The Colonial Enlightenment and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Abstract The fall of the Compagnie des Indes after the Seven Years’ War prompted a crown takeover of the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. The new royal administration in Ile de France (modern Mauritius) turned to natural and economic science to increase the island's productivity and improve the condition of enslaved people. However, a network of colonists and ex-Company men, represented by the Mauritian-born landholder Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny, embedded themselves in the apparatus of enlightened reforms. In the absence of an established plantation system on the island, they exploited the persistence of Company-style patrimonialism to obtain public subsidies for their investments in slavery. Cossigny framed the horticultural, commercial, ethnographic, and scientific research he conducted as public service. His critics denounced it as rent seeking. Lobbying for Mascarene slaveholders in Paris during the Revolution convinced Cossigny that the Enlightenment could be more than an extension of economic claims making; it could be mobilized to reinvent Atlantic slavery in the Indian Ocean. An Enlightenment born of colonialism on the periphery of the plantation complex thus flowed into an emerging antiabolitionist movement.