Mauritian Indenture in the Indian Ocean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper presents a case study of an African/Indian Ocean plantation that focuses on daily lives of indentured laborers during the 19th century. Mauritius’s Bras d’Eau National Park was a sugar estate that functioned from 1786 to 1868. During the 1830s, French colonial landowners shifted from a reliance on enslaved laborers primarily from Mozambique and Madagascar, to indentured laborers primarily from India. Four hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children traveled to Mauritius on five-year indenture contracts to live and work on sugar estates. Domestic artifacts from the plantation village, such as Indian smoking pipes, glass bangle fragments, buttons from second-hand British military uniforms, cowrie shell currencies, lotus bowls, and traces of a pulses-and-rice-based diet are broadly representative of long-standing Indian Ocean cultural networks. On the other hand, the organization of village housing reflects laborers’ preferences not just for individual homes over communal barracks, but for houses adapted to the local environment and climate based on Indian health practices and the western concept of miasma. As such, the landscape and material culture of Bras d’Eau are expressions of indentured immigrant identities that are specific to Mauritius, but that also fit within Indian Ocean and European colonial sensibilities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Approaches to Slavery and Unfree Labour in Africa   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24197