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The introduction provides the key features and argument, divided into six sections. Besides a discussion of creolisation as a concept, the introduction lays out the central tenets of this monograph. This book is about the practices of plant knowledge; that is, the knowing how, but not the knowing that. By looking at the interconnections between people, materials, and nature, this book argues that creolisation took place in the social, cultural, epistemological, and material terms that determined the application of knowledge. As a creolising process, the knowledge of plants derived from cultures all over the world was integrated into the emerging practices within the island space. The cultivators included the Europeans who had migrated to Mauritius by choice, settlers born there, labourers, and enslaved people brought in by forced migration. Unsurprisingly, the agricultural knowledge of these individuals varied widely. Consequently, cultivation turned out to be a complex process of creolising the expertise that had originated in the local populations of the plants’ native habitats with the varying degrees of horticultural knowledge of the people living in Mauritius.
This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
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