ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Scientific Exploration Against Slavery? Catineau Laroche’s Expedition and the “White Colonization” Project in Mana (French Guiana, 1820s)

• In Event: Scientific Travel in Colonial Contexts: Logistics, Politics and Practices

English Abstract

This paper draws on the attempt at “white colonization” that unfolded in Mana (French Guiana) in the 1820s to show how scientific exploration could serve projects aimed at overcoming colonial slavery in the context of the imperial crisis triggered by Haiti’s independence and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Focused on the idea of “acclimatizing” white peasants to work the land in the so-called “torrid zone”, the Mana project raised several environmental challenges. It eventually led to the organization of a scientific exploration of the region, led by anti-slavery advocate Pierre Catineau Laroche, to determine whether Mana was suitable for the proposed project. After situating and explaining the genesis of this exploration project at the imperial and colonial scales, I will analyze the field practices of the members of the Exploration Commission (botanists, naturalists, lieutenants, naval surgeons, etc.) to understand how they established an on-site “scientific” diagnosis of the “healthiness” and “productivity” of the lands explored. The sixteen day-to-day manuscript journals of the various members of the expedition, held in the French National Overseas Archives, reveal the logistics of the exploration from many different viewpoints. Read “against the grain” these journals shed light on how negotiations with local intermediaries unfolded–the Kalin’a people as well as the Maroons who had fled neighboring Suriname. Finally, I will examine the controversy that this exploration sparked in relation to deeply rooted deterministic beliefs about the tropical environment and race. Pitting Catineau Laroche and his empirical arguments against the French representative, Marquis Barbé de Marbois, and his conception of French Guiana as a “White Man’s Grave”, the controversy eventually led to the “failure” of the project.

Author

• Salomé Ketabi, EHESS, Mondes Américains (Paris)