The Enlightenment Birth of Biopolitics and the Migration of Ideas

I will argue that the development of biopolitics is central to the Enlightenment and that the historical emergence of the biopolitical cannot be understood unless scholars take an Atlantic perspective. This oceanic perspective is necessary in order to see that biopolitics emerged out of the back and forth movement of ideas, practices, and people between France and its Atlantic slave colonies. The large frame of analysis is also necessary in order to trace how biopolitical ideas and practices spread from the original context of their emergence to be taken up in distant places and other discourses. To reveal the French Atlantic emergence of biopolitics, I will draw on examples of programs of surveillance of slaves in Saint-Domingue, the transformation of concepts like “population” and “species” (particularly in relation to the human species), the development of population statistics throughout the French Atlantic colonies, the development of scientific theories of race, the creation of administrative proposals to racially engineer colonial populations, and metropolitan programs to monitor and transform the black population in metropolitan France. From these examples, I will then trace the migratory route of some of these ideas and practices into the Anglophone Atlantic through specific texts and intermediary actors such Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Jefferson, John Gregory, and Samuel Stanhope Smith.