Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

MEGAN VAUGHAN. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 341. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.111.2.601

1937-5239

Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

The last decade has seen a flourishing of English-language scholarship on French colonialism, both on France's prerevolutionary Atlantic empire and on its later colonies in Africa and Asia. France's Indian Ocean colonies under the Old Regime have received less attention, however. In many ways this is unsurprising, since colonies like Saint-Domingue (Haiti) were more integral parts of France's empire than remote territories such as Île Bourbon (Reunion) and Île de France (Mauritius). Nevertheless, as Megan Vaughan demonstrates in her compelling new study, such peripheral colonies have much to teach us about both colonialism and métissage. Mauritius today is often vaunted as a harmonious rainbow society. As Vaughan notes, Mauritius was a “creole island” from its origins; before European settlement, the island was uninhabited and had no “natives.” She reminds us that colonization was not a self-evident process. Rats and disease made Mauritius a “place from which everyone [slaves and colonists] desired to escape” (p. 9); peopling the island proceeded slowly. The Portuguese visited the island but opted not to stay; the Dutch colonized and abandoned it twice; the French began to settle there in 1721. Although they imported slave labor from Madagascar and mainland Africa to engage in agriculture and timber production, marronage became a central feature on the island. A vicious cycle was created, in which the threat of slave escape created a demand for more slave labor to prevent it, even while economic output remained low. The first three chapters of Vaughan's study offer a narrative of these difficult early years of colonization. She also explores how Enlightenment texts portrayed the island.