The Sociology and Politics of Slavery in Mauritius

The American Historical Review, 2001

Part 2 Land and the mobilization of domestic capital 4 Becoming an appropriated people: the rise of the free population of color, 1729±1830 79 5 The general desire to possess land: ex-apprentices and the post-emancipation era, 1839±1851 105 6 The regenerators of agricultural prosperity: Indian immigrants and their descendants, 1834±1936 136 Conclusion 172 Notes 183 Bibliography 202 Index 218 ix x Maps 1 The Southwestern Indian Ocean page 10 2 Administrative districts on Mauritius 38 xii List of tables 23 Distribution of occupations within the Indian population, 1846±1931 24 Social characteristics of Indians purchasing land, 1840±1889 25 Occupations of Indians purchasing land, 1840±1889 26 Sharecropping and Mauritian sugar estates, 1887±1918

This paper seeks to explain the concept and construct of colonialism and maps the factors that led to the emergence of colonialism through the case study of Mauritius which had faced Dutch, French and British colonialists. It demonstrates British colonialism, established French influence over culture and society and British attitudes to different sections of the Mauritian society. The development of Mauritian society was by and large a colonial establishment. The economy, society, the polity, the very flora and fauna of the island are all direct results of colonial history (Houbert, 1981). Therefore, there have been attempts to study and analyze the differences in the British colonial policies adopted in Mauritius and their general colonial approach of the British with reference to their other colonies. The inhabitants are descendants of the ones who willingly or unwillingly settled in Mauritius.

Radical History Review, 2005

Mauritius is a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It is isolated, and even the Internet and frequent air transport have not removed the insularity that characterizes all aspects of the island's population's life-from politics to economic philosophy to culture. Many Mauritians remain in blissful ignorance of the harsh realities that exist elsewhere: civil war, totalitarian regimes, starvation, and so on. Yet the study of Mauritian history is inherently transregional. Mauritius is a product of colonialism, itself a globalizing phenomenon. To understand Mauritian history, one needs to understand feudalism in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe, African slavery, British legal and economic history, and the social and economic history of Africa and Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study of slavery in the past fifteen to twenty years has undergone tremendous change and reinterpretation. For example, a public history of slavery has emerged that takes into consideration how the history of slavery is viewed in Mauritius today and by whom it is studied. I started researching the history of slavery after helping to produce a series of TV programs on history with the national television station. It became clear to all of us that there were huge gaps in our knowledge of Mauritian history. One such gap was the situation of slaves and the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in 1835. Our TV scripts had traced the history of the island through a study of the different districts, but when it came to talking about the exslave population after the 1850s, there seemed to be absolutely no information. The history books mentioned nothing about the ex-slave population from the period of

American Anthropologist, 2006

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Megan Vaughan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 341 pp.

2010

It is unlikely that anyone reading this article can say that they have not been affected in some way by past colonial activity. Whether through diasporas, interaction with new cultural attitudes or the exposure of our taste buds to new foods, one thing is certain: no one remains unaffected. However, for some, the colonial experience is one that is very present in day-to-day life. This article examines Mauritius, an island ‘created’ in its modern guise by colonialism. It juxtaposes the colonial legacies of Europe with the ideals of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, former Prime Minister of Mauritius and unequivocal père de la nation, as laid out in his (co-authored) book Our Struggle (1992). The book outlines the ‘epic struggle’ of a colonial island, under British rule, to achieve a peaceful transition to independence. For an island foreshadowed by doom in the years following independence, how has ‘islandness’ and isolation helped it to become a rare economic success story? By finding an eq...

