Policing the oeconomy of nature: The oiseau martin as an instrument of oeconomic management in the eighteenth-century French maritime world

Abstract

The natural environments of the Isle de France and Isle de Bourbon (present-day Mauritius and Réunion) were radically altered by European colonization in the eighteenth-century. In the 1740s, locusts were introduced to the islands, then under French possession, through the trans-oceanic movement of plants, peoples, animals, and foodstuffs. By straining agricultural production in the islands, locusts challenged French colonial administrators’ attempts to transform the islands into a granary that could supply fleets sent to pursue France’s imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean. The introduction of insect-eating mynah birds (acridotheres tristis), imported from other parts of France’s colonial empire by the naturalist and administrator Pierre Poivre, was envisioned as a strategy for achieving a productive balance between the natural and human oeconomies of the islands. Yet engineering a stable balance between the natural and human elements on the islands proved to be more difficult than Poivre and his contemporaries had anticipated, as the mynah birds came to be widely seen as equally destructive as the locusts they were intended to eliminate by the 1770s and 1780s.