Insular Hinterlands and Continental Entrepôts? Judicial Migration and the Legal Spatial Formation of the French Indian Ocean

The late eighteenth century scientist and traveler Alexis Rochon worried that Madagascar and the Mascarenes were too isolated to be useful to French imperial and commercial projects in the Indian Ocean, but he ultimately concluded that with the right investment of resources Île de France (now Mauritius) could form “the arsenal of our forces and the entrepôt of our commerce.” Through the migration of court users, from sailors to traders, to Île de France courtrooms, it also became a judicial entrepôt that linked continental entrepôts like Pondichéry and insular hinterlands like the Île Bourbon and Madagascar. This paper examines the spatial dynamics of the Mascarene Islands within the early modern Indian Ocean system through the lens of legal practices conducted there in French imperial law courts. Though Malick Ghachem has identified an “itinerant, emergency form of justice, whereby magistrates would travel immediately to a plantation” to examine criminal cases for the eighteenth-century French Atlantic, the more transitory and commerce- (rather than agriculture-) based French Indian Ocean system depended upon judicial as well as trading entrepôts to hear legal matters brought from around the oceanic littoral, forming a unique network of court participants. How did subjects, especially French subjects, navigate an imperial geography that spanned, but did not encompass, the Indian Ocean? What kinds of parameters, spatial and legal, restricted and/or their movement? This paper implements insights from scholarship on legal geography and courtroom spaces (Braverman et al., Sibley and Ewick), legal pluralism (Benton, Stern), and migration (Games, Amrith) to demonstrate how an archipelago of justice enabled subjects to navigate and reshape France’s global legal regime during an era of growth and rapid change from 1680 to 1780.