2016

The objective of this chapter is to explore the experience of slaves during the Slave Amelioration Period and of apprentices during the Apprenticeship era in Mauritius. It focuses on slaves’ and apprentices’ attempts to free themselves through manumission, their motives and the methods used to achieve this between 1829 and 1839. The aim is to show that slaves did not wait for the official abolition of slavery by the British government to attempt to change their servile status and instead used innovative attempts to improve their lives. As stated by Saunders for South Africa:

There were markedly distinct disciplinary regimes installed in Mauritius and Trinidad which were devised to regulate the mode of insertion of Indian labour into the plantation economy. One significant factor was the proximity to India which allowed Mauritius concerted and continuous labour recruitment process not seen in the West Indian colonies. The band headed by a returning immigrant became institutionalised in Mauritius and this became a key method of labour control which was less practicable in Trinidad where return migration was an expensive proposition. This, along with the concentrated increase in immigrant worker population, the supreme dominance of sugar in Mauritius and the displacement of the ex-apprentices to its periphery, configured the Indian and Indo-Mauritian as tropical labourer over any other identity. This may partly account for how the time-expired or Free Indians came to be disciplined in the 1850s and 1860s when vagrant depots were set up, the pass system introduced and the highly repressive legislative regime of 1867 sanctioned. The policing presence required to enforce this identity was concomitantly increased in these years whereas in Trinidad, the small rural police force was on hand merely to react to instances of disturbances on the estates. Trinidad’s location in the Caribbean brought a shift in the terms of discourses on governance as the experience of slavery continued to hover over decision-making. Paternal figures were installed at the executive level of colonial government and this served to situate the Indian immigrant in a discursive milieu where moral improvement became a legitimizing feature of indentureship. At the same time the diversity and distribution of the population over a thinly settled land made for conditions that were different to that experience in Mauritius. In Trinidad, a new disciplinary regime developed out of moralising discourses rather than discourses on control and containment and the institutional consequences were markedly different. I argue that In this proposed paper I will compare the emergence of these distinct disciplinary regimes and identify the reasons for their very different modes as they appear with the rise of a free Indian population in Mauritius and Trinidad.

At the end of the French period in Mauritius, the British administration began the introduction of major changes associated with the development of philanthropic notions and the abolitionism movement. Despite the British commitment against slavery, illegaltrading ventures continued to challenge the administration's authority. Within this conflicting atmosphere, in 1821 a French illegal slave trader named the Coureur wrecked less than 350 meters from the shore along the eastern coast of Mauritius. Its remains were discovered 8 years ago and have since been the object of extensive research, survey and excavation campaigns by the Mauritius Museum Council. This paper will outline the research, results and implications of archaeological study implemented on the shipwreck site of the Coureur.

2016

This book presents a comparative history of slavery and the transition from slavery to free labour in Zanzibar and Mauritius, within the context of a wider comparative study of the subject in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Both countries are islands, with roughly the same size of area and populations, a common colonial history, and both are multicultural societies. However, despite inhabiting and using the same oceanic space, there are differences in experiences and structures which deserve to be explored. In the nineteenth century, two types of slave systems developed on the islands ? while Zanzibar represented a variant of an Indian Ocean slave system, Mauritius represented a variant of the Atlantic system ? yet both flourished when the world was already under the hegemony of the global capitalist mode of production. This comparison, therefore, has to be seen in the context of their specific historical conjunctures and the types of slave systems in the overall theoretical c...

This chapter deals with the Mauritian contemporary context of competing communal memories. 1 Mauritius is the perfect illustration of a Creole society: the island has no native population, its origins are largely linked with slave trade and the sugar industry, and it comprises an important mixture of cultures coming from various parts of the world. However, the majority of the Mauritian population comes from India and practices Hinduism. At least since its independence in 1968, the Indo-Mauritian communities have developed a huge concern for Indian cultural roots in an attempt to differentiate themselves from descendants of enslaved Africans. This chapter argues that official Mauritian initiatives to promote the memory of slavery and indentured labor must be understood in the context of the ongoing construction of a young nation hesitating between Indian-ness and Creoleness, and here seen as a dynamic interpenetration of various cultures resulting from contexts of forced migration and slavery. Denying or accepting the past—and its original uprooting—is the main mechanism behind competing memories of slavery and indentured labor. The first part of the chapter explores the links between the public memories of enslaved Africans and indentured servants as well as their relations with communal founding narratives that reconstruct the past of each community. The second part discusses the various projects of appropriation of the Mauritian public space through recently built monuments and sites.