The Mechanical Plantation: Picturing Sugar Production in the Encyclopédie

Among the eighty-three illustrations of agriculture in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie are several depicting colonial plantations.¹ Grouped together in a section titled “Economie et Agriculture Rustique,” scenes of tobacco, indigo, cotton, and sugar production appear among images of domestic agriculture, such as plowing, caring for grapevines, and making hemp. The colonial agriculture takes place on island plantations, except for tobacco, where the location is not indicated. A reader viewing this section sees a succession of illustrations of familiar rural activities occurring in a temperate region, interrupted by a few scenes taking place in the tropics, as if the latter were simply topographical variations of the French landscape, and not over 4,000 miles from France’s west coast.

Visually locating the West Indian colonies as if they were attached to France is one of many pictorial devices that served to normalize, indeed promote, France’s colonial ambitions by figuring plantation agriculture as a productive, efficient and rational method of exploiting human and constructed technologies for the benefit of the French economy. These qualities are amplified by the images’ emphasis on mechanical processes through detailed, close-up views of tools and machines that drive the organization of labor, that are typical of all of the Encyclopédie’s illustrations of labor. Although the plantation images do not function entirely independently of articles in the text volumes, and figure as parts of a thematic collection, they act as a discrete visual information system, communicating the philosophes’ essentially favorable views on colonialism, and by extension, on slavery, in ways that texts cannot.

Scholarship on the Encyclopédie illustrations has paid some attention to the agricultural illustrations but very little to the plantation scenes.² In what follows, my aim is to show how these images portrayed colonialism as a desirable and financially viable enterprise for the French nation as it sought to recover from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The volume that included the agricultura; series was published in 1762 after six years of conflict with Britain, during which time France had lost Quebec and other parts of New France in North America, as well as its forts in Senegal and territory in India. For a time, France had also lost most of its Caribbean colonies to the British, although Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe were regained by 1763.³ The damage to the French economy was devastating, and by 1760, the country was nearly bankrupt.⁴ The 1763 Treaty of Paris left France with its most valuable Caribbean colonies but without most of its North American possessions. I do not suggest that the images were intentionally published when they were for the explicit purpose of responding to the war, but given the effects of the conflict, the appearance of the colonies as securely linked to French soil would surely have conveyed the idea that increased investment in large-scale, mechanized monoculture plantations would restore France’s stability, and more importantly, would secure them for the nation.

I approach these images in terms of what Jill H. Casid calls “plantation as discourse.”⁵ Connecting representation and practice, she writes,

“…the colonial landscape was planted and replanted not only through successive eras of colonial plantation but through forms of reproductive print, visual and textual, that were to serve as prototypical models of colonial relandscaping[;]…printed views, diagrams, maps, and plans … acted primarily as vehicles for the dissemination and production of imperial power, whether in the beneficent guise of…landscape or the abstracted geometry of machinic drafting.”⁶

I contend that the Encyclopédie’s plantation scenes, as images circulating among the other prints, views, and texts mentioned above, similarly performed the work of spreading colonialist aims. Moreover, as descriptions of occupations and labor (the “arts et métiers” of the Encyclopédie), they fetishize technology, to the point where they figure the colonial plantation in its entirety as a perfectly synchronized machine.

In what follows, I briefly provide background on the Encyclopédie’s publication chronology and address the illustrations’ visual properties and organization. I then turn...