Madeleine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Peabody
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Debt Bondage ◽  
French Woman ◽  
The Indian Ocean

During Furcy’s lawsuit more than half a century after the fact, two receipts were offered as proof that his mother, Madeleine, had been sold as a child slave by Portuguese traders in the French trading center at Chandernagor in Bengal, India, in the 1760s. Although these receipts may be forgeries, they offer plausible details consistent with the prevalence of children in the Indian Ocean slave trade in the eighteenth century. Frequent famines caused parents to pawn their children into debt bondage. European traders took slaves, including kidnapped children, from the Indian subcontinent to overseas colonies, thus separating families permanently. Madeleine’s mistress, Anne Despense de la Loge, was an unusual single French woman living in Chandernagor, who may have been part of an informal religious community.

The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Set Up

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

Shipped but Not Sold

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Um
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
The West ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Indian Ocean

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, Yemen hosted a lively community of merchants that came to the southern Arabian Peninsula from the east and the west, seeking, among other products, coffee, at a time when this new social habit was on the rise. Shipped but not Sold argues that many of the diverse goods that these merchants carried, bought, and sold at the port, also played ceremonial, social, and utilitarian roles in this intensely commercial society that was oriented toward the Indian Ocean. Including sumptuous foreign textiles and robes, Arabian horses, porcelain vessels, spices, aromatics, and Yemeni coffee, these items were offered, displayed, exchanged, consumed, or utilized by major merchants in a number of socially exclusive practices that affirmed their identity and status, but also sustained the livelihood of their business ventures. These traders invested these objects with layers of social meaning through a number of repetitive ceremonial exercises and observances, in addition to their everyday protocols of the trade. This study looks at what happened to these local and imported commodities that were diverted from the marketplace to be used for a set of directives that were seemingly quite non-transactional.

Sovereignty in a Minor Key

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty ◽  
A Minor ◽  
State Form

Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.

The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prasannan Parthasarathi ◽  
Giorgio Riello
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

France and its Empire in the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Marvin ◽  
Blake Smith
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
French Military ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The 19Th Century

France was a latecomer to the Indian Ocean among European powers. After some tentative and short-lived initiatives by private merchants, the first French East India Company was founded in 1664 by a French monarchy eager to catch up with England and the Netherlands, which had founded companies of their own at the beginning of the 17th century. Competing with the English and Dutch to replace the Portuguese as the preeminent European power in the Indian Ocean, France gradually established a network of colonial holdings that included the island colonies of the Mascarenes in the southwestern Indian Ocean (Réunion and Mauritius) as well as a network of trading posts along the shores of the Indian subcontinent. Plans to expand this colonial empire to Madagascar, however, met with repeated failure. Established as a regional power by the middle of the 18th century, France would be reduced by the century’s end to the role of a spectator of Britain’s rising hegemony. Nevertheless, France held on to some of its Indian Ocean territories, including Réunion and Pondicherry in South Asia. These outposts of French imperialism would inspire nostalgia, regret, and new colonial ambitions among metropolitan observers, and they would become sites of cultural hybridity and exchange. Indeed, while France’s empire in the Indian Ocean is often overshadowed by the emergence of British dominance in the 19th century, or by the intensity of French investment in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean was a key area of French military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural interest in the 17th and 18th centuries, and beyond.

The Promises and Perils of Subjecthood and Jurisdiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Weiss Muller
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Government ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Indian Ocean

Chapter 5 moves to the Indian Ocean and centers on the vibrant trading community of Calcutta. The East India Company’s assumption of the diwani for Bengal in 1765 and its accelerating territorial expansion in the Indian subcontinent provoked concerns about subject status and jurisdiction over those residing in Company territories. These concerns were never fully resolved by the 1773 Regulating Act and were intimately connected to struggles over authority between the British government and the East India Company. This chapter identifies the range of individuals actually subject to the Supreme Court of Judicature, founded in 1774, at the same time as it focuses on the political and jurisdictional repercussions of subject status. It underlines why the judiciary became a central site for negotiations over subjecthood and how subject status became a malleable tool in the hands of judges.

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