Political Ecology Networks, Environmental Change, and Diderot and D'Alembert's: Encyclopédie

Abstract

Abstract: This essay analyzes how Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751–72) maps the colonial economy and its imbrication in the infrastructure of knowledge. It explores the content of the early-modern plantation economy while showing how the referencing structure of the Encyclopédie enables a critical reading of that system. I also contend that the Encyclopédie demonstrates the historical intertwining of church and capitalism, including ecocritique of the colonial destruction of land. In addition, this article reexamines the roots of current discussions on racial capitalism in early modern texts and how eighteenth-century authors bring together nascent articulations of slavery and capitalism.