Globalizing Knowledge and Scientific Practices in Tropical Agriculture: the Spanish
Caribbean during the “Great Divergence"
Leida Fernández Prieto
Research Fellow
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
It is often forgotten that knowledge of natural resources in the tropical world showed
metropolitan governments and agents, both colonial and local, the possibility of
controlling and taming the agricultural terrain, which made possible the commercial
exploitation of native crops of easy acclimatization; the ability to compete profitably in
the global market; the prevention and solution of ecological and economic agricultural
problems and, above all, the construction of the science of tropical agriculture with staff
specialized in it. Hence, the importance of studies on the production, circulation and
reception of tropical agricultural knowledge that connects (former) colonies with the
empires as well as blurring the borders between East and West.
In Stuart McCook's pioneering studies, he emphasizes that the agricultural expansion of
the Caribbean region that occurred between 1720 and 1930 resulted from increased
pressure on tropical ecosystems that allowed not only the continuing global exchange of
plants, but also of pathogens and diseases (McCook, 2002 and 2011). Other historians
have "decentered" the history of global science by stressing the trans-national
connections of the Caribbean with Europe, Africa, the United States and Latin America
(Weiner, 2006).
These global exchanges also occurred in relation to knowledge and practices that shaped
the scientific body of tropical agriculture, specifically in the case of sugar-cane
(Saccharum officinarum L.), the exotic plant that has influenced the social-economic,
political and cultural world of the Caribbean more than any other. My paper explores the
construction and circulation of knowledge and practices used to implement the scientific
agro-industry of sugar manufacturing on the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico between
1760 and 1860, the period in which the former became the world's leading producer of
cane-sugar. Various texts written by direct witnesses of the evolution of the West Indian
sugar industry are comparatively analysed in the context of the so-called "great
divergence" as, for example, the military engineer Agustin Cramer, Iñigo Abbad, and the
agronomists Jose Julian Acosta and Alvaro Reynoso. Both Acosta and Reynoso formed
part of the global community of 'elders' of tropical agricultural science. The paper
contributes to the idea of the Spanish Caribbean as a space where knowledge was
generated from local responses to the ecological and economic problems facing
agriculture on the two West Indian islands, and that interacted with other practices and
knowledge developed at a global level.