Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-04T02:55:30.146Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 13 - Concluding Reflections

from Part IV - Cultivating Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 September 2023

April G. Shelford
Affiliation:
American University, Washington DC
Get access

Summary

The goals of this book have been to recover a distinctive “Caribbean Enlightenment” and to show how it contributes to our understandings of eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean societies and the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan movement. Largely focused on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, it has explored four important Enlightenment themes in Caribbean contexts: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. It identifies many White male colonists who embraced Enlightenment practices and, in the process, asserted a colonial identity that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave. The Conclusion suggests future lines of research, such as the comparative vigor of the Enlightenment in French and British colonies and the relationship between the enslaved and free people of color to Enlightenment intellectual culture. Remarking how rapidly White colonists accustomed themselves to their brutal and lucrative slave societies, the Conclusion invites us to consider the consequences of globalization and the moral implications and real-world consequences of political economy in the twenty-first as well as the eighteenth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
A Caribbean Enlightenment
Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750–1792
, pp. 325 - 330
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Concluding Reflections
  • April G. Shelford, American University, Washington DC
  • Book: A Caribbean Enlightenment
  • Online publication: 14 September 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009360821.026
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Concluding Reflections
  • April G. Shelford, American University, Washington DC
  • Book: A Caribbean Enlightenment
  • Online publication: 14 September 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009360821.026
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Concluding Reflections
  • April G. Shelford, American University, Washington DC
  • Book: A Caribbean Enlightenment
  • Online publication: 14 September 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009360821.026
Available formats
×