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.

This chapter has a sociocultural approach to the quest for nutmeg and cloves. It analyses human, cross-cultural encounters in South East Asia, the native countries of numerous spices introduced in Mauritius over the course of the eighteenth century. As this chapter reveals, the French colonial spice project involved actors from different backgrounds for patronage, protection, and assistance. They used a mix of languages, promises, and informal relations mainly in South East Asian islands (the Maluku islands and the Philippines). The purpose of this chapter is to understand the movements of knowledge and people within cross-cultural interactions in the Indo-Pacific through the lens of plant exchange. These cross-cultural connections were essential for this project: Asian merchants and brokers were indispensable for acquiring spice plants and grains from Dutch colonial territory in today’s Indonesia. Insisting on the cross-cultural nature of the acquisition of spice plants, this chapter challenges existing narratives of the cultural components of the French empire.