a black man on horseback as he had on Calbia’s “carcass,” concluding: “All the most superstitious can imagine of Wizards, Devils, dirty, obscene, filthy, frightfull, grotesque are not to be equalled with what is daily visible among Negroes!” Nor did he believe blacks capable of the kind of fellow feeling he described in a vigil at a loved one’s deathbed or even the admirable tenacity of the spider preserving its home (Part I). In a kind of thought experiment, he imagined how a group of slaves chained together would lack all affection and be callously indifferent to each other’s suffering. Yet even when he criticized the planter habit of parading “young creatures,” male and female, in glorious nudity, he used terms that clearly convey arousal as do his descriptions of naked enslaved females at work in the fields and his descanting on how the shape of the noses of the enslaved was conducive to kissing. While rare, these passages stand out for their raw expression of male lust, which his unchallengeable power makes that much more repugnant. They also undercut his claim of the shamelessness of slaves compared to Europeans, his assertion of the “moderate” man’s immunity to “fornicating ideas,” and his condemnation of the “lecherous minds” of other slaveholders. He did not record whether and how liberally he indulged his desire, but in his comments he repaid the blackskinned reminders of his vulnerability with a disdain similar to that expressed toward women, especially White creoles. The comparatively few comments Robert made about the enslaved were based on daily experience, not his reading. Untroubled by slavery as an institution, he did worry about its administration. He was unhappy with a runaway slave law that, he claimed, a savvy slave could easily evade, and he discouraged compensating slaves with cash because it incentivized larceny. He believed a planter acted against his self-interest by permitting a slave to purchase his freedom. It deprived him of the revenue produced during a slave’s lifetime; it could “create a jealousy in the other slaves,” who would steal to secure the means to purchase their own freedom. He also believed in strict control over “free Negroes.” Occasionally some aspect of slave behavior or life attracted his attention as when he transcribed a dialogue between two “creole blacks” or disapproved of their charms and
BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, right; BRIS-Ms, ; BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, right. BRIS-Ms, , . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, , .
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curses. He briefly recorded how many plantains a “new Negro” should be fed daily and specified the practices he wished overseers to observe. When it came to the “nature” of the enslaved as people and as peoples, Robert did not even share the ethnographic curiosity that popular travel accounts inspired in so many readers. He was not indifferent to human diversity, nor did he dismiss its significance. But his notes on Peter Kolb’s The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope () make clear that diversity for him had little to do with a hierarchy of peoples based on civilization or “race.” Kolb’s widely influential account of the Hottentots was anthropologically astute, frequently sympathetic, and sounded a note of cultural relativism that did not always reflect well on Europeans. Kolb discouraged the ceremony of urinating on the ashes of the deceased, for example, but he represented the custom as rational. Indeed, it had the laudable and high-minded moral purposes of humbling pride, extinguishing vanity, and “banishing all Distinctions from among’em.” While much in this passage agreed with Robert’s own views on pride and death (see below), he did not cite it. Yet his notes suggest that he understood Kolb’s account as the author intended. It even inspired his own exercise in cultural relativism: “Common Sense or Custom or Opinion,” a two-page compilation of the customs of the Hottentots, Europeans, and other peoples. His conclusion in one instance serves for the rest: “What custom made honourable it makes dishonourable with Time’s help and vice versa.” Ultimately for Robert, slaves figured in a social hierarchy into which he had been born and that he never challenged. While he considered slaves socially inferior, he also considered them human, and he was aware of the paradoxes slavery sometimes presented. The White man shaded from the sun by a bareheaded slave was an exemplar of pride, because the White, diminished by “artificial necessities,” made strength serve weakness. For Robert, this violated the rules of being a good master of a slave or of a servant. But Robert did not need to consult books to determine what good mastery entailed because experience had taught him quite enough. On the one hand, he was very dubious about a fellow planter’s “modest” and
BRIS-Ms, ; BRIS-Ms, right. Also see BRIS-Ms, ; BRIS-Ms, left; BRIS-Ms, left; BRIS-Ms, , , . BRIS-Ms, left, left. Nicholas Hudson, “‘Hottentots’ and the Evolution of European Racism,” Journal of European Studies , no. (): –. Ibid., ; Peter Kolb, Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (London, ), :–. BRIS-MsVI, –; allusions to Kolb: : –, , , , –, , , , . BRIS-Ms, .
