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Abstract
France s colonization of the Mascarenes (today s Reunion and Mauritius) from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth illuminates the manner in which European expansion and the science of botany reinforced one another. Established as a strategic outpost on the East Indian route by the royal Compagnie des Indes, the Mascarenes were a site for innovative techniques of nature management, and for novel interconnections between science, commerce and political power specific to this period. This thesis explores the circumstances leading the French state and the scientific agencies to co- operate in developing new methods to overcome the obstacle of distance and longstanding maritime constraints so as to enhance metropolitan control of remote resources. It attends to the central importance of plant resources required for colonial maintenance and for shipping and trade, especially naval provisions and valuable East Indian drugs and spices, and thus to the challenges of self-sufficiency and efficiency in the distant East Indies. It argues that the state brought science to bear on improving plant knowledge and plant management, largely due to the perceived need for reliability in identification and production of resources, driving systematisation and professionalization of botanical activity at the periphery. Innovations in botanical information media, identification and classification methods, and agronomic trials all resulted from the new linkages between science, state and commerce, for mutual benefits. Moreover, intensifying rivalry with the British in the mid-eighteenth century made this new botany into a strategic instrument deliberately fostered by the metropolis in the periphery to optimise control over nature. Thus, scientific expertise was delocalised: a global botanical network was established, including a botanical garden and resident botanists in the Mascarenes, and a scientific circumnavigation was conducted. Furthermore, the Physiocratic theory incorporating concepts from the new botany was applied in the Mascarenes to rationalise production of plant resources, both for sustainable colony subsistence and for profit. Thus the more remote East Indies and its riches had an impact on science and on European resource management distinct from, even more profound than, the West Indies through an emphasis on botany as the key to making nature an ally to empire.