Creolised Science: Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Indo-Pacific

By Dorit Brixius

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1009200445
• ISBN13: 9781009200448
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"