The Order of Destruction: Monoculture in Colonial Caribbean Literature, c. 1640-1800 [Paperback]

This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution.?

1. Introduction 2. Destruction and Contradiction in Richard Ligons History 3. Environment and Circular Rationality in Henry Draxs Instructions 4. Reproduction, Sameness, and James Graingers The Sugar-Cane 5. Racism, Consumption, and the Individual in Janet Schaws Letters 6. Ideology and History in Toussaint Louvertures Labour Proclamations 7. Epilogue: cette ?norme m?lop?e du monde

 

This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution. Researching travel literature, plantation manuals, Georgic poetry, letters, and political proclamations, this book interprets texts by Richard Ligon, Henry Drax, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, and Toussaint Louverture.

As the first extended investigation into its topic, this book reads colonial Caribbean monoculture as the conjunction of racial capitalism and agrarian capitalism in the tropics. Its eco-Marxist perspective highlights the dual exploitation of the soil and of enslaved agricultural producers under the plantation regime, thereby extending Marxist analysis to the early colonial Caribbean. By focusing on textual form (in literary and non-literary texts alike), this study discloses the bearing of monoculture on contemporary writers thoughts. In the process, it emphasizes the significance of a literary tradition that, despite its ideological importance, is frequently neglected in (postcolonial) literary studies and the environmental humanitiesl³Z