Description
A Caribbean Enlightenment provides a comprehensive analysis of intellectual life in the British and French Caribbean colonies between 1750 and 1792, a pivotal period in the Atlantic world. April G. Shelford investigates how colonial elites, planters, and emerging intellectual communities engaged with Enlightenment philosophy, science, and political thought while adapting these ideas to their distinctive colonial contexts.
The book demonstrates how Caribbean thinkers developed their own intellectual traditions, influenced by but distinct from metropolitan European thought. Shelford examines the role of natural history, scientific inquiry, and philosophical debates in shaping colonial consciousness. She also addresses the tensions between Enlightenment ideals of liberty and reason and the brutal reality of slavery that underpinned Caribbean economies, revealing how some colonials grappled with these contradictions while others remained complicit in the system.
Part of the Ideas in Context series, this work contributes significantly to understanding how the Enlightenment was not simply imposed from Europe but was actively shaped, contested, and transformed in colonial spaces.
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