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ABSTRACT
In the years prior to legal emancipation, British officials enacted a series of laws intended to ameliorate the condition of those held in slavery in their colonies. This article investigates the impact of amelioration on the islands of the Seychelles immediately prior to emancipation. While the legal changes, including the dispatch of a Protector of Slaves to the Seychelles, were limited in terms of effectiveness, their implementation offered people new avenues to protest mistreatment and engage directly with the language of abolition. Reports filed by the protector highlight people’s uncertainty and isolation during the years leading up to emancipation. While there is evidence of resistance through uprisings, desertions, and the filing of formal complaints, people in the Seychelles faced significant challenges as owners used the islands’ distance from colonial oversight to maintain control through violence and patriarchal structures of domination. As remote ‘island laboratories’, however, the islands offer unique insights into the ways in which people managed to leverage British abolitionism to their advantage even on such isolated islands.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Investigation at Desroches (‘Isle des Roches’), ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, 1832, CO 172/31, British National Archives, Kew (henceforth NA).
2 There were sixty five labourers in 1837 but these people were gradually removed to other islands in subsequent years. ‘Despatches’, CO 167/204, NA. At this point, the islands of the Seychelles, including the ‘outlying islands’, were ruled over by the British colonial government on Mauritius.
3 While no name is given in the proceedings, elsewhere A. Wilson is listed as the assistant protector in the Seychelles in 1832. ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves', CO 172/31.
4 ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, CO 172/31.
5 Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Aline Helg, Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas, trans. Lara Vergnaud (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
6 For more on varieties of resistance: Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, and Michael Salman, eds., Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006); Edward A. Alpers, ‘The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean’, in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 20–38; Matthias van Rossum, ‘“Amok!”: Mutinies and Slaves on Dutch East Indiamen in the 1780s’, International Review of Social History 58, Supplement S21 (December 2013): 109–30; Nira Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
7 Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin, 88.
8 Helg, Slave No More, 13.
9 This article draws upon sources found in the British National Archives primarily because those held in the Seychelles are not currently accessible and the archives have been closed for an extended period.
10 For an exhaustive discussion on scholarship about the Seychelles, see Richard B. Allen, ‘History of Seychelles’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1141. Publications that do examine slavery and slave trafficking include Deryck Scarr, Seychelles since 1770: History of a Slave and Post-Slavery Society (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999); Peter A. Nicholls, ‘“The Door to the Coast of Africa”: The Seychelles in the Mascarene Slave Trade, 1770–1830’ (PhD diss., University of Kent, 2018).
11 Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Robert J. DiNapoli and Thomas P. Leppard, ‘Islands as Model Environments’, The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 13, no. 2 (2018): 157–60.
12 Allen, ‘History of Seychelles’; Claude Wanquet, ‘Le peuplement des Seychelles sous l’occupation française: Une experience de colonization à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’, in Mouvements de populations dans l’océan Indien (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1979), 187. Note that the Mascarenes included the islands of Mauritius, Reunion (Bourbon), Rodrigues, the main islands of the Seychelles, and other outlying islands in the southwestern Indian Ocean.
13 Wanquet, ‘Le peuplement des Seychelles’, 196–7; Allen, ‘History of Seychelles’.
14 Jean-François Dupon, ‘Aspects de l’agriculture aux Seychelles: L’exemple de l’île Silhouette’, Cahiers d’outre-mer no. 95 (1971): 221–2.
15 These numbers are primarily from Robert R. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire, vol. 2 (Oxford: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1949). By contrast, Mauritius was home to more than 63,000 enslaved people by 1832. Richard B. Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), table 18, p. 112. For more on the apprenticeship and emancipation process in Mauritius, see Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 15–16.
16 For more on shifting legal terrain of this era: Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023), 36–7.
17 Christa Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 10–11. Other scholars have called attention to these contradictions, including J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (London: Clarendon Press, 1988); Claudius Fergus, ‘“Dread of Insurrection”: Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain’s West Indian Colonies, 1760–1823’, The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 757–80; Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Christina Twomey, ‘Protecting Slaves and Aborigines’, Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 10–29; Seymour Drescher, ‘Approaches to Global Antislavery’, in Writing the History of Slavery, ed. David Stefan Doddington and Enrico Dal Lago (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 113–32.
