In this volume, The Hassam Toorawa Trust brings together six thought-provoking essays by scholars of Mauritius and other Indian Ocean islands. Together, they explore the experiences of islanders past and present, of placement and displacement, of locals and globals. The volume opens with a Foreword by Megan Vaughan (King's College Cambridge), situating the essays in the broader context of the historical processes in the Indian Ocean. Ned Alpers (University of California, Los Angeles) places the islands of the Western Indian Ocean in the wider African context. Himanshu Prabha Ray (Jawaharlal Nehru University) discusses ancient and medieval seafaring in the Indian Ocean. Shawkat Toorawa (Cornell University) muses on the Indian Ocean location of the medieval Waqwaq islands. Paul van der Velde (International Institute for Asian Studies) reflects on Dutch traveler Jacob Haafner's late eighteenth century description of his visit to Mauritius. Larry Bowman (University of Connecticut) describes the nineteenth century visit of mariner Joshua Slocum to Rodrigues and Mauritius. Jocelyn Chan Low (University of Mauritius) puts the plight of the Chagos Islanders (Ilois) into the context of Cold War realpolitik and Mauritius independence.

This book examines savagery and the savage as dynamic components of colonialism in South Asia. Focusing on the colonial discourses of race, criminality, civilization, and savagery, it illuminates and historicizes the processes by which the discourse of savagery was expressed in the Andamans, British India, Britain and the wider empire.

The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology by Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, first published in 1922, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

Table of contents

*Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading There is no record of Marco Polo ever visiting the Andaman Islands, so his brief description of the islanders must have been drawn from a secondary source. They were, he wrote, "a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth like those of dogs. They are very cruel, and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon." Most subsequent travelers and travelogues have tended to agree, although in an age of inclusion and diversity, the modern understanding and appreciation of the indigenous Andamanese is somewhat more sympathetic. Nonetheless, that one common theme has persisted, in particular in the many colonial-era chronicles, which were all written at a time when Darwin and his contemporaries were rationalizing evolution, and evolutionary divergence. How could it be, they ask, that a small pocket of the human race could be content to linger so far behind in the journey of human development? The Andaman and Nicobar Islands comprise a tiny archipelago of some 200 islands in the Indian Ocean. They are located in a seemingly insignificant spot in the Bay of Bengal, comprising a combined area of only 3,500 square miles, but the islands are a tropical idyll, populated by dark Indians drawn mainly from the east coast, with a curious aboriginal people who appear more African than Asian. The islands have been within sight of international shipping routes since the very birth of ocean travel, and yet, until the arrival of the great European trading enterprises, the archipelago remained virtually unvisited, and absolutely unsettled by any other than its indigenous inhabitants. The Sentinelese: The History of the Uncontacted People on North Sentinel Island profiles the indigenous people, famous attempts to contact them, and what's known and unknown about them. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Sentinelese like never before.

The Chagos islanders were forcibly uprooted from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean between 1965 and 1973. This is the first book to compare the experiences of displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius with the experiences of those Chagossians who have moved to the UK since 2002. It thus provides a unique ethnographic comparative study of forced displacement and onward migration within the living memory of one community. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Mauritius and Crawley (West Sussex), the six chapters explore Chagossians’ challenging lives in Mauritius, the mobilisation of the community, reformulations of the homeland, the politics of culture in exile, onward migration to Crawley, and attempts to make a home in successive locations. Jeffery illuminates how displaced people romanticise their homeland through an exploration of changing representations of the Chagos Archipelago in song lyrics. Offering further ethnographic insights into the politics of culture, she shows how Chagossians in exile engage with contrasting conceptions of culture ranging from expectations of continuity and authenticity to enactments of change, loss and revival. The book will appeal particularly to social scientists specialising in the fields of migration studies, the anthropology of displacement, political and legal anthropology, African studies, Indian Ocean studies, and the anthropology of Britain, as well as to readers interested in the Chagossian case study.

David Vine recounts how the British & US governments created the Diego Garcia base, making the native Chagossians homeless in the process. He details the strategic significance of this remote location & also describes recent efforts by the exiles to regain their territory.

Islanders and Empire examines the role smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. With a rare focus on local peoples and communities, the book analyzes how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. By co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island, residents could take advantage of, and even dominate, the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they altered the course of the European inter-imperial struggles in the Caribbean by limiting, redirecting, or suppressing the Spanish crown's policies, thus taking control of their destinies and that of their neighbors in Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish empire in the region.

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.