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“mild” disposition; he disapproved of how, even when exhausted, his counterpart sought his slaves’ “service and obedience not as a matter of necessity, but free will” and how he relayed his wishes with “an air of request rather than command.” But he adamantly rejected the other extreme, though he believed it rare: “A cruel West Indian planter wherever one is to be found (few I believe there are) I would wish a stoker in Hell when he dies.” Robert did not consider slaves stupid, either. He admitted as much in an extraordinary “speech” that addressed a slave whose cruel master had died. Here he did draw on his reading, appropriating and powerfully retooling a passage from an ancient text – and became an author in the process. His inspiration was a quotation from Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, “I trample on the pride of Plato”: This is similar to what one may suppose of a Negro slave’s idea with regard to his master’s proud and haughty mind (for Negroes can think and justly, too, though they’ve not the mastery of our tongue) who lived proud and died poor. His once unhappy bondsman received from the successor the old wardrobe of his late master. “There,” says the administrator, “you receive the outside of him whose inside was so terrible. You wear it now not only without fear but with comfort as a good and handsome covering. As a memento ’tis as the skin of the once tremendous lion. As trophies of yours and death’s victory over tyranny and oppression, you’ve pulled his skin over your ears who threatened to do it to you. You familiarize your eyes and person with what was once a terror to you and sat as a blister on your shoulders. The same things are subservient to your purposes that once cloaked a body now rotten and worm eaten. These are emblems of his past humiliation and of your triumph (though a slave) over a mean usurpation not a lawful domain.”
We should note that Robert’s use of “usurpation” and “tyranny” did not challenge the legitimacy of slavery, but only the illegitimate exercise of legitimate rule. Being a slaveholder in a society where dominance was secured through unremitting violence probably made him much more sensitive to what constituted legitimate mastery over servants, slaves, and even wives. But how he conceptualized slavery shielded the institution while leaving considerable room to condemn his planter peers. It also connects with other denunciations of pride, which he considered the cardinal sin of his caste. His ability to use a Latin classic to fuse these
BRIS-Ms, ; BRIS-Ms, . For example, BRIS-Ms, .
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many concerns into a compelling piece of original prose demonstrates the potential creativity of reading. My consideration of Robert’s religious views begins at what initially seems an odd place: his reading of the History of England by the French Huguenot Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, “the most influential and widely read general historian of England in the first half of the eighteenth century.” While the Frenchman had his critics, many considered him a model historian because of his prudent adjudication of competing accounts and an impartiality that they believed derived from his outsider status. Indeed, a review in the London Journal asserted that it “should be in every Englishman’s Hand.” As with Montesquieu, Robert did not agree. He especially objected to Rapin-Thoyras’s “superstitious credulity.” He noted how other “annotators” had characterized the French historian’s attribution of a certain power even to the names of monarchs as “a weakness unworthy [of] an English historian” – and followed up with a three-page critique. Because Thoyras-Rapin introduced into his account a “vulgar belief” in “prodigies” and “miracles” deduced from happenstance and coincidence, he could not accomplish the historian’s task: “set[ting] down plain fact and leav[ing] his readers to judge for themselves as to their causes.” Robert offered several examples before delivering his summary judgment: [I]f Rapin believed that Providence sometimes intervened in human affairs when they concerned “a whole people, a potent and great kingdom,” why not do the same for a lesser people and even individuals? “All people, all creatures, all things are alike under the almighty’s guidance, direction, and protection. Not a sparrow falls but he knows it.” British Francophobia certainly could have influenced Robert’s response to this widely esteemed work. After all, his comments on Montesquieu show his mistrust of the French, though a grudging respect as well. Robert’s contrarian nature made him keen to criticize what others praised. But the bone he chose to pick with the History suggests that more was at stake. First, his condemnation was not really fair. Rapin-Thoyras had frequently merely reported how people interpreted incidents as portents and omens without agreeing that they were. And Robert’s judgment diverged wildly from what others had singled out for praise: that Rapin
M. G. Sullivan, “Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth Century England,” History of European Ideas , no (): . D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, –. BRIS-Ms, –.
