(Source: Oxford University Press)
Last year,
Oxford University Press published a book which deals with the history of a
slave’s quest to attain his freedom in court in France’s 18th-19th
Indian Ocean colonies.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Madeleine's
Children uncovers a multigenerational saga of
an enslaved family in India and two islands, Réunion and Mauritius, in the
eastern empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. A tale of legal intrigue, it reveals the lives and secret relationships
between slaves and free people that have remained obscure for two centuries.
As a child,
Madeleine was pawned by her impoverished family and became the slave of a
French woman in Bengal. She accompanied her mistress to France as a teenager, but
she did not challenge her enslavement there on the basis of France's Free Soil
principle, a consideration that did not come to light until future lawyers
investigated her story. In France, a new master and mistress purchased her,
despite laws prohibiting the sale of slaves within the kingdom. The couple
transported Madeleine across the ocean to their plantation in the Indian Ocean
colonies, where she eventually gave birth to three children: Maurice,
Constance, and Furcy. One died a slave and two eventually became free, but
under very different circumstances. On 21 November 1817, Furcy exited the gates
of his master's mansion and declared himself a free man. The lawsuit waged by
Furcy to challenge his wrongful enslavement ultimately brought him before the
Royal Court of Paris, despite the extreme measures that his putative master,
Joseph Lory, deployed to retain him as his slave.
A meticulous
work of archival detection, Madeleine's Children investigates
the cunning, clandestine, and brutal strategies that masters devised to keep
slaves under their control-and paints a vivid picture of the unique and
evolving meanings of slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sue Peabody is Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and History
at Washington State University Vancouver. She is the author of "There
Are No Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the
Ancien Regime (OUP, 1996) and the co-editor of The Color of
Liberty: Histories of Race in France and Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the
Atlantic World.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Madeleine: A
Child Slave in Pre-Colonial India
2. Crossings:
Oceans, Islands, and Free Soil
3. Madeleine's
Children: Family Secrets
4. The
Revolution: Emancipation without Freedom
5. The Limits of
Law: Madeleine's Betrayal
6. A Perfect
Storm
7. Incendiary
Arguments, Justice Suspended
8. English
Liberties
9. Freedom
Papers Hidden in His Shoe
10. Damages and
Interest
Afterword
Appendices
Notes
Index
More information
with the publisher
No comments:
Post a Comment