Boundaries and Networks on the 19th Century Bras d’Eau Sugar Estate

Summary

This paper discusses research on the most complete and well-preserved 18th and 19th century sugar estate on Mauritius and how communities and identities were constituted under the conflicting conditions of both physical control and local/regional connectivity. Established in 1786, the Bras d’Eau Sugar Estate (now a national park) grew in the following century when the island shifted from French to British colonial rule. The slave trade and the institution of slavery were later abolished across the British Empire, though industrial sugar production increased. Indian indentured laborers with different castes, religions and skill sets, came to Mauritius to work on plantations. Vagrancy laws were designed to reengage laborers legally to plantations beyond their five-year contracts. Preliminary research at Bras d’Eau revealed extensive road and railway networks, and the ruins of industrial structures, enclosure walls and houses. Roads are positioned as both passages and boundary markers that divide, for example, living quarters from industrial workspaces and cultivated areas. I argue that space on the plantation was simultaneously controlled by wall and road boundaries and strategically connected to intern and external exchange networks. Within this context, archaeological research will help us to understand the diversity of identities performed in the past.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeologies of Colonialism and Everyday Life in the Indian Ocean World

Keywords

Spatial Coverage