18 Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 12.
19 For more the Protector of Slaves office in Mauritius: Tyler Yank, ‘Slave Protection and Resistance in Colonial Mauritius, 1829–1830’, in Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, ed. Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas (Boston: Brill, 2017), 224–46.
20 Nicole N. Aljoe, ‘“Going to Law”: Legal Discourse and Testimony in Early West Indian Slave Narratives’, Early American Literature 46, no. 2 (2011): 351.
21 Claudius Fergus, ‘Centring the City in the Amelioration of Slavery in Trinidad, 1824–1834’, The Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 1 (2006): 118.
22 Aljoe, ‘Going to Law’, 369.
23 Trevor Burnard, ‘A Voice for Slaves’, Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 43–46.
24 For more on African use of colonial legal systems, see Richard Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005).
25 Wim Klooster, ‘Slave Revolts, Royal Justice, and a Ubiquitous Rumor in the Age of Revolutions’, The William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2014): 401–24.
26 Nigel Worden, ‘The Environment and Slave Resistance in the Cape Colony’, in Bondage and the Environment in the Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 101–21.
27 On this slave trading period: Allen, European Slave Trading; Nicholls, ‘“The Door to the Coast of Africa”’.
28 Allen, ‘History of the Seychelles’.
29 On the Commission of East Enquiry: Richard B. Allen, ‘Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History 42 (2001): 101; Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (December 2012): 749.
30 For instance: ‘Memorandum of the several islands dependencies of Mauritius’, 1829, Commission of East Enquiry report at Mauritius, CO 167/144, NA.
31 ‘Report on Trade and Navigation’, 1829, CO 167/144, NA.
32 On the cases brought before the protector in Port Louis: Yank, ‘Slave Protection and Resistance’.
33 Ibid., 232.
34 Report of Capt. Moorsom, 21 June 1823, in ‘Slaves and Slave Trade, Nos. A.3–A.33’, CO 415/3, NA.
35 On effective emancipation: Joel Quirk, ‘Ending Slavery in All Its Forms: Legal Abolition and Effective Emancipation in Historical Perspective’, The International Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 4 (2008): 529–54.
36 ‘The Case of Julie’, 1831, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’. CO 172/31. Scarr notes that Savy had ‘enfranchised a woman who nursed him as an epileptic but later killed a slave woman while gripped by his affliction’. Deryck Scarr, Slaving and Slavery in the Indian Ocean (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 159. Many of these testimonies are in recorded in French, while the British wrote their reports in English. All translations from French are my own.
37 For example, Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
38 Cf. Kate Ekama, ‘Connected Lives: Experiences of Slavery in VOC Colombo’, in Being a Slave, ed. Alicia Schrikker and Nira Wickramasinghe, Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Leiden University Press, 2020), 99–100.
39 As in other British colonies: Burnard, ‘A Voice for Slaves’, 53.
40 For more on African testimony: Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, ‘Law in Colonial Africa’, in Law in Colonial Africa, ed. Mann and Roberts (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991).
41 Example: Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004).
42 Wanquet, ‘Le peuplement des Seychelles’, 191; Nicholls, ‘Door to the Coast of Africa’, 162.
43 Yank, Slave Protection and Resistance, 239.
44 ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves, Part 2’, CO 172/36, NA.
45 Nicholls, ‘Door to the Coast of Africa’, 74–5, 84–8.
46 Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).
47 Case of Amis, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, CO 172/31.
48 Ibid.
49 Fergus, ‘Centering the City’, 118.
50 Reports of protector, 1829, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, CO 172/27, NA.
51 Case of Désiré, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, December 1832, CO 172/31.
52 Ibid.
53 Case of Rosalie and Figaro, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, June 1831, CO 172/28, NA. Scarr notes that she was eventually sent to jail for her use of violence against slaves: Scarr, Slaving and Slavery, 159.
54 Case of Rosalie and Figaro.
55 Quotation: Justin Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 44–5.
56 Yank likewise calls attention to the extreme use of irons in cases of punishment, even during the amelioration phase. Yank, Slave Protection and Resistance, 234.
