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Indian Immigrants and the Legacy of Marronage: Illegal Absence, Desertion and Vagrancy on Mauritius, 1835–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Richard B. Allen
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Extract

Even before the abolition of slavery on 1 February 1835, planters on Mauritius had begun to look for free agricultural labourers to work their estates. By the early 1830s, it had become apparent that the local slave population was inadequate to meet the labour needs of the colony's rapidly expanding sugar industry, and the long-term availability of this soon-to-be emancipated work force was also increasingly open to question as the decade progressed. The Act of Abolition promised owners the services of their former slaves, now transformed into ‘apprentices’, as agricultural labourers, but only for a period of six years. Some planters no doubt suspected that the apprenticeship system might come to an end earlier than scheduled, as indeed was to happen in 1839. Others had good reason to suspect that many, if not most, of their apprentices would leave the plantations upon their final emancipation, as indeed they subsequently did. Faced with these realities, Mauritian planters dispatched their agents as far afield as China, Singapore, Ethiopia and Madagascar to search out supplies of inexpensive labour. Their gaze returned continually, however, to the relative close and seemingly inexhaustible manpower of India.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 98 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1997

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References

Notes

1 According to one local magistrate, of the 9,000 apprentices who purchased their freedom before the apprenticeship system came to an end on 31 March 1839, not one ‘returned to the cultivation of land’. C. Anderson to Lord John Russell, 1–5–1840, PP 1840 XXXVII [331] 194–196.

2 On Indian immigration to Mauritius and other British colonies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see: Kondapi, C., Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (New Delhi 1951)Google Scholar; Cumpston, I.M., Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834–1854 (London 1953)Google Scholar; Saha, Panchanan, Emigration of Indian Labour, 1834–1900 (Delhi 1970)Google Scholar; Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London 1974)Google Scholar; Pineo, Huguette Ly-Tio-Fane, Lured Away: The Life History of Indian Cane Workers in Mauritius (Moka 1984)Google Scholar; Lai, Walton Look, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore and London 1993)Google Scholar; Laurence, K.O., A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875–1917 (New York 1994).Google Scholar

3 Tinker's characterisation of Indian immigration in these terms (A New System of Slavery, 19) has been seconded by Hazareesingh, K., History of Indians in Mauritius (London and Basingstoke 1975) 20Google Scholar ff; Tayal, Maureen, ‘Indian Indentured Labour in Natal, 1890–1911’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 14 (1977) 519–547CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mannick, A.R., Mauritius: The Development of a Plural Society (Nottingham 1979) 45Google Scholar; Jain, Ravindra K., ‘South Indian Labour in Malaya, 1840–1920: Asylum, Stability and Involution’ in: Saunders, Kay ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834–1920 (London and Canberra 1984) 158–182Google Scholar; M.D. North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture: Forced Labour in the Political Economy of Mauritius, 1834–1867’ in: Saunders ed., Indentured Labour, 78–125. The tendency to liken indentured labour to slavery has been challenged recently by Beechert, Edward D., ‘Reflections’ in: Lai, Brij V., Munro, Doug and Beechert, Edward D. eds, Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation (Honolulu 1993) 319Google Scholar, and Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874(Oxford University Press, forthcoming) chapter 1.

4 Contemporary accounts of early immigrant living and working conditions are to be found in the reports of the Mauritian-based ‘Committees of Inquiry on the State and Condition of the Indian Labourers Employed in the Mauritius’ (PP 1840 XXXVII [58] 18–35, 45–68, and PP 1840 XXXVII [331] 12–94, 107–183) and a Calcutta-based commission of inquiry (PP 1841 XVI [45] 4–12).

5 Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius (hereafter 1872 Royal Commission) para. 3180. PP 1875 XXXIV.

6 See, for example: Barnwell, P.J. and Toussaint, A., A Short History of Mauritius (London 1949)Google Scholar; Toussaint, Auguste, Histoire des iles Mascareignes (Paris 1972); Hazareesingh, History of Indians, North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture'.Google Scholar

7 Gillion, K.L., Fiji's Indian Migrants (Melbourne 1962)Google Scholar; Mayer, Adrian C., Indians in Fiji (London 1963)Google Scholar; Jain, Ravindra K., South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya (New Haven and London 1970)Google Scholar; Shlomowitz, Ralph, ‘Markets for Indentured and Time-expired Melanesian Labour in Queensland, 1863–1906’, Journal of Pacific History 16 (1981) 70–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Melanesian Labor and the Development of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1863–1906’, Research in Economic History 7 (1982) 327–361Google Scholar; Graves, Adrian, ‘Truck and Gifts: Melanesian Immigrants and the Trade Box System in Colonial Queensland’, Past and Present 101 (1983) 87–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Toyal, ‘Indian Indentured Labour in Natal’; Breman, Jan, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plan lotion Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (Delhi 1989).Google Scholar

8 See the articles in: Lai, Munro and Beechert eds, Plantation Workers, especially Doug Munro, “Patterns of Resistance and Accommodation’, 1–43.

