Statecraft and Insect Oeconomies in the Global French Enlightenment (1670-1815) Pierre-Etienne Stockland Naturalists, state administrators and farmers in France and its colonies developed a myriad set of techniques over the course of the long eighteenth century to manage the circulation of useful and harmful insects. The development of normative protocols for classifying, depicting and observing insects provided a set of common tools and techniques for identifying and tracking useful and harmful insects across great distances. Administrative techniques for containing the movement of harmful insects such as quarantine, grain processing and fumigation developed at the intersection of science and statecraft, through the collaborative efforts of diplomats, state administrators, naturalists and chemical practitioners. The introduction of insectivorous animals into French colonies besieged by harmful insects was envisioned as strategy for restoring providential balance within environments suffering from human-induced disequilibria. Naturalists, administrators, and agricultural improvers also collaborated in projects to maximize the production of useful substances secreted by insects, namely silk, dyes and medicines. A study of these scientific and administrative techniques will shed light on how scientists, administrators and lay practitioners in the French Enlightenment came to assess and manage the risks and opportunities afforded by the related processes of commercial and ecological globalization.

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Statecraft and Insect Oeconomies in the Global French Enlightenment (1670-1815)

The natural environments of the Isle de France and Isle de Bourbon (present-day Mauritius and Reunion) were radically altered by European colonization in the eighteenth-century. In the 1740s, locusts were introduced to the islands, then under French possession, through the trans-oceanic movement of plants, peoples, animals, and foodstuffs. By straining agricultural production in the islands, locusts challenged French colonial administrators’ attempts to transform the islands into a granary that could supply fleets sent to pursue France’s imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean. The introduction of insect-eating mynah birds (acridotheres tristis), imported from other parts of France’s colonial empire by the naturalist and administrator Pierre Poivre, was envisioned as a strategy for achieving a productive balance between the natural and human oeconomies of the islands. Yet engineering a stable balance between the natural and human elements on the islands proved to be more difficult than Poivre and his conte...

Policing the oeconomy of nature: The oiseau martin as an instrument of oeconomic management in the eighteenth-century French maritime world

This paper documents that the first specimens of the economically important nutmeg tree did not reach the New World until 1773, while the equally valuable cinnamon tree had been transferred to a Caribbean island by 1762. These dates can serve to interpret a recently discovered manuscript by the French botanist Jean Baptiste D’Arnault in which he claimed to have collected nutmeg and cinnamon in the Lesser Antilles or Venezuela in 1767 (Lindorf 2001, 2002).

Madeleine Ly-Tio-Fane

Papers

Mauritius and the Spice Trade. The Triumph of Jean Nicolas Cere and His Isle Bourbon Collaborators