Creating Undiminished Confidence: The Free Population of Colour and Identity Formation in Mauritius, 1767–1835

Abstract

Recent scholarship on free coloured militias in colonial Mexico and New Orleans, white and free coloured culture, identity and political activity in Barbados, and identity formation in Creole societies in the Caribbean highlights the need to explore the dynamics and consequences of free coloured identity formation elsewhere in the colonial slave plantation world. The Mauritian case study provides an opportunity to draw on the insights from sociological work on identity formation to examine how ethnicity, gender and class, as well as race, influenced the development of a distinctive sense of collective identity among the island's free persons of colour during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.