151. Marie Rozette and her world: class, ethnicity, gender, and race in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mauritius.
- Author
-
Allen RB
- Subjects
- History, 18th Century, History, 19th Century, Humans, Mauritius ethnology, Population Groups education, Population Groups ethnology, Population Groups history, Population Groups legislation & jurisprudence, Population Groups psychology, Socioeconomic Factors history, Anthropology, Cultural education, Anthropology, Cultural history, Ethnicity education, Ethnicity ethnology, Ethnicity history, Ethnicity legislation & jurisprudence, Ethnicity psychology, Gender Identity, Race Relations history, Race Relations legislation & jurisprudence, Race Relations psychology, Social Class history, Women education, Women history, Women psychology
- Abstract
In 1790, Marie Rozette, a freedwoman of Indian origin on Mauritius, executed a series of notarial acts which revealed that she possessed a small fortune in cash assets as well as slaves and substantial landed property in one of the island’s rural districts. The life of this former slave between 1776, when she first appears in the archival record, and her death in 1804 provides a vantage point from which to gain a subaltern perspective on aspects of Mascarene social and economic history, as well as developments in the wider Indian Ocean world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Marie Rozette’s life history challenges the notion that free persons of color in Mauritius were little more than an “unappropriated” people, and invites us to consider how supposedly marginalized individuals were able to cross various socio-economic and cultural boundaries. More specifically, her life affords an opportunity to consider the ways in which class, ethnicity, and gender, as well as race, interacted to create a distinctive Creole society in Mauritius, the nature and dynamics of which bear directly on our knowledge and understanding of the free colored experience elsewhere in the European colonial slave plantation world.
- Published
- 2011
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