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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.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was made possible, in part, by an American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and by support from the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund, Mauritius. An earlier version was presented to the conference on Community Building and Identity Formation in the African Diaspora, Boston University, 30–31 March 2007.
Notes
Mauritius, known as Île de France following its colonisation by the French in 1721, was captured by a British expeditionary force in December 1810 and ceded permanently to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1814.
National Archives, Kew: Colonial Office Records (hereafter CO) 167/169, Enc. in Despatch No. 15, Sir William Nicolay to Viscount Goderich, 11 April 1833. The address was printed in the Mauritius Government Gazette 42, 23 March 1833.
CO 167/66, Despatch No. 22, R.T. Farquhar to Earl Bathurst, 19 May 1823.
CO 167/143, ‘Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry upon the Condition of the Free People of Colour at Mauritius’, 15 July 1828 (hereafter CEE report).
Mauritius National Archives (hereafter MNA): HA 80, M.M. Maingard, Jean Cantin, Jne Dupuy, A. Icery, A. Gouges and Bte Nayna (et al.) to Sir Charles Colville, 14 juillet 1830.
Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96.
CEE report.
Melanie Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
See, respectively, Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Jonathon D. Hill, ed., History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); Nancy Foner, ‘West Indian Identity in the Diaspora: Comparative and Historical Perspectives’, Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 3 (1998): 173–188; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context’, Plantation Society in the Americas 5, no. 1 (1998): 8–28; Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic Dimensions’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 227–260.
Philip Baker, ‘On the Origins of the First Mauritians and of the Creole Language of Their Descendants: A Refutation of Chaudenson's “Bourbonnais” Theory’, in Isle de France Creole: Affinities and Origins, ed. Philip Baker and Chris Corne (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma, 1982), 193.
MNA: A 32, ‘Liste des passagers arrivés, 1794–1801’.
Charles Grant, 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 (London: W. Bulmer, 1801), 73.
Gabriel Rantoandro, ‘Contribution à l’étude d'un groupe social peu connu du XIXe siècle: les maromita', Omaly Sy Anio 16 (1982): 41–60.
The term ‘Lascar’ generally referred to East Indian sailors, many of whom were Muslim. The descriptor ‘Malay’ could refer not only to persons from Malaya and elsewhere in south-eastern Asia, but also from India or the Maldives. See Hubert Gerbeau, ‘Des minorités mal-connues: esclaves indiens et malais des Mascareignes au XIXe siècle’, in Migrations, minorités et échanges en Océan Indien, XIX e –XX e siècle (Aix-en-Provence: Institut d'Histoire des Pays d'Outre-Mer, Université de Provence, 1978), 160–164. For free coloured immigrants from the Americas to Île de France, see MNA: LC 16/83; OA 39B/2; Z2B/6, f. 113v, 22 juin 1777.
Richard B. Allen, ‘The Constant Demand of the French: The Mascarene Slave Trade and the Worlds of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of African History 49, no. 1 (2008): 52–53.
The descriptor ‘Malabar’ referred to persons from southern India's Coromandel and Malabar Coasts and their hinterlands.
On the potential impact on manumission of the stereotypical qualities that whites assigned to slaves from different ethnocultural backgrounds, see Allen, Slaves, 42.
Formal actes de liberté exist for 785 slaves from 1768 to 1789. See Musleem Jumeer, ‘Les Affranchissements et les libres à l’Île de France à la fin de l'Ancien Régime', Mémoire de maîtrise (Université de Poitiers, 1979), 26.
Two-thirds of the 3639 slaves manumitted from 1789 to 1810 received their freedom between 1790 and 1797. See Pritilah Rosunee, ‘Manumission in Isle de France during the Revolutionary and Post Revolutionary Years from 1789 to 1810’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2002), 67.
British Parliament Sessional Papers 1823 XVIII [89], 125, ‘Return of All Manumissions Effected by Purchase, Bequest or Otherwise, since the 1st of January 1808’; 1828 XXV [204], 58–75, ‘Return of the Number of Manumissions Effected by Purchase, Bequest or Otherwise … from 1st January to 1st June 1826’. These returns report 1835 manumissions between 1811 and 1826.
