1st Edition
The Order of Destruction Monoculture in Colonial Caribbean Literature, c. 1640-1800
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 humanities.
Located at a crossroads of disciplines and perspectives, this study will be of interest to literary/cultural critics and historians working in the early Americas and in Atlantic studies, to students and scholars of agriculture, colonialism, and (racial) capitalism, to Marxists and postcolonial critics, and to those working in the environmental humanities and in Global South studies.
1. Introduction 2. Destruction and Contradiction in Richard Ligon’s History 3. Environment and Circular Rationality in Henry Drax’s “Instructions” 4. Reproduction, Sameness, and James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane 5. Racism, Consumption, and the Individual in Janet Schaw’s Letters 6. Ideology and History in Toussaint Louverture’s Labour Proclamations 7. Epilogue: “cette énorme mélopée du monde”
Biography
Heinrich Wilke studied English and Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and the University of Connecticut, graduating with an M.A. in English Literatures and Cultures. From 2016 to 2020, he wrote his dissertation about the colonial Caribbean in the research training group, Minor Cosmopolitanisms (funded by the German Research Foundation), at the University of Potsdam and at York University, Toronto. He worked as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Potsdam until the autumn of 2023. The Order of Destruction: Monoculture in Colonial Caribbean Literature, c. 1640–1800 is his first book.
