SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis examines the transition from slavery to indenture in the French plantation islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean and Réunion in the Indian Ocean. It considers how the lived experience of Indian indentured workers was shaped by racial ideologies and structures, and how these migrant communities in turn reshaped the societies of the three islands in the nineteenth century. Contrasts and comparisons are made between, on the one hand, Guadeloupe and Martinique, where before the first indentured workers arrived in the 1850s no Indians had ever set foot, and, on the other hand, Réunion, where a history of free and forced migration from India predated France’s abolition of slavery in 1848. Chapter One examines French images of enslaved Indians in the Indian Ocean during the advent of Enlightenment racial theories and how race came to determine the parameters of freedom and enslavement in Réunion. Chapter Two charts the path to abolition in the French Caribbean, examining the legislation policing interactions between different racial groups in the eighteenth century and the social upheaval that grew as abolitionism and resistance by enslaved groups mounted in the first half of the nineteenth. Chapter Three turns to India, addressing how and why French planters and officials began to source labour from the subcontinent and what led Indian men and women to become indentured migrants. Chapter Four explores migrants’ journeys, which marked the beginning of their interaction with agents of the French colonial empire and with each other. Chapter Five returns to Réunion, considering how the regime of indenture served to reverse previous stereotypes of enslaved Indians and how the established Indian presence facilitated social mobility within the expanded migrant community and the assertion of their cultural imprint onto the island. Chapter Six examines how both French colonial administrations and formerly enslaved communities in the Caribbean perceived Indians and how in turn the migrants forged new forms of culture and collective identity.