In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

Drawing on his experience as a planter, Father Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663–1738) disentangled details about sugar cultivation and production from the limited discussions found in natural histories and travel accounts to create a full-fledged planters manual in Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (1722). Elie Monnereau did the same for indigo in L’art de l’indigotier (1765), which detailed the “art” of cultivation and processing and the “science” of plantation management, including the regulation of enslaved laborers. His treatise also suggested how his peers shared information through manuscripts; his visual representation of indigo production, superior to previous versions, became a model for others after influencing Beauvais-Raseau’s L’art de l’indigotier (1770), published by the Académie Royale des Sciences. Discussion of Labat and Monnereau/Beauvais-Raseau demonstrates how Caribbean agriculturalists addressed the problems common to anyone seeking to communicate practical and technical information: What elements of a description made it particularly informative? What should an illustration include to make it most useful? How could text and illustration together facilitate communication? Discussion of Monnereau’s and Beauvais-Raseau’s treatises also underscore the differences between colonial and metropolitan agendas in the production and promulgation of agricultural knowledge.

Part IV, “Cultivating Knowledge: Agricultural Improvement in the French Caribbean,” shows how Enlightenment and agriculture were as intertwined for colonists as for metropolitan improvers. It reveals the often considerable ingenuity of Caribbean agriculturalists as they appropriated scientific advances, staged trials, developed new technology, circulated manuscripts, and published their findings in letters to the editor and freestanding treatises. As with political economy (Part II), their discourse of agricultural improvement merged with those of patriotism and civic-mindedness, utility and emulation. Caribbean agricultural texts and images also reveal a disconnect between metropolitan and colonial intellectual agendas; they challenged the efficacy of the existing intellectual infrastructure, such as the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, which was supposed to secure useful knowledge, promote improvement, and arbiter competing claims to intellectual authority. Finally, the rise of anti-slavery sentiment, which demanded the consideration of slavery as a moral, not a management problem, compelled Caribbean responses. These included the promotion of the “Enlightened planter,” an agriculturalist whose estate flourished precisely because he harmonized humanity and interest.

This chapter focuses on planters manuals beyond Saint-Domingue published by Jean Samuel Guisan and Jean-Baptiste Poyen de Sainte-Marie. Writing respectively in the very different circumstances of an underdeveloped French Guiana and an economically mature Guadeloupe, both writers urged planters to adopt technological innovations, regiment their workforce, keep detailed records, and prioritize long-term profitability over short-term profits. Publishing in close proximity to the French and Haitian Revolutions (1788 and 1792, respectively), they also had to consider increased anti-slavery sentiment, even revolutionary ferment, in expressing their pro-slavery views. They responded by promoting the ideal of an “enlightened” planter, which is contrasted to the ideas of the marquis de Casaux, published in a 1781 treatise. Appropriating the language of sentiment, Guisan and Poyen folded “humanity” into plantation management, asserting that this would harmonize with the planter’s self-interest and increase his happiness by promoting that of the enslaved. Ultimately, though, they construed the planter’s mastery differently: for Poyen, a benevolent plantation monarch ruled over his subjects while Guisan’s planter was accountable to a wider social and political order devoted to collective good.