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Thoyras had authored an edifying history of the struggle of the English to “maintain liberty through the balance of prerogatives and privileges.” We could say that Robert missed the point or, more generously, became fixated on a lesser point. But it is more productive to ask, as Blount’s Calbia had sparked a misogynous nerve, what had Rapin-Thoyras’s prodigies and miracles set off? Like Thistlewood, Robert was highly skeptical of popular and conventional Christian practice and belief – in short, what both men considered literal, credulous, superstitious, “vulgar,” even “enthusiast.” Now Robert was neither careless nor casual about sorting out his thoughts on religion. He listened attentively to sermons and prayers whether in Spanish Town or England. But he also ridiculed a representation of bodily resurrection in a “print in the Halfway Tree Church Bible” with its “absurd . . . figures half flesh, half bone, half reincorporated & reanimated” instead of transformed instantaneously. He was amazed to see in the Bible at the St. Iago church in Spanish Town and in the Duke of Portland’s chapel in England depictions of angels as female with “exuberant bubbies” when everyone in heaven supposedly had “no sex.” And he ridiculed people crying “Heaven be praised” as if to attract God’s attention to all their trifles or vanities. There is a through line from Robert’s impatience with what he considered religious foolishness – and which Rapin-Thoyras had inadvertently tapped into – to much more probing questions about the nature of God, the immortality of the soul, and divine punishment. We have seen how precisely the same questions agitated Thistlewood, too. Robert thought them through in his own way, of course, though often arrived at equally heterodox conclusions. And while he fussed over different texts, reading helped him grapple with these issues as it did Thistlewood. Edward Young’s Night Thoughts prompted the earliest religious ruminations in Robert’s “Reflections.” He read this most successful of Young’s religious poetry in its expanded version of . Initially a work of consolation inspired by several family deaths, it eventually became a formidable Christian apologetic. Young’s contemporary John Walker included passages from it in his popular work on elocution, because the poet, “like a good philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of
Sullivan, “Rapin, Hume and the Identity of the Historian,” . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . James E. May, “Young, Edward (bap. , d. ),” ODNB; Wayne C. Ripley, “‘An Age More Curious, Than Devout’: The Counter-Enlightenment Edward Young,” Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): .
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man from the grandeur of his conceptions and the meanness and misery of his state.” It helped bring the shoemaker-turned-bookseller James Lackington back to Methodism after a flirtation with freethinking. Jamaica’s Attorney General, Thomas Harrison, tearfully admitted his fondness for such books to the Methodist minister William Jones; claiming that reading them too much “would absolutely incapacitate me for attending to my Business; I shou’d not . . . care whether I were worth a dollar in the world, &, consequently shou’d neglect my children & Family.” Robert Long and some other contemporaries were not so impressed. His first set of comments responded to the seventh “night” where the poet defended his doctrine of immortality against the skeptical Lorenzo. Young offered the paradoxical, if not wholly original argument that men needed immortal life to complete them. Ill-proportioned to this world, human passions and aspirations, whether for knowledge or virtue, could only be satisfied in the next: “’Tis Immortality your Nature solves; /’Tis Immortality deciphers Man . . . Without it, all his Virtues are a Dream. / His very Crimes attest his Dignity.” Even his worldly ambitions “[declare] him born for Blessing infinite.” Robert clearly seconded Lorenzo, registering his skepticism by adding an eloquent underline and exclamation point to a single verse: “his (man’s) very Crimes attest his Dignity!” He found nothing consoling about Young’s afterlife, forever dead to any sense but pain. Yet he soldiered on as Young asserted that both reason and hope required immortality because they were inevitably limited and disappointed in this life. Once again, Robert expressed his disapproval by adorning a transcribed verse with an exclamation point. He did the same and added a parenthetical when restating Young’s verse, “It is when future Time procures us Bliss! – (at least in Expectation).” And he connected that verse to another description of eternal suffering, underscoring the dubious blessing of such a hereafter. The eighth night prompted more comments. There Young rejected how much the “Man of the World” esteemed pride, ambition, and pleasure. “Pleasure” took many forms, yet whatever her form, men consorted with a harlot. This was true, too, of the Stoic who pridefully scorned pleasure.
Williams, Social Life of Books, ; two instances of friends reading it together, , ; Allan, Making British Culture, . Sophie Bankes, “James Lackington (–): Reading and Personal Development,” in The History of Reading, ed. Katie Halsey and W. R. Owens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Jones, Diary, . On Young’s relationship to physico-theology, Ripley, Counter-Enlightenment, .
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Robert agreed with this criticism of pride, so here he merely paraphrased Young. But he wrangled with Young’s assertion a few pages later that “Truth never was indebted to a lie.” Here the polite gentleman concerned to manage social relations came into conflict with a poet intent on undermining the hold of worldly imperatives. Robert countered that “Truth” was not always the point – at least, not immediately. Sometimes lies were preferable to offending people who “fear [t]o have their folly or their vices revealed.” Lies sometimes furthered truth. Wasn’t that the point of fables? Sometimes prudence concealed truth to “better [attain] her point.” The physician did not tell his patient how noxious his medicine was. Truth could even be dangerous, and one should temporize to save an innocent life. “In such and like cases the best of mankind would belie themselves.” Generally speaking, Robert’s imagination was more biblical than Thistlewood’s. He sought metaphors for proper conduct in its text, and he puzzled over literal versus symbolic interpretations. Two pages after his comments on Young, he mused about “forbidden fruit.” “Rich, luscious fruits promote venery,” he wrote, but even sexual desire could be “lawful” and promoted the good when properly restrained. Fruits had been given to us by God, so we were entitled to taste them. Lust “corrected” ensured posterity; lust “unlawful” was “whoredom.” Robert’s exegesis aligned with his beliefs about a proper life, though did he apply it to the White man’s appropriation at will of a Black woman’s sexual services? Elsewhere, he mused whether the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib merely symbolized the affection a woman should feel for her husband or was a matter of fact. If the latter, how should the miracle be reconciled with reason? Beyond the Bible, even prosaic texts prompted searching questions. Wetenhill Wilke’s A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady () triggered speculations about the nature of the Trinity. Less seriously, a couplet from William de Britaine’s Human Prudence kicked off several comments on the lives of angels, including what “happiness” meant to one. Robert was startled when a slave asked whether God had created Satan as well as all other beings. Assured this was so, the slave wondered whether God would destroy his own creation because Satan’s “power and wisdom” came from God “as an inferior from a superior power receives all he has.” Surprised, Robert speculated that this was a natural enough conclusion for anyone instructed “in a literal manner the plan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is founded [chiefly] in Scripture.” But
BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, .
