Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius

The Journal of African History, 1998

Anthony Barker's study of slavery in Mauritius focuses on the dynamic interaction between humanitarian concern and economic exploitation in the aftermath of the British conquest. During this period, Mauritian society was grappling with the prospects of the transition to British rule, economic stagnation, and the spectre of amelioration and the proposed emancipation of slaves. Those familiar with these aspects of Mauritian history will be seeking answers in this book to a number of questions that have thus far not been adequately researched, such as the internal nature of Mauritian slavery, the demographics of the slave population, and the transition from a household-type slave economy to plantation slavery. In chapters -, Barker analyses the antislavery movement in Britain and its critics in Mauritius. He criticises British officials, including the governor himself, for failing to enforce British amelioration and anti-slave trade policies more effectively, although he does not answer the nagging question of why an antislavery movement never arose in Mauritius, the only British slave colony in which this was the case. Barker's concentration on events in England and on British officials in Mauritius, and his downplaying of important events and developments in Mauritius itself, results in an inadequate and rather static analysis of the activities of Governor Farquhar and his secretary, Charles Telfair. Although Barker may be right in criticizing Nwulia for failing to recognize Telfair's crucial place in politics, the latter's activities must be seen in the context of more virulent, albeit more powerful, forces and personalities on the Mauritian political scene. For example, the Comite! Coloniale, which had been formed specifically to resist amelioration and abolition, is barely mentioned despite its immense significance in local politics. Farquhar's policies need to be seen not only in the context of the anti-slavery movement, but also in the context of overall British policy in Mauritius, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean, and their interplay with local forces. It was not until the s that Farquhar became convinced that the future of Mauritius was to be closely tied to sugar. Barker also spends much time trying to prove not only the complicity but the participation of British officials in the illegal slave trade, although the Commissioners of Enquiry report never produced more than circumstantial evidence to support this claim, to which Barker adds nothing new. Nevertheless, these chapters represent pioneering advances in Mauritian historiography : new material on the anti-slavery movement's preoccupation and involvement with Mauritian slavery is presented, and the metropolitan view of slavery in Mauritius is fully explored. Barker's examination of the  census, in chapter , regrettably does not include references to recent studies on this topic, for example, the study of the  slave census by H. Ly Tio Fane, and my own on the  slave census. His analysis of trends in the transformation of sugar and slavery, the two most closely intertwined and critical issues of these times, would have carried more weight had the right direction. Kenya's political history may yet recover a much needed degree of objectivity.

Studies in History, 2009

American Anthropologist, 2006

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

Predominantly to facilitate the continuation of labour emigration to the crown colonies of British the colonial Government of India had few Ordinances in force by which approved their travel on provisionally. Each recruited laborers, who had accepted the contract, had to appear before any one of the Magistrates of Calcutta where need to assure his or her intention of the travel voluntarily. The contracts were termed for five years initially, but which looked much liberal only enough on deed alone, Rs. 8 with sufficient dietary, being fixed as the minimum monthly wage. In too many cases, lacking any knowledge to the government, unregistered emigrants had also transported to the colonies devoid of any punishment. Indentured recruitment system, however, underwent changes overtime with amendments to the original legislation. The amendments made in the first fifty years were due to the lobby of the white planters, the changes effected in the next fifty years were because of the mounting pressure from the Indian nationalists like Gokhale and Gandhi. To provide lucidity to the objective of the paper which has been divided into three parts. The first part discuss about the initiation of the regulated Indian labour emigration to British crown colonies. The implicit and tailored laws had also affected the Indian immigrants in the Mauritian plantations which have contended in the second part. Final part of the paper has been explained the wicked nature of the indentured labour system in Mauritius.

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.

Grey Room, 2018

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.

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:

Mauritius has been an independent nation since 1968. It was founded on the history and structures of a plantation society and is mainly inhabited by descendants of Indian (and Hindu) indentured labourers. The issue of the transfer or the loss of the caste system among Hindu Mauritians is both locally taboo and crucial to our understanding of Mauritian realities, leading us deep inside the local interactions between creoleness and indianness. A survey realized among older generations having lived (and still living) in plantation camps counters the common perception of a radical loss of the caste system, or at least of its ideological relevance, among Hindu Mauritians. Hinduism, Mauritius, castes, India, plantation

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.