Transiting Imperial Boundaries: Slavery and Freedom in France's Indian Ocean Colonies

Sue Peabody uses the life history of an enslaved family in France’s Indian Ocean empire as the lens through which to investigate wider changes in the meanings of slavery and freedom from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Furcy's mother's origins and enslavement in Chandernagor (Bengal), and transit to France and Ile Bourbon (1759-1812) formed the basis of his subsequent lawsuits for freedom in the early nineteenth century. Furcy's multiple sites of "liberation," in Lorient (via his mother’s arrival in 1768), Ile Bourbon (1817-1818), in British Mauritius (1820s), in Paris (1835-1843) and in La Réunion upon general emancipation in 1848 allow for the examination of how diverse juridical contexts produced the categories of slavery and freedom as well as insight into what these relationships meant "on the ground," in aspirational and/or real terms, through testimony by Furcy, his sister, and Furcy's extant letters.