9 Bernardin de St. Pierre, J.H., Voyage à lĩle de France part 2 (Paris 1834) 120–121Google Scholar;, and part 2, 170; Baron d'Unienville, Statistiques de lĩle Maurice et ses dépendances suivie d'une notice historique sur cette colonie et d'un essai sur lĩle de Madagascar, part 1 (Second edition, Maurice 1885–1886) 256.

10 Reported by the 1872 Royal Commission, para. 1960.

11 1872 Royal Commission, para. 664.

12 Lamusse, Roland, ‘The Economic Development of the Mauritius Sugar Industry III: The Sources of Capital and System of Crop Finance’, Revue agricole et sucrière de lĩle Maurice 43 (1964) 354–372.Google Scholar

13 Second Report of the Select Committee on Sugar and Coffee Planting: Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix, para. 3755. PP 1847–1848 XXIII [137].

14 AIR 1860, para. 53.

15 1872 Royal Commission, 10 (para. 17).

16 Colony of Mauritius, Report of the Prison Committee on the Prison Establishment, 1857.

17 Compiled from employers’ replies to the Mauritian-based Committee of Inquiry (see n. 4). PP 1840 XXXVII [58] 18–35, 45–68, and PP 1840 XXXVII [331] 12–94, 107–183.

18 1872 Royal Commission, para. 236.

19 Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers, Table 6.4.

20 Mauritius, Report of the Prison Committee, Appendix B.

21 By way of comparison, illegal absence and desertion accounted for 53.3 per cent of all complaints against Indian indentured labourers in Fiji between 1885 and 1906 (Brij V. Lai, ‘“Nonresistance” on Fiji Plantations; The Fiji Indian Experience, 1879–1920’ in: Lai, Munro and Beechert eds, Plantation Workers, 209).

22 On marronage rates on early nineteenth-century Mauritius, see: Allen, Richard B., ‘Marronage and the Maintenance of Public Order in Mauritius, 1721–1835’, Slavery and Abolition 4 (1983) 219. Desertion and absenteeism accounted for 14.8 per cent of all charges lodged against Melanesian labourers in Queensland's Mackay District between 1871–1907. Give Moore, ‘The Counterculture of Survival: Melanesians in the Mackay District of Queensland, 1865–1906’ in: Lai, Munro and Beechert eds, Plantation Workers, 80–81. In 1889–1890, more than sixteen per cent of the contract labourers in Samoa were runaways. Doug Munro and Stewart Firth, ‘Sarnoan Plantations: The Gilbertese Labourers’ Experience, 1867–1896’ in: Lai, Munro and Beechert eds, Plantation Workers, 117. The number of such runaways fluctuated from 16.6 to 12.6 per cent between 1891 and 1894, and dropped to approximately four per cent a year between 1895 and 1898.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 AIR 1862: PP XXXV, Appendix G (No. 44); 1872 Royal Commission, para. 772.

24 1872 Royal Commission, para. 704.

25 Based on the estate reports in PP 1875 XXXV, Appendix B.

26 AIR 1873, para. 41.

27 AIR 1881, para. 40.

28 AIR 1866, para. 44.

29 AIR 1869, para. 55. See also: Pike, Nicholas, Sub-tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapleryx (New York 1873) 474.Google Scholar

30 1872 Royal Commission, paras 879–882.

31 1872 Royal Commission, para. 883.

32 AIR 1860, para. 49.

33 1872 Royal Commission, paras 2934–2947.

34 Allen, Richard B., ‘The Slender, Sweet Thread: Sugar, Capital and Dependency in Mauritius, 1860–1936’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 16 (1987) 177–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Colony of Mauritius, Blue Book for 188, XI, X4.

36 See Beechert and Carter (n. 3).

37 In particular, see the essays by Dough Munro, Edward Beechert and Michael J. Gonzales in: Lai, Munro and Beechert eds, Plantation Systems.