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the slave’s question obviously troubled him. And his thoughts took a darker turn when he speculated whether wishing for death was a tacit criticism of God “as man was created for misery and assigned . . . a power of sense but to feel pain and anguish.” More troubling, who was responsible for the existence of evil, a question that exercised Thistlewood, too. A note relatively early in the “Reflections” makes clear that Robert knew the stakes in the answer: “Rather than believe the deity a god of cruelty, men became atheists and felones de seipsis [destroyers of themselves].” He imagined the disembodied souls of the wicked, suffering eternal punishment. If they were even then incapable of repentance, was God in some sense the “author . . . of [their] eternal obstinacy and wickedness of heart”? If they could repent, yet remained condemned, was God the cruellest as well as the greatest of all beings? In a somewhat obscure passage, he quibbled over the purported connection between soul and body. Vaguely he appears to have questioned the “perfection” of a creator who created such an imperfect being. “Is the body of such a man like a dull instrument or a bad telescope?” The statement implicitly criticized the divine master craftsman who had crafted human beings. Given that Robert was still musing about the nature of the afterlife on the last page of his “Reflections,” we might wonder whether he was denied his Savoyard Vicar moment. Yet about two-thirds of the way through the “Reflections” in the midst of his comments on Rapin-Thoyras, he apparently found a way to calm his anxiety, if not settle his questions: “Lord Shaftesbury says all of us should if possible regard religion with a mind serene and cheerful.” He was probably reading Shaftesbury’s influential “Letter concerning Enthusiasm” () and perhaps his later reflections published just a few years later. The “Letter” was an entry in the debate over enthusiasm prompted by the “French Prophets,” Camisard refugees whose apocalyptic predictions aroused controversy and sparked prosecutions in England. Shaftesbury’s contribution to the ensuing “battle of pamphlets” was atypical, neither rejecting “enthusiasm” on rationalist grounds nor ridiculing it through satire like Jonathan Swift. As Lionel Laborie puts it, he attempted to “rehabilitate [enthusiasm] as a positive, even creative passion.” Shaftesbury acknowledged the unwholesome
BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . BRIS-Ms, . On French prophets, Lionel Laborie, Enlightening Enthusiasm: Prophecy and Religious Experience in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), chaps. –, and pamphlet war, –. Laborie, Enlightening Enthusiasm, .
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enthusiasm that arose from “melancholy occasions,” such as “public calamities,” natural disasters, or “other amazing prodigies,” which the magistrate should dispel by “exercis[ing] sympathy” for its victims and employing “cheerful ways to divert it,” not punishment. Unlike some contemporaries, Robert correctly understood that Shaftesbury was not making a jest of religion, but warning against enthusiasts afflicted by a melancholic view of “all of nature” and “even the great father of nature.” This was the socially destructive enthusiasm manipulated by priests to preserve their power. But there was another enthusiasm fundamental to religion, a profound admiration always connected with a “certain religious veneration.” Shaftesbury sought to return human religious feelings to those “first beginnings, that natural complacency and good humour which inclines to trust and confidence in mankind” and that “present[s] us with agreeable views of joy, love, meekness, gentleness and moderation.” In David Alvarez’s words, Shaftesbury’s enthusiasm was “a sensibility of delight and wonder marked by an openness, an affirmation of life, and an enhancement of our natural social affections. More than a feeling, good humour is an expansive mode of cognition and experience.” Robert perhaps did not grasp the intricacies of Shaftesbury’s distinctions. But he definitely had a dark side, so Shaftesbury’s concern to address the problem of melancholy would have hit home. He would naturally welcome a doctrine that sought to delight rather than strike fear into believers with threats of eternal torment. Even if Robert missed where Shaftesbury explicitly connected well-ordered religious belief and a divinely ordered, regular universe, he connected the dots for himself in his second paragraph on Shaftesbury. There he pushed beyond RapinThoyras’s alleged credulity to the physico-theology that ennobled scientific inquiry: When I see the vapors streaked with red, I admire their beauty, but more their utility, but yet most their author. But I am far from eyeing them with terror as portentous appearances of a nation’s coming calamities and descending destruction. At most, they’re but second[ary] causes as meteorologists must know when they trace the approaching tempest in their aspect.
