Creating the Creole Island

Name: Creating the Creole Island
Price: 92.99 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9780822333999

Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Megan Vaughan

$92.99

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We will update you on expected arrival time to us. If this delay is too long, please let us know within 2 business days and we can give you options regarding cancelling or adjusting your order. More details on cancelling your order can be found in our Terms of Trade.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Duke University Press
01 February 2005

Regional studies; General & world history; African history; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; Physical anthropology & ethnography

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.

Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

By: Megan Vaughan
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 549g
ISBN: 9780822333999
ISBN 10: 0822333996
Pages: 360
Publication Date: 01 February 2005
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments ix Preface xi 1. In the Beginning 1 2. Engineering a Colony, 1735–1767 33 3. Enlightenment Colonialism and Its Limits, 1767–1789 56 4. Roots and Routes: Ethnicity without Origins 91 5. A Baby in the Salt Pans: Mothering Slavery 123 6. Love in the Torrid Zone 152 7. Reputation, Recognition, and Race 178 8. Speaking Slavery: Language and Loss 202 9. Métissage and Revolution 229 10. Sugar and Abolition 253 Notes 277 Works Cited 305 Index 329

Megan Vaughan is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge University. She is the author of several books including Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (with Henrietta L. Moore) and Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness.

Reviews for Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Creating the Creole Island is a riveting portrait of a slave-owning society. Megan Vaughan's elegant narrative combines rich and ground-breaking historical analysis with acute theorizing of human subjectivity. It will be of compelling interest to anyone concerned with the emergence of our modern 'creole' world. -Michael Lambek, author of The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar Megan Vaughan has given us a vivid portrait of how a society was formed from the mixture of peoples and languages of eighteenth-century Mauritius. Slaves take the initiative here-one of the many new insights that Creating the Creole Island brings to history, literature, and anthropology. And the book is a wonderful read besides. -Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives Creating the Creole Island offers an exciting and innovative approach to slave history in the eighteenth century. It is an extremely valuable resource for scholars working on slave histories from a variety of disciplinary angles. Its primary objective of historicizing the process of 'creolisation' contributes an invaluable dimension to current debates on ethnicity and identity in postcolonial Mauritius. -- Srilata Ravi Postcolonial Studies [P]owerful set of arguments about what it means to be a slave... [A] compellingly detailed tale... This is an important book of huge interest to Mauritian specialists and historians of the slave trade and slavery elsewhere, as well as scholars interested in questions of gender and identity. -- Clare Anderson American Anthropologist