57 Roberts, Slavery and the Enlightenment, 44.
58 Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, ‘Introduction’, in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Scully and Paton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.
59 For more: Helen Bradford, ‘Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and Its Frontier Zones, C. 1806–70’, The Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 351–70; Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family?: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997); Melanie Newton, ‘“New Ideas of Correctness”: Gender, Amelioration and Emancipation in Barbados, 1810s–50s’, Slavery & Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 94–124; Emily S. Burrill, ‘“Wives of Circumstance”: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Late Nineteenth-Century Senegal’, Slavery & Abolition 29, no. 1 (1 March 2008): 49–64.
60 Letter to J. Smith, Acting Chief Secretary to government, 20 September 1831, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, CO 172/29, NA.
61 Louis Larcher is described as a landowner on La Digue in Joël Eymeret, ‘Population et vie quotidienne aux Seychettes [sic] sous le Premier Empire’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 71, no. 262–263 (1984): 8.
62 ‘Affair of Louis Larcher’, CO 172/29.
63 Yank, ‘Slave Protection and Resistance’, 236–7.
64 Punishment registers, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’.
65 For more on Leduc and examples of his paternalism: Auguste Le Duc, Galéga, 1827–1939 … : Mémoires d’Auguste Le Duc, planteur dans l’océan indien, ed. François. Pourcelet (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1994), 68–9.
66 William Madge, letter to the HM Commissioners of inquiry, Port Louis, 1827, in ‘Report on the Slave Trade. Appendix Nos. 1–8’, CO 167/127, NA.
67 As argued by Bradford, ‘Women, Gender and Colonialism’, 360.
68 On women as keeper of secrets: Aisha Finch, ‘“What Looks like a Revolution”: Enslaved Women and the Gendered Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843–1844’, Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 1 (2014): 123. For more on women’s collective actions, Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 73.
69 Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 139.
70 Thomas Boteler, Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1835), 243.
71 Claudius K. Fergus, Revolutionary Emancipation: Slavery and Abolitionism in the British West Indies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 39.
72 Report of 1834, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves, Part 1’, CO 172/35, NA.
73 ‘General Observations’, December 1832, ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, CO 172/31, 1200–1.
74 Roberts, encyclopedia entry.
75 For example, see the work of Richard Allen, particularly ‘Marronage and the Maintenance of Public Order in Mauritius, 1721–1835’, Slavery & Abolition 4, no. 3 (1 December 1983): 214–31 and ‘Maroonage and Its Legacy in Mauritius and in the Colonial Plantation World’, Outre-Mers (Saint-Denis) 89, no. 336 (2002): 131–52.
76 On marronage in the Americas: Gad Heuman, Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World (London: Cass, 1986); Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: University Press, 2014); Shauna J. Sweeney, ‘Market Marronage: Fugitive Women and the Internal Marketing System in Jamaica, 1781–1834’, The William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2019): 197–222; J. Brent Morris, Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022).
77 J. V. Payet, Histoire de l’esclavage à l’Ile Bourbon (Réunion) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990); Marie-Ange Payet, Les femmes dans le marronnage à l’ïle de La Réunion de 1662 à 1848 (Paris: Harmattan, 2013).
78 Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island, 172–4.
79 On the incidence of petit marronage: Allen, ‘Maroonage and Its Legacy’.
80 Yank, ‘Slave Protection and Resistance’, 229.
81 Peter A. Nicholls, Evading Enslavement in the Seychelles: Maroon Trajectories and the Culture of Maroonage in a Sub-Dependency of the Mascarenes 1768–1839 (Réduit: University of Mauritius, Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture, 2016).
82 Letter, from Mr. Clark to Revd. Trew, Seychelles, 18 Aug. 1839, in ‘Correspondence, Original – Secretary of State: Letters from Religious Societies’, CO 318/152, NA.
83 Cf. Edward A. Alpers, ‘Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean World, c.1750–1962’, Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 51–68; Gwyn Campbell and Edward A. Alpers, ‘Slavery, Forced Labour and Resistance in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia’, Slavery & Abolition 25 (August 2004): ix–xxvii.