Quoting Shaftesbury, David Alvarez, “Reading Locke after Shaftesbury: Feeling Our Way towards a Postsecular Genealogy of Religious Tolerance,” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Quoting Shaftesbury, ibid., . BRIS-Ms, . Quoting Shaftesbury, Alvarez, “Reading Locke after Shaftesbury,” . Ibid., . Ibid.
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Tristram in the Tropics The Deity is a benevolent as much as he’s an all-powerful essence and, as we are taught as Christians, greater in mildness than in terror.
In short, for Robert as for Thistlewood, natural philosophy revealed and confirmed God’s existence and benignity, even if it did not give human beings the means to apprehend their own or God’s nature. But if science reconciled Robert to God, as it did Thistlewood, that does not mean he was content with his situation. Indeed, his reading might even have given him the chance to rebel in imagination, if not in deed. An extremely atypical entry in his “Reflections,” one penned just a few years before he died, strongly suggests this. As mentioned earlier, Robert rarely transcribed. Yet here he copied out William Wilkie’s “The Ape, the Parrot, and the Jack-daw,” deleting only the poet’s brief preamble. He had to have read it between , its year of publication, and , the year he died. Wilkie (–) was a pastor and minor Scottish littérateur whose Epigoniad, a “long, ponderous epic,” found harsh critics in England and admirers in Scotland, among them David Hume. “The Ape” appeared in Fables, Wilkie’s second book of poetry, which delivered morals through engaging fictions. At seven pages, there is nothing like it in the “Reflections,” and the lack of comment indicates Robert’s approval. But while Wilkie’s poem was undoubtedly meaningful to Robert, he gave no inkling why. Wilkie’s poem recounts the story of a pet “ape” named Pug, who “was the sole delight of an old woman.” “Monkey” and “ape” were interchangeable terms in the eighteenth century, so it was perhaps a monkey like the one Robert had kept in Jamaica. Thoroughly spoilt by his mistress, Pug desperately wanted to fly. He was jealous of the “meanest birds, and insects too” who accomplished this “feat with greatest ease.” Indeed, even “man’s imperial race” could not do it. He asked the advice of his mistress’s parrot, Polly, who “tho’ instructed by mankind, / Her tongue to candor still inclin’d.” She told him that his “frame” made flight impossible. She urged him to “be perfectly content / With your peculiar element” and to improve on those capacities that nature had given creatures like him. Polly paid a high price for telling the truth. Pug mistook her concerned counsel for a competitor’s self-interest. He nearly killed her by tossing her cage out the window. In contrast, a jackdaw, who often enjoyed the
BRIS-Ms, . Richard B. Sher, “Wilkie, William (–),” ODNB. Transcription at BRIS-Ms, –; the text of the volume ends at . William Wilkie, Fables (London, ), . Ibid., , . Ibid., .
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Containing the Overflowing Fountain of His Brain
monkey’s gifts of bread crusts left on the windowsill, told Pug what he wanted to hear. He encouraged him to literally take the leap: “You’ll soar aloft, or, if you please, / Proceed straight forwards at your ease: / The whole depends on resolution, / Which you possess from constitution.” Pug fell, of course, and Polly had foreseen the ridicule his failure would attract. As he lay stunned, few creatures pitied him. None thought the punishment too “severe” for “playing tricks beyond his sphere.” Enraged by the jackdaw’s lies, Pug could not avenge himself on the bird, which flew away, so he savagely murdered the bird’s “helpless brood” until “[n]o single bird was left alive.” When a reader departs from his usual practice, the historian of reading must take it very seriously. But how can one account for Robert’s interest? One problem with the prominence of Wilkie’s poem in Robert’s notes is squaring the many cultural meanings that animals, particularly pets, had during the period with what Wilkie intended them to mean and what they meant to Robert. The rise of keeping pets during the eighteenth century has drawn much scholarly attention, especially from literary specialists. This makes for a rich semiotic menagerie of exoticized slaves, unruly monkeys, simpering lapdogs, and chattering parrots. Constrained or set loose, domesticated animals frequently figured in social criticism, and they served as stand-ins for cultural and racial “Others.” As Laura Brown writes, “Animals helped Europeans imagine Africans, Native Americans, and themselves.” But the “selves” Europeans imagined through animals were hardly admirable as in the it-narratives discussed earlier. The discovery of the orangutans and encounters with other primates prompted questions about what distinguished human beings from animals while encouraging the identification of Africans with the latter. Clothed in European livery and Turkish turban, the domestic slave joined the many commodities brought by global trade into the homes of metropolitan consumers. The slave, the pet, and the porcelain tea service signified the dangers of “luxury,” especially the alleged moral corruption, urge to dominance, frivolity, and uselessness of middle-class women. Together, they prattled brainlessly like parrots while sipping tea from porcelain cups served by
Ibid., . Ibid., . Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), chap. six, quote at ; Markman Ellis, “The Tea-Table, Women and Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé (London: Boydell & Brewer, ), –. Schotland, “Africans as Objects,” .
