Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

by Megan Vaughan

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island , the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency. Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Genres: History, Mauritius

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Urna · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius, historian Megan Vaughan examines the role of slavery in the process of creolization in Mauritius. She focuses on slave-master interactions in the pre-plantation slave-owning society of Mauritius, with emphasis on slaves’ subjectivity and traces the process of creolization spanning the whole period of slavery in Mauritius under, successively, the Dutch, the French, and the British until its abolition in 1835. She argues that “a history of the lived experience of slavery” is based upon the assumption that slave experience was central in the construction of cultural roots on an island with no native population. She asserts that the uprooting which was a consequence of the slave trade, far from effecting a mere erasure of the past, gave rise to a gradual and complex process of “invention of tradition.” From this perspective, creolization involved the sharing of history and culture, but also contained the seeds of the ethnic differentiation that would pervade social relations in Mauritius in the post-abolition era. Vaughan’s contention is that different layers of ethnic differentiation were produced among slaves, according to the degree to which their memory of their homelands could be reproduced.

In her attempt to reconstruct the social world of slavery in the islands, she relies heavily on archival research into colonial correspondence, manumission registers, and legal records, especially criminal procedures. She uses descriptions of legal cases and testimonies of slaves involved in trials which, in the absence of slave narratives, become her source for a reconstruction of the slaves’ subjectivity in their social interactions with slave owners. She identifies this process as archetypically colonial in that it was “the meeting (or nonmeeting) of two radically different worlds in the courtroom”. Even as Vaughan is aware of the mimetic possibilities of the court encounter and invokes theories of colonial mimicry and hybridity as posited by post-colonial theorists like Homi K. Bhabha, she ultimately falls back on the sense of contingency and complexity that the archival records seem to reinforce towards disaggregating a fixed interpretation of the slave’s location in the colonial legal apparatus. Structurally, for Vaughan, scholarship on Atlantic slavery and many of its registers of interpretation become useful in examining the slave experience in Creating the Creole Island. She draws from analytic categories popularly used in scholarship on the Middle Passage like “rupture”, “trauma”, “erasure of the past” and “loss of memory and identity” to interrogate the aggregation of slave identity in colonial Mauritius.

Comparing the history and perception of slavery in Mauritius, particularly of slaves imported from Africa, with that of other slave-owning societies like in the Caribbean and the Americas, Vaughan concludes that there can be no simple origin story for Mauritian slaves as their “roots” lay in the complex, layered and already creolized cultures of their origin. To that effect, her major contribution in this book is her sustained argument that the French colonial legal system’s simplified categories of ethnic labelling were part of the process of their ascribed identification within colonial Mauritian society and the “invention” of their ethnicities and traditions were simultaneous with the erasure of their histories.

[Richard Marney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book on the recommendation of a Mauritian whom I met during a recent visit to the Island. She said to understand the people and culture of Mauritius I must study the history of slavery on the island.

This was the first book to which she directed me.

The writing style is quite readable, even at times a bit of a page turner. The work is well researched. A solid academic piece.

For what type of reader the book is suited is hard to say.

I was focused humbly and therefore narrowly on the question of how the current ethnicity of the island came to be and hence the build up of the African population during the French giving way to the influx of Indians after the abolition of slavery by the British in the 1830s, interested me. Many "other" sections I raced through disinterestedly as a result ..... For example, there is much for legal historians (which I am not), in the discussion of the judicial treatment of slaves versus free men in French and English colonial-era Mauritius, but this is not an area of interest (or competence) for me.

My rating of three stars is not a criticism of the book per se, but rather a warning: "know why you may want to pick up the book before you start or you might be disappointed".

[Mwanafunzi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a strange one... Vaughan seeks to explain the rise of Créolité on Mauritius from the 18th c. on. It is based in large part on French court records, and it is informed by a sort of psycho-anthropological literature that has its roots in Foucault. The major disappointment is that we are not afforded as many windows into the experience of enslavement as we might have expected given the title. Much attention is paid to Mauritian elites, and we are asked to consider what their writings can tell us about the island’s slave society. There does appear to be some logic to mining elite perspectives for what they can tell us about the “creolization” that took place here.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly easy read looking at the history of Mauritius. There are gaps and things are constantly changing but this book gives an introduction.

[Erin]

summer 24 - GSRM

[Benemint · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest, I don't understand why this is assigned in my historiography class. But it was a good interesting book.