This is the engrossing story of Mauritius, the exotic Indian Ocean island port of call at the heart of the fabled "Spice Route". Although first discovered and visited by the Arabs and the Portuguese, and subsequently colonised by the Dutch, the French and the English, it is the French influence that is most keenly felt in Mauritius today, thanks to France's nearly century-long rule over Mauritius from 1715 to 1810. Combining rich historical detail, rare archival documents, antique lithographs paintings, and portraits, and fascinating stories of well-known figures of the period - like the founder of the colony Governor Mahé de La Bourdonnais, the explorer and botanist Pierre Poivre, and the celebrated explorer Jean- François de Lapérouse - Mauritius on the Spice Route is an invitation to step back in time and discover the fascinating history of this exotic paradise.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of religious traditions. At the core of Eisenlohr’s concern is the interplay of voice, media, affect, and listeners’ religious experiences. Sounding Islam sheds new light on a key dimension of religion, the sonic incitement of sensations that are often difficult to translate into language.

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.

The Mascarene islands in the southern Indian Ocean - Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues - were once home to an extraordinary range of birds and reptiles. Evolving on these isolated volcanic islands in the absence of mammalian predators or competitors, the land was dominated by giant tortoises, parrots, skinks and geckos, burrowing boas, flightless rails & herons, and of course (in Mauritius) the Dodo. Uninhabited and only discovered in the 1500s, colonisation by European settlers in the 1600s led to dramatic changes in the ecology of the islands; the birds and tortoises were slaughtered indiscriminately while introduced rats, cats, pigs and monkeys destroyed their eggs, the once-extensive forests logged, and invasive introduced plants from all over the tropics devastated the ecosystem. The now-familiar icon of extinction, the Dodo, was gone from Mauritius within 50 years of human settlement, and over the next 150 years many of the Mascarenes' other native vertebrates followed suit. The product of over 30 years research by Anthony Cheke, Lost Land of the Dodo provides a comprehensive yet hugely enjoyable account of the story of the islands' changing ecology, interspersed with human stories, the islands' biogeographical anomalies, and much else. Many French publications, old and new, especially for Réunion, are discussed and referenced in English for the first time. The book is richly illustrated with maps and contemporary illustrations of the animals and their environment, many of which have rarely been reprinted before. Illustrated box texts look in detail at each extinct vertebrate species, while Julian Hume's superb colour plates bring many of the extinct birds to life. Lost Land of the Dodo provides the definitive account of this tragic yet remarkable fauna, and is a must-read for anyone interested in islands, their ecology and the history of our relationship with the world around us.

By extending their voyages to all oceans from the 1760s onward, whaling vessels from North America and Europe spanned a novel net of hunting grounds, maritime routes, supply posts, and transport chains across the globe. For obtaining provisions, cutting firewood, recruiting additional men, and transshipping whale products, these highly mobile hunters regularly frequented coastal places and islands along their routes, which were largely determined by the migratory movements of their prey. American-style pelagic whaling thus constituted a significant, though often overlooked factor in connecting people and places between distant world regions during the long nineteenth century. Focusing on Africa, this book investigates side-effects resulting from stopovers by whalers for littoral societies on the economic, social, political, and cultural level. For this purpose it draws on eight local case studies, four from Africa’s west coast and four from its east coast. In the overall picture, the book shows a broad range of effects and side-effects of different forms and strengths, which it figures as a "grey undercurrent" of global history.

In this wide-ranging social and economic history of the island of Mauritius, from French colonization in 1721 to the beginnings of modern political life in the colony in the mid-1930s, Richard Allen brings out the importance of domestic capital formation, particularly in the sugar industry. He describes the changing relationship between different elements in the society - slave, free and maroon, and East Indian indentured populations - and shows how these were conditioned by demographic changes, world markets and local institutions. Based on thorough archival research, and thoroughly attuned to contemporary debates, this 1999 book will bring the Mauritian case to the attention of scholars engaged in the comparative study of slavery and plantation systems.