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black servants; alone, a fashionable plantation mistress shed more tears over an injury to her lapdog than to the suffering of a slave. But women were not the only targets of satires that weaponized pets and the lesscoddled animals crowding London’s streets. In Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty, youths torture dogs and cats while the weight of barristers in a carriage kills the horse harnessed to it. In a discomfiting round-robin, the power dynamic between human and domestic animals raised uncomfortable associations with slavery, and arguments for the humane treatment of animals converged with encouraging the same for slaves. Wilkie’s poem clearly traded in some of the symbolic currency of these associations, if not straightforwardly. “Pug” was both a breed and the name of a pet dog, most famously Hogarth’s. Why would Wilkie apply the name of a faithful, docile dog to a monkey, whose nature made it an unpredictable, even dangerous animal companion? The temptation to make Wilkie’s Pug a reminder of slavery makes sense: both pet dogs and domestic slaves were literally collared, though the former more lavishly than the plantation slave. The dehumanization of Africans by associating them with orangutans more than human beings supports this interpretive move, too, which Wilkie’s depictions of Pug’s savagery underscores. We can even see Pug as a parody of Francis Williams, whose intellectual reputation had certainly reached Robert’s ears. After all, Pug “oft sat poring / About experiments in soaring,” even as the Parrot reminded him to reconcile himself to his natural limitations. Finally, though confined, Pug enjoyed the privileges of a cossetted domestic slave. As envious as he was of Polly, he admitted his privileges: she was caged, but he had free run of the house and accompanied his mistress when she went visiting. But because we could read Wilkie’s poem as an allegory of slavery, that does not mean that Wilkie meant his poem to be read that way, much less that Robert understood it that way. Indeed, he probably found repugnant its explicit moral that counsellors, however different, met the same evil fates. After all, he prized friendship, and he would have been appalled by Pug’s brutality toward Polly, a true friend.
Manushag N. Powell, “Parroting and the Periodical: Women’s Speech, Haywood’s ‘Parrot,’ and Its Antecedents,” in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature , no. (): –. Brown, Fables of Modernity, –. Ingrid H. Tague, “Companions, Servants, or Slaves?: Considering Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (): –; on the emerging connection between anti-slavery and animal welfare, Brycchan Carey, “Abolishing Cruelty: The Concurrent Growth of Anti-Slavery and Animal Welfare Sentiment in British and Colonial Literature,” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies , no. (): –. Wilkie, Fables, .
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Containing the Overflowing Fountain of His Brain
So clearly the poem spoke to Robert, but what did it say? I suspect that the key to understanding what Wilkie’s poem meant to Robert lies less in slavery than in hierarchy, the organizing principle of his world into which he slotted slavery. Pug suffered pain and humiliation precisely because he refused to stay in his place. Yet in Wilkie’s poem, hierarchy, whose imperatives Robert never overtly challenged, was unjust. It was not in Pug’s nature to fly, but it was in Polly’s. Even Pug acknowledged the pain of her imprisonment. Liberty was our greatest blessing, yet she had been “[d]enied the privilege to soar, / With boundless freedom as before.” Too true, the parrot responded. Instead of enjoying her “certain” privilege and her “glorious” fate, she was “confin’d, / Tho’ wing’d and of the flying kind.” A comment in Robert’s scientific notes suggests sympathy with Polly’s predicament. He knew from experience that when a being free by nature was stripped of its liberty, its nature became deformed. He wrote of a “white wing wild pigeon,” which he “let out of confinement after having been in a large coop above two months.” He “gave its liberty to save its life” because rats had killed its companions. But the bird did not respond as expected. It seemed baffled at “its sudden unexpected enlargement”; it never strayed far from the cage and was easily recaptured. Robert speculated that a sure and constant source of food and water “took off the pain of imprisonment.” It had become too comfortable around human beings, thus “estranged to its species, and to other birds and they to it.” In short, imprisonment had denatured the pigeon, leaving it pathetic and alone in the space between bird and man. But while Robert’s scientific notes suggest his sympathy for Polly’s plight, others reveal an envy as keen as Pug’s at her gift. “A grov’ling thing: I fain would rise,” Pug declared, “[a]bove the earth, and mount the skies.” Even more galling to Pug was how even the butterfly, which began life as a crawling caterpillar, soared resplendent in the soft spring sky. How could such creatures, nourished on corruption, “A glorious privilege obtain, / Which I can never hope to gain?” In a long ruminative passage, Robert cast the freedom of flight in even more splendid terms. I alluded to it in Part I when recounting Robinson and Robert’s experiments on the unlucky tick they found on a pigeon’s carcass. While the passage is difficult to make out because the paper is torn and creased, there is enough to convey Robert’s yearning despite his efforts to transform the dove and its tick into an earthbound moral exemplum of the social debt
Ibid.
