French empire on the ground : plants, peoples, and knowledge in the service of eighteenth-century Isle de France

Abstract

This dissertation examines the globally connected project of plant accumulation on Isle de France in the second half of the eighteenth century, focusing distinctly on the roles and activities of local actors embedded within wider Indo-Pacific networks and environments. Exploring the collection, transfer, and use of plants for subsistence and commerce as localised histories of the plant-related undertakings of a French island colony in the Indian Ocean, this dissertation asks what 'science' and 'empire' meant at a local level. Relying on an in-depth analysis of the plant-based projects of the island 'from below', it raises localised approaches to the transfer, production and practices of plant knowledge and plant material from a crosscultural perspective. Here, a bottom-up approach tells a very different story than a top-down one would: the whole botanical enterprise was fragile, experiential and significantly shaped by environmental conditions. Above all, it was built on collaboration between French actors and local populations from Africa to Asia. To tackle, juxtapose, and understand the possibilities and limits of the French actors and to look at plant knowledge as a nuanced localised knowledge-practice conducted by non-elite and elite actors in the Indo-Pacific worlds, this project couples approaches from the history of science and empire, oceanic history, environmental history, economic history, and global history. For this purpose, each chapter explores plant-related themes from different perspectives, arguing for the uncertainty of the cross-cultural botanical project of eighteenthcentury Isle de France. For one, the Isle de France project was built extensively on the contribution of widely neglected actors, such as slaves, indigenous informants, and gobetweens. For another, the island’s cultivational activities consisted of strongly experiential dynamics of local knowledge deriving from and produced in the Indo-Pacific context. The major aim of this dissertation is to re-assess the French botanical project in the Indian Ocean in order to understand the social, cultural, and natural complexities of plant-based knowledge production as a practice with respect to their local sites in both the Indo-Pacific worlds and the French colonial island as such.