ABSTRACT
Pierre Poivre was a highly renowned eighteenth-century French botanical explorer and royal functionary who travelled across Asia in the 1740s and served as an intendant in the Isle de France (nowadays Mauritius) in the 1760s. In the island, he settled the roots of a centuries-long botanical garden (currently named Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden) where he experimented with the acclimatisation of tropical plants, especially spices that he himself smuggled from the other corner of the Indian Ocean. At once, missionary, merchant, and traveller; Poivre’s life was by all its features perplexingly global and vividly local. His experiences bridged different disconnected spaces across a few continents as well as multiple branches of knowledge.