Ibid., .
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BRIS-Ms-, r.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
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the wealthy owed dependents. Should we not envy “the happiness of the dove,” who makes “the whole country her own by her swift and easy flight”? Of course, Robert himself ought not “move, change my abode with as much freedom as that [of] a bird through the ether.” But his moralizing could not mask the rapturous tone with which he bemoaned the soaring ambition that transported “unhappy man” to the edge of Saturn in imagination, but left him “humbled” and condemned “to move about on the Earth’s surface like a reptile,” deprived of the ability to evade terrestrial dangers. Thus, Robert’s situation between Jamaica and England – an island of slaves and one of free-born men – presents a riot of possibilities for understanding the appeal and meaning of Wilkie’s poem for him. Here I suggest that reading offered a way to emotionally confront, if not solve, his deep discontent and heartfelt yearnings. He experienced both Polly’s pain and Pug’s rage. The world of these pets was comfortable, but claustrophobic; so was Robert’s, hemmed in socially and psychologically by the imperatives of politeness. He made peace with God through science, yet remained indignant with the limitations of his “frame.” Like Pug, he struggled against them – if only in the inviting imaginary space of a book.
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Conclusion to Part III
In November , the New Shoreham anchored in Kingston harbor, journey’s end for William Hickey (–), a young lawyer in search of a position. Unlike the young Scottish doctor William Taylor whom we met at the beginning of Part III, his hopes were disappointed despite impressive letters of introduction. Yet he spent a pleasant few months on the island, generously hosted by well-heeled and prominent residents of town and country. Even considering the brevity of his stay and the generally very good company he kept, Hickey’s positive view of Jamaica is striking. He found Kingston “truly superb, abounding with noble public and private buildings.” He noted the rich and elegant table settings of his boarding house and the city’s “large and commodious church.” Church going clearly was not a priority for him, but he thoroughly enjoyed the city’s cultural amenities before tumbling into bed around midnight. Spanish Town had its charms, too. He declared the road that took him there “a better than I ever saw in England,” and he attended a “splendid ball.” Life on the plantations he visited was equally hospitable and gracious. Bushy Park had “the grandeur about it of a palace,” its owner ready to welcome him from his seat “in a noble portico.” Even a more modest estate “abound[ed] with conveniences” and “stood upon an eminence commanding a delightful view of the adjacent country with a distant sight of the ocean.” Hickey experienced many of these pleasures in the company of Robert Richards, an Irish lawyer who welcomed him warmly as the son of a fellow countryman and successful London lawyer. No longer practicing, Richards owned two thriving plantations. The best of Hickey’s new Jamaican friends, he insisted they visit his estates in St. Mary’s and St. Ann’s. Hickey declared the one in St. Mary’s a “paradise.” It commanded
Hickey, Memoirs, :. Ibid., :, –. Ibid., :–. Ibid., :. Bailey, “Metropole and Colony,” –.
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Ibid., :.
Conclusion to Part III
“an extensive and luxuriant prospect” of the ocean and “in every direction on the land were beautiful buildings, where different gentlemen planters resided.” The one in St. Ann did not have such a sublime view. But the journey took him through scenery unequaled in his subsequent travels, and its “mansion was very superior” to that of St. Mary’s, “being of the best masonry, built in the modern style of architecture.” Yet Richards stood out for Hickey not just for his affluence, generosity, and sophistication, but for his simultaneously humane and profitable plantation management. Indeed, Hickey was surprised at finding slaves treated so differently from “what I expected and so opposite to the opinions entertained by the generality of people in England.” It was Richards’ view that “independent of common humanity . . . [the planters’] own interest should induce lenient, if not kind, treatment” and that more was accomplished “by moderation and gentleness . . . [than] by the whip or punishments of any sort.” In a dramatic incident, Richards even ordered the arrest of a “scoundrel overseer” who exercised “the most dreadful tyranny and severity” on his (absent) brother’s plantation, whose productivity had steadily decreased as slave mortality steadily rose. Now Hickey, adept at disappointing his father’s ambitions for him, is not an entirely trustworthy narrator. He wrote his memoirs many years after the fact and a decades-long career in India, not the Caribbean. It is of some interest, though, that he wrote such a sympathetic depiction of a Jamaican slaveholder in the period between the abolition of the slave trade () and the abolition of slavery (). Indeed, the scene in which Richards upbraided the overseer recalls the tropes of anti-slavery literature: at the overseer’s command a “stout black” furiously lashed a young female slave who had “refus[ed] to gratify the lustful wishes of the overseer.” And it was Richards, the white magistrate and slaveholder himself, who literally rode to her rescue. Yet Hickey still described the Jamaica that Trevor Burnard terms “the jewel in the British imperial crown.” Although Robert Long died three years before his visit, he would have recognized this flourishing, and Thistlewood would have experienced its effects in Westmoreland. This was a world rich in things, an array of consumer goods available to those who could pay, and cultural and intellectual amenities. Hickey did not emphasize the latter, but he definitely enjoyed his newspapers and
Ibid., :. Ibid., :. Ibid., :. Ibid. Ibid., :. P. J. Marshall, “Hickey, William,” ODNB; Bailey, “Metropole,” –. Hickey, Memoirs, :.