CO 172/42, Tableau No. 14, ‘Rapports des naissances, décès, mariages aux populations blanche et libre dans les différents quartiers, établis sur les relevés des régistres de l'Etat Civil de 21 années, 1er janvier 1804 au 1er janvier 1825’.
Five such camps – des malabars et lascars, des iolofs (sic), des malgaches, des bambara (sic) and des noirs libres – existed in the early 1790s. See MNA: B1A/A.31/22, ‘Plan de la Ville de Port Louis dans l’Île de France par Douville, 1791'. On free coloured and white challenges to this residential segregation, see Richard B. Allen, ‘Marie Rozette and Her World: Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Mauritius’, Journal of Social History, forthcoming.
MNA: KK 20, ‘Recensement des populations blanche et libre, Port Louis, 1828–1829’.
Jimy M. Sanders, ‘Ethnic Boundaries and Identity in Plural Society’, Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 347.
MNA: OA 91, f. 130r, v, 29 janvier 1775; Z2B/20, f. 28r, 30 janvier 1775. For a fuller discussion of this assembly's activities, see Musleem Jumeer, ‘Les Affranchis et les indiens libres à l’Île de France au XVIIIe siècle (1721–1803)', Thèse de 3 e cycle (Université de Poitiers, 1984), 251–257. On ethnicity and free coloured marginality in colonial Mauritius, see Richard B. Allen, ‘Lives of neither Luxury nor Misery: Indians and Free Colored Marginality on the Île de France (1728–1810)’, Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer 78 (1991): 337–358.
Jumeer, ‘Les Affranchissements’, 26; Rosunee, ‘Manumission’, 119–122.
CEE report.
Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence: G1 473, ‘Recensement général de l’Isle de France, 1776'.
MNA: KK 15, ‘Cadastre des Plaines Wilhems. Populations blanche et libre, 1826’; KK 20, respectively.
Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: Norton, 1984), esp. chap. 4; Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 7; David P. Geggus, ‘Slave and Free Colored Women in Saint-Domingue’, in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 259–278; Judith A. Gilbert, ‘Free Women of Color as Property Owners in Colonial St. Louis, 1765–1803’, Gateway Heritage 17 (1996): 14–23; Susan M. Socolow, ‘Economic Roles of Free Women of Color in Cap Français’, in Gaspar and Hine, More Than Chattel, 279–297; David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Richard B. Allen, ‘Free Women of Colour and Socio-Economic Marginality in Mauritius, 1767–1830’, Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 181–197.
MNA: KK 5, ‘Recensement des impositions de l'An XII, populations blanche et libre (25 mars 1806)’; KK 20, respectively.
Allen, Slaves, 100.
Richard B. Allen, ‘Capital, Illegal Slaves, Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 2 (2008): 151–170.
Allen, ‘Marie Rozette’.
CO 167/86, Despatch No. 89, Sir Lowry Cole to Earl Bathurst, 19 November 1826.
Richard B. Allen, ‘Femmes libre “de couleur” et l'esprit d'entreprise dans la société esclavagiste de l’Île de France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle', Cahiers des anneaux de la mémoire 5 (2003): 147–161; Allen, ‘Marie Rozette’.
On slave women as cultural entrepreneurs, see Barbara Bush, ‘Towards Emancipation: Slave Women and Resistance to Coercive Labour Regimes in the British West Indian Colonies, 1790–1838’, in Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916, ed. David Richardson (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 27–53; Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 151–160.
Allen, Slaves, 90ff.
MNA: KK 3, ‘Recensement des populations blanche et libres, Port Louis (1805)’.
MNA: KK 20.
MNA: HA 80, ‘Prospectus. Il a pour but l’édification d'un Etablissement qui sera spécialement consacré à l'enseignement, lequel aura la denomination de Collège Central pour la Jeunesse de la Population de Couleur', [20 juin 1826].
CO 415/11/B.5 (No. 10), ‘Statement of Mr. Delaville an inhabitant of Port Louis respecting the number of Free people of Colour in Port Louis, and the encouraging [of] them to reside in the Country by granting them Land on favourable terms’, [21 March 1827].
MNA: HA 80, Extract from the Minutes of Council of 19 May 1830.
MNA: HA 80, J.M. Finniss, Chief Commy of Police to F.E.S. Viret, Private Secretary, 20 July 1830, para. 25.
