ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Toxic Forests and Poisoned Gardens: Selective forestry, poison suppression, and Maroon mapping in colonial Martinique

• In Event: Manipulating Biota, Engineering Healthscapes: Colonial Science & Medicine 1750-2000

English Abstract

How did the struggle to know and control poisons in the colonial Caribbean influence the development of ecological and environmental sciences? Faced with ever-encroaching colonial rivals, Maroons repeatedly opted to live on the move or amidst poisonous ecological niches rather than face capture and subjugation. Colonists, conversely, relied on spatial fixity and fortifications to protect themselves against “poisonous” Caribbean nature and its imagined weaponization by Maroons. As intra-imperial plant exchange networks developed in the latter eighteenth century, French botanists and administrators revealed their fixation with disarming noxious nature by selectively transporting only those plants which promised medicinal, economic, or antidotal properties and suppressing the transmission of poisonous flora outside of their indigenous ecosystems.

This talk aims to illustrate how French colonists sought to employ botanical and environmental engineering technologies to eliminate poisons and eradicate Maroon habitats. In the period after 1763, the Jardin du Roi coordinated vast networks of botanical exchanges, whereby plants of many types and uses would regularly circulate between colonies like Réunion, Guyane, and Martinique, and between each island and Metropolitan France. Whereas most plants circulated freely between colonial depots, poisonous flora were either restricted to their native islands or shipped exclusively to Paris where France’s chief botanists and chemists strove to identify antidotes. How poisons did circulate between islands, however, was via people: planters commonly expelled enslaved and Maroon peoples suspected of poison conspiracies and banished them to neighboring French colonies. Analyzing the divergent colonial treatment of poisons and those assumed to be innate poisoners, this talk employs the framework of healthscapes to examine the consequences of separating humans from non-human biota in the historical development of ecological categories.

Author

• Thomas C Anderson, Yale University