The conclusion to Part II returns to the cultural aspirations expressed by colonists earlier in the decade by analyzing a debate over the viability of an academic society on the island published in the Affiches in 1769. Two White colonists took diametrically opposed positions on the question before a White author, who assumed the identity of the enslaved “Toussaint,” sharply satirized the debate. In the course of absurd boasts about his intellectual prowess, “Toussaint” countered the arguments in favor of establishing an intellectual society. His exaggerated rusticity traced unambiguously the charmed circle of a White public of allegedly rational citizens and their elegant White wives, which was simultaneously conjured and addressed by the periodicals of Saint-Domingue. In the context of hardening racial barriers in the colony, “Toussaint” held the line between a White public that could participate in informed debate and refined amusements and the Black masses who (his burlesque suggested) innately lacked the capacity to do the same.

Recent changes in Enlightenment and Caribbean studies have made it possible to recover a distinctively Caribbean Enlightenment; doing so contributes to our understanding of French and British colonial societies and of the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural movement. As inspired as metropolitan counterparts by ideologies of utility and improvement, colonists engaged in intellectual practices common in the metropole as their lives in profitable slave societies deeply informed their appropriations of Enlightenment ideas. Focusing chiefly on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1790s, this book explores a Caribbean Enlightenment through four topics: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. These themes illustrate that becoming “enlightened” made a distinctive colonial identity available to White male colonists, one that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree smudged by proximity and intimacy, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave.