ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

« L’art de convertir les vivres en pain»: Scarcity, Technology and Hybrid Knowledge in the 18th-Century Antilles

• In Event: Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 1

English Abstract

Scholarly interest in the history of French breadmaking has focused on eighteenth-century France, looking in particular at the chemist Antoine-Auguste Parmentier as the epitome of bread-making know-how. Less known are, however, the reorganisation and appropriation of Parmentier's knowledge in the colonial world, and especially in the French Antilles. This article inquiries into one of these appropriations, by looking at the use of Parmentier’s ideas in French Saint-Domingue in the 1780s. It will do so by focusing on a 300-pages manuscript on colonial botany, Florindie, written by the abbot Guillaume De la Haye for the Cercle des Philadelphe, a learned society located in Cap Français. More specifically, the paper will focus on an extended section, fully dedicated to bread making experiments, and will enquire into how Parmentier's knowledge met with local and indigenous know-how. At a broader level, the article will shed light on the technological and practical responses to grain scarcity in a key moment of the history of Saint Domingue and of contemporary European debates on the grain trade.

Author

• Lavinia Maddaluno, Institut d'Études Avancées, Paris; University of Ca' Foscari in Venice (Italy)