A book about the past and present Pacific Islands, wide-ranging in time and space spanning the centuries from the first settlement of the islands until the present day.

A book about the past and present Pacific Islands, wide-ranging in time and space spanning the centuries from the first settlement of the islands until the present day.

When Britain seized the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Bourbon and the later-settled satellite of Seychelles (collectively known as the Mascareignes) during the Napoleonic War, after outlawing the slave trade itself, it became a question whether the British anti-slave-trade statutes should be applied in the former French island. Enduring questions arose as to whether the new British administrators of Mauritius and Seychelles, who often became slave and plantation owners themselves, winked at the illegal slave trade and whether they were permitted to do so by the British government. This book is an in-depth study of slave plantations, law courts, and the illegal slave trade in the Southwest Indian Ocean.

The Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Bourbon and their satellite colony of Seychelles, collectively known as the Mascareignes, were all plantation colonies, as well as significant naval bases from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Scarr uses Mauritian, British and French archival sources to examine both the situation of slaves, as painted by court records in particular, and the psychology of both slave traders and slave owners..

A comprehensive history of the Seychelles, this volume traces its periods of colonisation by France and Britain, the immobile years of the twentieth century, the granting of independence in 1976, and the social changes precipitated by tourism in the late-1990s.