Abstract
It is easy to overlook the fact that Mauritius, a tiny island of some 720 square miles in the western Indian Ocean, was one of the largest slave colonies in the British Empire at the time of the Emancipation Act of 1833.1 Visitors to the newly acquired island in the years after 1810 often recorded shock at vivid, squalid and brutal scenes on the wharves and in the streets of Port Louis. Even those familiar with the West Indies had seen nothing to match the racial mélange of Africans, Madagascans, Indians, Malays, Arabs, Europeans, and their varied offspring. Nor had they seen cruelty so casual and public nakedness so complete as they were borne away in palanquins by human beasts of burden.2 But these exotic glimpses were rarely followed up with accounts of the hinterland plantations which, by the 1820s, were the mainstay of a rapidly expanding sugar economy and the focus of a ferocious antislavery attack.
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Notes
Maud Lowry Cole and Stephen Gwynn, eds, Memoirs of Sir Lowry Cole (London, 1934), 206; Edward Byam, ‘Three Years Administration of the Isle of France’, pp. 27–8, CO 172/38; David Jones to W. Ellis, Port Louis, 12 Dec. 1839, CWM; C.R. Moorsom, ‘British Peasantry and West-India Slaves’, Bristol Mercury, 25 Aug. 1832, 4b; Monthly Review, 4th Ser. 1 (Jan.–April 1831), 391.
Gaëtan Benoît, The Afro-Mauritians: An Essay (Moka, Mauritius, 1985), p. 3.
R.R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, Vol. 2 (Oxford, 1949), Part 4, ‘Mauritius and Seychelles’, pp. 753, 758.
Charles Grant, comp., The History of Mauritius, or the Isle of France, and the Neighbouring Islands; from their first discovery to the present time; composed principally from the papers and memoirs of Baron Grant, who resided twenty years in the island, by his son, Charles Grant, Viscount de Vaux (London, 1801), p. 370.
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Empire, Vol. 2, Part 4, p. 758.
Peter Burroughs, ‘The Mauritius Rebellion of 1832 and the Abolition of British Colonial Slavery’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 4 (1976), p. 245.
Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane Pineo, ‘Food Production and Plantation Economy of Mauritius’ in U. Bissoondoyal and S.B.C. Servansing, eds, Slavery in South West Indian Ocean (Moka, Mauritius, 1989), p. 214.
See, for example, Benedict Burton, ‘Slavery and Indenture in Mauritius and Seychelles’, in James L. Watson, ed., Asian and African Systems of Slavery (Oxford, 1980), pp. 135–68.
Burroughs, ‘The Mauritius Rebellion of 1832’, pp. 243–65; L. Rivaltz Quenette, La Fin d’Une Légende (Port Louis, 1979); Richard B. Allen, ‘Marronage and the Maintenance of Public Order in Mauritius, 1721–1835’, Slavery and Abolition, vol. 4, No. 3 (December, 1983), pp. 214–31; Richard B. Allen, ‘Economic Marginality and the Rise of the Free Population of Colour, 1767–1830’, Slavery and Abolition, vol. 10, No. 2 (September, 1989), pp. 126–50; Benoît, The Afro-Mauritians is a useful but short (105 pages) historical and sociological essay.
Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Empire, Vol. 2, Part 4, ‘Mauritius and Seychelles’, pp. 707–946.
Moses D.E. Nwulia, The History of Slavery in Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1810–75 (London and Toronto, 1981).
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1945); for a selection of criticisms of various aspects of the Elkins’ thesis see Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Chicago, 1971).
Eugene D. Genovese, ‘The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Application of the Comparative Method’, in Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, eds, Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), pp. 202–10; Franklin A. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison, Wis., 1970); see also Herbert Klein, Slavery in the Americas (Chicago, 1967); H. Hoetink, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas (New York, 1973).
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).
Peter Kolchin, ‘Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective’, Journal of American History, 70 (December, 1983), pp. 579–601.
Most notably, Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976).
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© 1996 Anthony J. Barker
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Barker, A.J. (1996). Introduction: History and Historiography. In: Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810–33. Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24999-2_1
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