Historians of science have had little to say about France's richest Caribbean possession, and almost nothing has been written in English. McClellan treats that silence as the problem to be solved, and builds his study in three movements.

He begins with the colony itself: how the French settled and organised it, what made its plantations so profitable, and which of its difficulties European expertise was expected to remedy. Without that groundwork, he argues, the scientific story cannot be read properly.

A second part follows the many ways seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and medicine served colonial development, or appeared to. The third traces the Cercle des Philadelphes as an institution: the learned society at Cap Français that Louis XVI raised to royal standing in 1789. A provincial academy in the tropics, on McClellan's account, has more to say about science and empire than its obscurity would suggest.