Chapter 1 introduces the geopolitical and scientific–colonial context of eighteenth-century Mauritius, primarily from the perspective of its governance. Mauritius was a French colony, and a very expensive one to run. It was managed by the Compagnie des Indes (CIO) until 1763 and then, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (and dissolution of the CIO), was purchased by the French crown. By setting out the hidden dynamics of empire, this chapter provides a detailed discussion that explains why Mauritius was primarily a stopping-off point in the period under review rather than an island of commerce. A key finding concerns the internal divisions within the island over its management and policy, which is an important revision to prevailing assumptions in the historiography that such interests would be divided between policymakers in the metropole and those in the colony, where each has been assumed to represent a unified view. Hence, it examines the various experiments in colonial autonomy undertaken on Mauritius between the 1760s and the 1780s, including the complex alternatives relating to the agents who tried to build networks through alliances with local actors and Indigenous populations in the Indo-Pacific region. Lastly, this chapter spotlights the use of enslaved people in various projects in the island.

This is a brief conclusion of the book summarising the main features and overall argument.

Chapter 6 provides a detailed explanation of the practical and political challenges faced by the projects to introduce nutmeg (and clove) into Mauritius. It is about the experiential and unsettled knowledge mobilised in the French attempts to acclimatise spices. It engages with the material practices associated with transportation and acclimatisation. The chapter explores various examples of highly ambivalent strategies for the transport on ships and cultivation in foreign soil of the spices. All of these were by no means initiated in the metropolis. This chapter is primarily concerned with natural obstacles, or rather how local actors in Mauritius sought to overcome them by employing non-conventional strategies and initiatives. Using the example of grafting, it argues that techniques and methods were developed independently in different parts of the world, and were not ‘transferred’ from Europe to the colonies, or vice versa. The sketchy and uncertain knowledge of the French remained fragmented until at least the 1780s, which led to miscalculations and an eventual failure of the project to establish a spice trade. Exploring the reasons for this failure, the last chapter reinforces calls to understand the decentred, complex, and slow process of plant knowledge in the making.

Featuring an explanation of Enlightenment thought on agronomy and political economy, Chapter 3 examines the efforts to make Mauritius a self-sufficient island through the importation and naturalisation of plants (primarily foodstuffs and fodder, also some industrial materials, and a few ornamental plants). It explores how newly introduced and ‘old’ plants were cultivated and how local knowledge, which was gathered together with the plants in their countries of origin, was implemented. It highlights the practical significance of knowledge about plants in relation to their cultivation of Malagasy and non-European communities across Asia. It seeks to understand how settlers sought to cultivate foreign, newly introduced staple crops, such as rice, root vegetables, and fruit trees. Stressing the importance of non-European knowledge, the chapter looks at the interplay of this knowledge between its practical implementation and environmental factors. The chapter reveals that cultivation techniques were difficult to implement and often led to a crop’s failure.

Chapter 2 examines the ways in which French botanists obtained information about plant cultivation. It sheds light on the exploration and collection of plants and related knowledge about them, which was made possible with the assistance of local populations in Madagascar and East Asia. It develops an argument against the prevailing historical myth the eighteenth-century naturalists were only interested in classification. The focus of the chapter is on utility and especially how useful knowledge might be communicated to French naturalists. Mauritius’s intendant’s plan to domesticate staple crops could only be conducted because of multidirectional and multinational networks consisting of French, non-French, and above all non-European assistance. These actors used several types of plant knowledge, communication systems, languages, negotiation practices, often leading to cultural misunderstandings. The chapter highlights the significance of knowing a plant’s native/local name, so that Europeans could return and access that same plant again. Here, European naturalists followed a twofold strategy to document and interpret knowledge. Exploring these details neglected in grand narratives of colonial science challenges Eurocentric narratives, the presumed superiority of European science, and the centralisation on the Parisian acclimatisation garden in particular.

In its central position, Chapter 4, with its focus on enslaved people, brings together all the aspects discussed in Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6. It highlights the importance of the enslaved people in Mauritius, both for their labour and as sources of plant knowledge. Making an important contribution to the history of slavery and natural history, it serves as a link between the chapters on staple crops (Chapters 2 and 3) and those on commercial crops (Chapters 5 and 6), because it elaborates on both types of crops in relation to slavery. In particular, Chapter 4 reveals the disconnects of knowledge circulation. It seeks to explain what happened when new and unknown crops were introduced and knowledge of their cultivation or preparation techniques was lacking or faulty. Lastly, this chapter focuses on the Bengali slave gardener, Charles Rama. His knowledge of cultivation earned him praise from French actors, and he was later freed because of it. In the same way, the chapter examines the work of the enslaved gardener Hilaire, who initiated and tested the new grafting methods that were adopted by European-trained naturalists in the island. These two cases not only highlight the importance of the enslaved people’s knowledge, but more importantly, they reveal the shortcomings of European plant knowledge within the creolising processes.