Slavery, Indenture and the Law: Assembling a Nation in Colonial Mauritius

Between 1901 and 1973 immigration to Australia was governed by the White Australia policy, which prevented non-Europeans from entering Australia for residence except under special circumstances.1 I...

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are characterised by their smallness and high exposure to global environmental challenges such as climate change. Although high exposure to physical environmental stressors over long periods of time may represent vulnerability, rich local knowledge can result in long histories of responding to disaster risk, demonstrating that smallness does not always lead to vulnerability. This research study focuses on environmental hazards in Colonial Mauritius and their impact on the Mauritian population from 1857 to 1911. Mauritius is one of those small islands with a colonial history and diseases prevalent during colonial times were considered to be a consequence of poverty, inadequate food supplies and bad sanitation. However, these factors alone did not account for the rapid spread of diseases. Climate variations often seemed to have influenced the incidence of illnesses in many tropical regions. Results showed that Islanders had to face several episodes of epidemics and water-borne diseases such as malaria were likely to increase and decrease after alternate periods of severe rainfall. Island studies on the spread of diseases and climate were increasingly recognised as offering valuable contributions to climate change adaptation in Mauritius. The mid-twentieth century marked the beginning of a new, prevention-oriented, colonial policy towards tropical cyclones and disease control. These catastrophes have led to a growing disaster consciousness in the Mauritian community, and over time, strengthened the coordination ability of institutions to shape the modern-day perspectives of the Mauritian Society.

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to demonstrate the structure of attitudes in British colonial officialdom through a case study of Mauritius from the governorship of Sir John Pope Hennessy to decolonization. It suggests that officials consistently saw Mauritians as a whole as ‘the Others’, while seeking both to divide and rule them – into an émigré French elite left over from the French colonial period at the time of British conquest (1810), a Creole community, and an Indian community – without assimilating them; and to suspect each in turn of disloyalty and treachery. By a grim irony, many of the governors and their officials were suspected by the colonial office of joining the Others. This is thus a story of an adaptable imperial paranoia.

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This chapter outlines the history of colonisation, settlement, and decolonisation in Mauritius and the Chagos Archipelago. It shows that the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago were already marginal within colonial Mauritius, and that their marginality was compounded by their relocation to Mauritius during the decade around independence, which was a period of social, economic, and political unrest.

1. Introduction 2. Creating a garden of sugar: land, labor and capital, 1721-1936 Part I. Labor and Labor Relations: 3. A state of continual disquietude and hostility: maroonage and slave labor, 1721-1835 4. Indentured labor and the legacy of maroonage: illegal absence desertion, and vagrancy, 1835-1900 Part II. Land and the Mobilization of Domestic Capital: 5. Becoming an appropriated people: the rise of the free population of color, 1729-1830 6. The general desire to possess land: ex-apprentices and the post-emancipation era, 1839-51 7. The regenerators of agricultural prosperity: Indian immigrants and their descendants, 1834-1936 8. Conclusion.

Chapter 2: Making canes credible in colonial Mauritius

With this important collection of essays on the independent economic activities of slaves, freedmen, and indentured Indians in colonial Mauritius, Richard Allen takes the history of Mauritian labor well beyond the familiar themes of exploitation and resistance. This is careful economic history from below, with important implications for Mauritian social and cultural history. Allen's argument is that inhabitants of the vast bottoms of the social pyramid—gens de couleur (free persons of color), ex-apprentices, and Indian immigrants—not only shaped their own destinies in difficult legal and social conditions, but that their independent choices profoundly influenced the insular economy as a whole. Through attention to subalterns' acquisition and management of land and capital, Allen sheds new light on key questions in Mauritian social history (especially the social “disappearance” of the Afro-Mauritian population and the rise of Indian entrepreneurship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). As do all provocative and well-researched works, this one proposes solutions to old problems and allows us to ask new questions about the roles of Malagasy, Africans, Indians, and their descendants in Mauritian history.

Slave Protection and Resistance in Colonial Mauritius, 1829–1830

ABSTRACTThe history of imprisonment in British colonial Mauritius is intertwined with its political economy, most especially the relationship between metropolitan government and plantation owners. Whether labour was predominantly enslaved, apprenticed or indentured, incarceration was part of a broader process through which the regulation of the colonial workforce was taken from the private to the public sphere and became associated with economic development. Nevertheless, prisoners both challenged and used prison regimes as vehicles for the improvement of their lives. Mauritian jails were intensely political arenas in which the changing nature of colonial relations and the regulation of labour was both expressed and contested.

Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius

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Thimithi – the Tamil Hindu fire-walking ceremony has always attracted the attention of the curious and the thrill seeker and remains a tourist attraction as well as the performance of a solemn vow in many parts of the world where it continues to be enacted. A source of much speculation as to the participants’ apparent ability to withstand the pain of walking over hot coals, travellers’ often exaggerated accounts of eye witness attendance at such events regularly graced the columns of western journals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article focusses on an unusual investigation carried out in colonial Mauritius in mid-1874. The enquiry resulted from a published description of thimithi written by Nicolas Pike, former American consul on the island which caused concern at the colonial office in London, who asked for an explanation. This produced a set of reports, firstly by British police officers, and secondly, but more remarkably, by leading members of the Tamil community on Mauritius. Their detailed and occasionally humorous responses to the western orientalist gaze deftly unpick the absurdities and hypocrisies of the so-called ruling caste whilst their very involvement serves to complicate our understanding of the relationship between white settler and Indian ‘subject’ in the mid-Victorian colonial empire.

Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius

Abstract