In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

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 1740s into the 1750s. The introduction situates their work in a chronology of naturalists working in Jamaica from the late seventeenth to the 1790s, when the dream of Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London, and botanically inclined Jamaicans culminated in the successful importation of the breadfruit from the South Pacific. It briefly sketches the social, economic, and political circumstances in which Browne and Robinson worked; it signals Part I’s emphasis on the circulation of information about the island’s natural history within Jamaica and between Jamaicans instead of the connections between colonists and metropolitan naturalists and institutions. Part I reveals how colonial naturalists worked in the field; how enslaved and free Jamaicans acquired and deployed knowledge about their environment; and how natural history promoted an affectively rich male intellectual sociability among White colonists.

The conclusion to Part II returns to the cultural aspirations expressed by colonists earlier in the decade by analyzing a debate over the viability of an academic society on the island published in the Affiches in 1769. Two White colonists took diametrically opposed positions on the question before a White author, who assumed the identity of the enslaved “Toussaint,” sharply satirized the debate. In the course of absurd boasts about his intellectual prowess, “Toussaint” countered the arguments in favor of establishing an intellectual society. His exaggerated rusticity traced unambiguously the charmed circle of a White public of allegedly rational citizens and their elegant White wives, which was simultaneously conjured and addressed by the periodicals of Saint-Domingue. In the context of hardening racial barriers in the colony, “Toussaint” held the line between a White public that could participate in informed debate and refined amusements and the Black masses who (his burlesque suggested) innately lacked the capacity to do the same.

Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

The approach to reading of Robert Long, brother of Edward Long, who authored The History of Jamaica (1774), was very different from Thomas Thistlewood’s, the subject of the preceding chapter. Yet Robert explored the same themes – race and slavery, religion – in his unpublished “Miscellaneous Reflections.” Like Thistlewood’s commonplace books, his reflections show that eighteenth-century readers were hardly passive vessels waiting to be filled with enlightened ideas. Their divergent readings of the widely influential Montesquieu prove that Caribbean colonists could read selectively, critically, sometimes opportunistically, even perversely. Robert’s manuscript notes also reveal an impatient and opinionated reader obsessed with the social dictates of “politeness.” Unlike Thistlewood, he primarily relied on his own experience as a planter to manage the enslaved workers on his Lucky Valley Estate, which also shaped his judgments of their intellectual and moral capacities. Like Thistlewood, he was critical of Christian orthodoxy, anxious for the fate of his soul in the face of divine justice, and restlessly sought personal transcendence.

The career of Patrick Browne (1720–1790), an Irish physician who lived in Jamaica at mid-century, demonstrates the multiple meanings of natural history for British colonists, from mere diversion to asserting a positive, constructive “creole” identity. The Civil and Natural History (London, 1756) shows his ideological commitments to making nature “useful,” his adherence to physico-theological views that valorized scientific activity for proving divine activity, and his commitment to making Linnaean taxonomy work in the field by systematically applying the Swede’s still controversial principles. Browne’s History also identifies the local informants who provided material support for his endeavors, from hospitality to specimens; read as a social document, it demonstrates the many ways in which the island’s people – free and enslaved, White and Black, wealthy, middling, and poor – made Jamaican nature “useful.” An analysis of the book’s subscription list reveals how critical local Jamaican support was to its publication. This fact transformed it into as much a Jamaican as a European intellectual achievement while making it vulnerable to criticism in metropolitan Britain despite the support of prominent continental scientists.

Both the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue encouraged White male colonists to consider themselves “enlightened” “American” citizens devoted to advancing the public good through reasonable means. This chapter focuses on the Affiches, which flourished into the revolutionary decade of the 1790s. It situates its founding in the rise of similar metropolitan publications while showing how the colonial context informed its objectives. Like metropolitan editors, its founder Jean Monceaux was confident in the power of communication to inform and of discussion to enlighten; brought metropolitan ideas and news into the colonies; created forums for debate within it; and believed that a press served its public by furthering the collective good. Constrained by official censorship, the Affiches nevertheless expressed colonial discontent with the postwar order by publishing extensively on the British Stamp Act Crisis. In the process, it exposed readers to a robust assertion of colonial “rights” in the face of metropolitan “tyranny” and implicitly connected Saint-Domingue’s political troubles with that of British North America and the Brittany Affair in France.

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans 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. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

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

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