84 W. F. W. Owen, Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia, and Madagascar: Performed in H. M. Ships Leven and Barracouta, vol. 2 (London: R. Bentley, 1833), 98.
85 Thomas Boteler, Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery to Africa and Arabia, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1835), 242–43.
86 On recent scholarship on this topic, see articles in ‘Forum: Maritime Marronage: Archaeological, Anthropological, and Historical Approaches’, ed. Elena Schneider, Slavery and Abolition 42, no. 3 (2021).
87 Cf. Jeppe Mulich, ‘Maritime Marronage in Colonial Borderlands’, in A World at Sea, ed. Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 134; Linda M. Rupert, ‘Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean’, Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 3 (September 2009): 361–82.
88 ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, December 1832, CO 172/31.
89 Ibid.
90 ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, June 1833, CO 172/32, NA.
91 In 1834: ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves, Part 1’, CO 172/35, NA.
92 Richard B. Allen, ‘A Serious and Alarming Daily Evil: Marronage and Its Legacy in Mauritius and the Colonial Plantation World’, Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 2 (2004): 8.
93 ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves, Part 2’, 1834–5, CO 172/36, NA.
94 Case of Maniol, in ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves’, CO 172/29, NA.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97 ‘Reports of Protectors of Slaves, Part 2’, CO 172/36. See list of vessels suspected of landing enslaved at Praslin: ‘Slaves and Slave Trade, Nos. A.3–A.33’.
98 ‘Slaves and Slave Trade, Nos. A.3–A.33’.
99 He died 8 September 1829 of ‘cranchement de sang’. Case of Latulipe, CO 172/29. Latulipe was owned by Couturout, Francois Savy’s brother-in-law.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Cf. Price, Maroon Societies, 5–6; Nigel Worden, ‘Environment and Slave Resistance’; Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin, 120–21.
103 Peter Mitchell, African Islands: A Comparative Archaeology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 224.
104 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 11.
105 LeDuc provides both Creole and French versions of the proclamation; I have translated the text from French to English. Auguste Le Duc, Galéga, 92–4.
106 For more on life in the Seychelles post-emancipation, see Allen, ‘History of the Seychelles’.
107 Dupon, ‘Aspects de l’agriculture’, 226.
108 Report, Special Justice Anderson, on HMS Leveret, 1838, in ‘Despatches’, CO 167/204.
109 Ibid.
110 Letter, 1859, ‘Despatches’, CO 167/412, NA.
111 Leduc, Galéga, 182–3.
112 ‘Despatches’, October 1838, CO 167/204.
113 ‘Mauritius: ’Further Correspondence Respecting the Condition of Liberated Africans … ’, 1873, CO 882/3/11, NA.
114 ‘Despatches’, August 1859, CO 167/412, NA.
115 Ibid.
116 Laura Jeffery, ‘How a Plantation Became Paradise: Changing Representations of the Homeland among Displaced Chagos Islanders’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 4 (2007): 957–8.
117 A. Jahangeer-Chojoo and D. Bablee, ‘Outer Islands of Mauritius: Historical Overview’, Journal of Mauritian Studies 3, no. 2 (2007): 2–55.
118 ‘Despatches’, August 1859, CO 167/412, NA.
119 Ibid.
120 For more: Jeffery, ‘How a Plantation’, 956.
121 Dupon, ‘Aspects de l’agriculture’, 232–7.
122 Guy Lionnet, The Seychelles (Newton Abbot, UK: David & Charles, 1972), 27.
123 Roger Dussercle, Archipel de Chagos: en mission, Diego, Six Iles, Peros, septembre-novembre 1934 (Port Louis: General Print. & Stationery Cy., 1935).
124 See Eviction from the Chagos Islands: Displacement and Struggle for Identity Against Two World Powers, Eviction from the Chagos Islands, ed. Sandra Evers and Marry Kooy (Boston: Brill, 2011); David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
125 Jahangeer-Chojoo and Bablee, ‘Outer Islands of Mauritius’, 2–55.
126 Natasha Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 7.
127 Ibid., 8.
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Jane Hooper
Jane Hooper is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, 3G1, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. Email: [email protected]