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conversation in Kingston’s cafes, his evenings at the theater, the demonstration of the ocean’s currents observed through Richards’ telescope, and the hours spent after dinner card playing and reading on his friend’s St. Mary’s estate. Robert Long could savor similar pleasures at his country estate and his family’s residence in Spanish Town while Thistlewood took part in more modest versions in private homes. Yet both men 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. From his derisive characterization of other Jamaicans’ collections, we can assume that Robert housed a substantial collection with the dignity his status required and from which friends such as Anthony Robinson could draw. Unlike many Jamaicans of more modest means, Thistlewood also had an ample collection that he housed in a room apart, painted and furnished with some care. He, too, became a resource for neighbors and friends while they in turn expanded the quantity and range of publications available to him. To demonstrate their appropriation of Enlightenment culture through reading, I have focused on how the topics of race and slavery and religion surfaced in Thistlewood’s commonplace books and Robert’s “Miscellaneous Reflections.” The fact that Robert was born into the norms of a slave society while Thistlewood had to adapt to them probably greatly affected their reading choices on race and slavery. Thistlewood sought advice in books for the unfamiliar tasks of managing enslaved laborers, which often counseled the type of humane treatment Richards allegedly adopted. His commonplaces also registered the uptick in controversies about the justice of the institution and the nature of Africans. Evidence suggests he had some interest in reforming the institution, perhaps by compensating slaves, but was also receptive to emerging racial views that defined Africans as inferior to Europeans. In contrast, while Robert was unhappy with how some aspects of slavery were managed in Jamaica, he never expressed any discomfort with the institution. He certainly acknowledged the humanity of slaves, their capacity to think, and their sense of justice, but he never entertained the notion of seriously reforming the regime under which they labored, suffered, and died. He might have known Richards; he might even have applauded him for his manly suppression of the brutal overseer in contrast to his criticism of another planter’s mildness and modesty. But he was satisfied with asserting that the responsibility of the slaveholder was to act reasonably and without cruelty, and he required no tutelage in how to fulfill what he considered his obligations toward his slaves.
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Conclusion to Part III
In both cases, religion figured more prominently in their reading notes than either slavery or race. Both men were concerned about the possibility of eternal punishment as a theological problem, that is, how divine goodness could be reconciled with justice. But they also clearly feared it, perhaps betraying some guilt about their actions in life. While we know nothing about Robert’s behavior, we know a great deal – and nearly all of it, terrible – about Thistlewood’s. However much either or both suffered from a bad conscience, their experiences converged in yearning evocations of the freedom of flight. Equally striking, their scientific interests, infused with the confidence that investigating nature’s works revealed God’s glory, gave them powerful ways to conceptualize, even resolve their spiritual anxieties. Robert was at least a nominally observant Christian, though one always ready to question what was presented to him, whether in a sermon, a celebrated apologetic poem, or an illustration. Thistlewood appears to have more militantly rejected Christianity, flirting with the more heterodox deistic views of English freethinkers before settling on the faith of Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar. By exploring these two themes, we have seen Thistlewood and Long choose from the full spectrum of publications that the British – and sometimes the Jamaican – press made available. But even when they read the same work, they judged it very differently. Impressed with Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, Thistlewood purchased his own copy after borrowing it. In contrast, Robert was apparently satisfied with a few excerpts published in a metropolitan periodical. When we read over their shoulders, we see them taking full advantage of the liberty to make “a philosophy (and . . . a religion) for himself.” Reading affected how they thought about their experiences; their thoughts and experiences informed how they interpreted what they read. However strange, even sometimes perverse their interpretations, these were the moments when they joined contemporary readers to “construe” what the Enlightenment meant and to take possession of it.
See Chapter .
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Allan, Making British Culture, .