The Order of Destruction: Monoculture in Colonial Caribbean Literature, c. 1640-1800

This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution. Researching travel literature, plantation manuals, Georgic poetry, letters, and political proclamations, this book interprets texts by Richard Ligon, Henry Drax, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, and Toussaint Louverture.

As the first extended investigation into its topic, this book reads colonial Caribbean monoculture as the conjunction o...