Food scarcity and knowledge making: crops and environments in the 18th-century Portuguese and French Atlantic

forthcoming

How to address food scarcity? Scarknow explores the various forms of knowledge mobilised to address scarcity in the Portuguese and French Atlantic in second half of the 18th century. It focuses on two tropical, yet geographically distinct case studies: the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and the northwestern part of the Amazon estuary in Brazil. The question of scarcity was central in 18th-century debates on political economy, a newly founded discipline which had the goal of outlining strategies to produce and increase wealth through the harnessing and transformation of natural resources. Administrators, governors, savants, clergymen, and naturalists all worked to prevent food and crop shortages through grain trade policies and by encouraging the identification of alternative resources in European colonies overseas. But how was the concept of scarcity constructed in ecologies as diverse as Amazonian riverbanks and islands, or the Saint Domingue sugar plantation plains? What kind of knowledge(s) were mobilised to address shortages of dominant crops such as cassava and wheat in non-European geographies? And how were environmental concerns tackled in forms of colonial extractivism and local agricultural practices? This project aims to recover the knowledge and practices—environmental, gendered, hybrid, mechanical and entrepreneurial—developed to address scarcity, along with the actors, European and not, involved in these efforts. It goes beyond a “national Atlantic model”, rather posing transversal questions which underline those hybrid and entangled environmental and knowledge-making dimensions overshadowed by national narratives of empire. The project goes beyond the state of the art by framing the history of scarcity as an Atlantic and environmental history. In doing so, it emphasises the role of indigenous and enslaved communities in cultivation and bread-making, as well as in outlining responses to environmental challenges within colonial economies.