Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature by Christopher Iannini (review)

The publication of Iannini's book is timely; it arrives in the midst of a number of recent scholarly initiatives across disciplines that address the central role of the Caribbean, its natural history, and its plantation economy in the making of early modern empires, modern capitalist economies, Enlightenment sensibilities, modern science, and literary history. Adopting a circum-Atlantic perspective, Iannini makes innovative use of both published and archival sources, expertly drawing on literary studies, economic and social history, art history, and the history of science. The result is a rich account of eighteenth-century literary and scientific practices that will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars.

Iannini convincingly portrays natural history as the eighteenth-century literary genre that was most directly engaged with the scientific and economic transformations of the long eighteenth century. Thus does he highlight the importance of Caribbean slavery for a proper understanding of the cultural history of the Enlightenment world of letters in general and for the formation of the novel in particular. As a literary scholar, Iannini is particularly attentive to textual strategies. He shows that natural history functioned within a hermeneutic that was not strictly referential or "scientific" in the modern sense but frequently allegorical—a hermeneutic that Iannini calls "specimen-as-emblem." Naturalistic descriptions of scenes of animal predation frequently evoked and offered moral reflections on the brutality and barbarism of the slave economy.

Individual chapters draw on the work of, among others, Shapin, McCusker, Menard, Roach, and Kriz to provide close readings of natural histories written during the long eighteenth century about the circum-Caribbean world (including Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia) by Hans Sloane, Mark Catesby, John and William Bartram, George Lukas, William Byrd, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, and Thomas Jefferson.¹ These chapters summarily show that the emblematic method of these natural historians (which often emerged from the interplay between naturalistic image and linguistic description) bear evidence of the rise of scientific empiricism, even as their visual aesthetics testified to the violence of slavery.

The epilogue briefly considers the controversy surrounding the English translation and English/American publication of Alexander von Humboldt's Essai politique sur l'ile de Cuba (Paris, 1826) in 1856 to suggest the continued significance of the Caribbean as an object of scientific knowledge and site of literary innovation. It also sheds light on the gradual, foreclosing of American Enlightenment in that area during the nineteenth century with the rise of U.S. imperialism. Some may take issue with the book's general neglect of the important Iberian precedents in New World natural history during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which provided important precedents for the "emblematic" hermeneutics that Iannini finds to be particular to the Protestant tradition (201, 209, 24, 3). Certainly, his explanation of the nineteenth-century foreclosure of American Enlightenment would have benefited from a wider engagement with the history of continental Latin America, especially in light of slavery's abolition there (excepting Brazil) since the 1820s.

Notwithstanding these issues, Fatal Revolutions is the most significant contribution to the study of eighteenth-century natural history to date. The book will stand out as a true milestone in scholarship, due to its exceptional methodological range and innovation, its considerable scholarly erudition, the insightfulness of its readings, its lucid prose, and its beautiful color illustrations.