Political Economy and the Ecological Repressed: A Symptomatic Reading of the French Colonial Enlightenment

There is an apparent contradiction in recent scholarship on the Enlightenment and its relationship to the environment. Whereas intellectual historians have characterized the master discourse of Enlightenment social theory, political economy, as being uniquely unconcerned with sustainability and limits to growth, environmental historians have argued that eighteenth-century intellectuals were remarkably sensitive to natural constraints—especially in European colonial spaces. This article looks at the specific case of the French colonial enlightenment to reassess the relationship between these two Enlightenments. It does so by applying the method of “symptomatic reading” to the political economy that informed France’s eighteenth century empire in general, and to the case of Pierre Poivre and his supposedly “environmental” reforms on the Mascarene Islands in particular. Symptomatic reading, the article argues, facilitates a necessary conversation between environmental and intellectual histories of the Enlightenment and reveals some of the fundamental dynamics and limitations of early modern capitalism.