Bourbon Island Creoles: Race and Revolution in the French Indian Ocean Colony of Réunion, 1767-1803
Embargo until
2022-08-01
Date
2018-07-20
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This dissertation traces the shifting politics of métissage (race-mixing) on Bourbon Island (today La Réunion), a French slave colony in the southwest Indian Ocean. Mining parish registers, censuses, and untapped police records, it uncovers the formal liaisons and everyday intimacies that blurred the lines between “black” and “white,” slave and free in eighteenth-century Bourbon. There, colonial officials tolerated intermarriage between European men and women of non-European heritage (mostly Malagasy and South Asian) who entered the “white” population by dint of such unions. Decision-makers in the metropole also accepted this capacious understanding of “whiteness” despite official imperial policies that aimed to harden the boundary between whites and nonwhites. The dissertation’s final chapters explore how Bourbon society responded to debates over the relationship between race and citizenship during the tumultuous period of the French and Haitian Revolutions, finding that despite advances toward racial equality made in other colonies, local authorities on Bourbon not only illegally maintained slavery but also pursued stricter racial segregation, reversing Old Regime precedents. Telling the story of race in the first French colonial empire from the perspective of its understudied colony of Bourbon Island reveals the surprising influence of Indian Ocean spaces on policy-making in Versailles and Paris and raises important questions about region-specific logics of race and the factors that shaped them, including land ownership and inheritance patterns, gender roles, and myths about the circumstances of colonial settlement.
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Keywords
colonialism, French empire, race, race mixing, slavery, French Revolution, Age of Revolution, Indian Ocean, Réunion, miscegenation