MNA: OA 74, ff. 28v–29r, 2 janvier 1787.
Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper, ‘Collective Identity and Social Movements’, Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 285. On the social psychological underpinnings of identity, see Judith A. Howard, ‘Social Psychology of Identities’, Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 367–393.
Karen A. Cerulo, ‘Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions’, Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 393.
Michèle Lamont and Virág Molnár, ‘The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences’, Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 168. On the fluidity of ethnic boundaries across time and social contexts in plural societies, see Sanders, ‘Ethnic Boundaries’.
Colin A. Palmer, ‘From Africa to the Americas: Ethnicity in the Early Black Communities of the Americas’, Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 236.
Kenneth Bilby, ‘Ethnogenesis in the Guianas and Jamaica: Two Maroon Cases’, in Hill, History, 132; Sarah Yeh, ‘“A Sink of All Filthiness”: Gender, Family and Identity in the British Atlantic, 1688–1763’, The Historian 68, no. 1 (2006): 68; Yelvington, ‘Anthropology’, 247.
Yelvington, Producing Power, 4.
MNA: HA 80, Minute for the Council, by His Excellency the Governor, 15 March 1830.
MNA: HA 80, Report by G.W. Lay, 29 July 1830; V. Thelesfort et al. to Sir Charles Colville, [30 July 1830].
MNA: HA 80, J.M. Finniss to F.E.S. Viret, 7 August 1830.
MNA: HA 80, ‘List of persons who signed the address of 30 July 1830’. The signatories included eight carpenters, a shopkeeper, two tailors, a horse doctor, a cobbler, a cabinetmaker, four clerks, a jeweller, a bakery worker, a fiddler, a teacher, and ‘a person with property’. On the creation of a common identity by elites and non-elites, see Francisco A. Scarano, ‘The Jíbaro Masquerade and the Subaltern Politics of Creole Identity Formation in Puerto Rico, 1745–1823’, American Historical Review 101, no. 5 (1996): 1398–1431.
MNA: HA 80, Petition to Governor Lieutenant General Sir Lowry Cole, 16 January 1828. On similar free coloured community institutions in Barbados, see Newton, Children of Africa, 107.
MNA: IB 6, ‘Return of Marroons captured by the Chiefs of Detachments during the year 1826’.
Auguste Toussaint, L'Administration française de l'Île Maurice et ses archives (1721–1810) (Port Louis: Mauritius Archives, 1965), 31.
On free coloured militias, see, for example, Jerome Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 110–116; Hanger, Bounded Lives, 109–135; Vinson, Bearing Arms; Ben Vinson III, ‘Articulating Space: The Free-Colored Military Establishment in Colonial Mexico from the Conquest to Independence’, Callaloo 27, no. 1 (2004): 150–171; David Sartorius, ‘My Vassals: Free-Colored Militias in Cuba and the Ends of Spanish Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5, no. 2 (2004) http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history. On slave regiments in the British West Indies, see Roger Norman Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
Raymond d'Unienville, Histoire politique de l'Îsle de France (1791–1794) (Port Louis: Mauritius Archives, 1982), 57–60.
Allen, Slaves, 96.
Richard B. Allen, ‘Unbridled and Licentious Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 106, 113.
Anthony J. Barker, Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810–33: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule (New York: Macmillan, 1996); Vijaya Teelock, Bitter Sugar: Sugar and Slavery in 19th Century Mauritius (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1998), 166ff.
Catherine Boudet, ‘Les Abolitions de l'esclavage à Maurice et la construction d'une identité franco-mauricenne’, in Esclavage et abolitions dans l'Océan Indien (1723–1860), ed. Edmond Maestri (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), 255–265; Catherine Boudet, ‘La Construction politique d'une identité franco-mauricienne (1810–1968): le discourse identaire comme gestion de la contradiction’, Kabaro 3, no. 3–4 (2005): 23–45.
Peter Burroughs, ‘The Mauritius Rebellion of 1832 and the Abolition of British Colonial Slavery’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 4, no. 3 (1976): 243–265.
CO 167/148, Despatch No. 42, Sir Charles Colville to Sir George Murray, 30 June 1830.
Laura Foner, ‘The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies’, Journal of Social History 3, no. 4 (1970): 406–430; David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 3.