Abstract

The 18 century's steady stream of Europeans moving to the  Caribbean colonies is primarily attracted by promises of wealth through the slave-based sugar- and tobacco-business. But it is also the prospect of an increased social mobility which enticed many people from poorest backgrounds to travel to French, English or Dutch settlements in the Caribbean. Those men and women who dared to resettle, kept close contact to friends, family and business partners by means of correspondence. In these letters, which have been preserved in an astonishing spectrum (see below), one highly-visible phenomenon comes to the fore: the world-perceiving, world-experiencing body of the letters' authors. Ubiquitously, they describe the body as the medium of perception and experience. Corporeal perception is the origin of emotional and mental states as well as the situational perception of the world – a “realm of the body”. The body, firstly, experiences the physical Caribbean: heat, tropical storms, bites of unknown insects, unfamiliar food. It also experiences the specific make-up of colonial societies, perceives the enslaved counterpart's black skin or the commingling of the white population regardless of European distinctions of rank, e.g. when a highly cultured theatre manager works next to a perennially hired servant. The authors' bodies experience the colonial resettlement as crisis and unfitting: their everyday practices of dressing, working, eating, sleeping or health care fail at the Caribbean's physical conditions; they fall ill, feel queasy, feeble, irritated. Social practices of in- and exclusion, distinction and usage of shared spaces have to be modified, too. A French merchant's wife, for example, is outraged about the “mulatto-women's impertinence”, who “parade” the streets in voguish clothes. In addition to that, there is slavery, which entails the execution of very particular practices on a daily basis. The letters preserved contain an astonishing spectrum of intelligible bodies, which contributed to shaping the 18^th century's colonial everyday life through their practices – this allows for a new approach to a colonial history of the body from the perspectives of Praxeology and History of the Everyday. more...