Creolizing Cultivation: Missionary Estates and Plantation Agriculture in the 18th-Century French Indian Ocean World

This paper examines the overlooked role of Catholic missionary estates in shaping plantation agriculture in France’s western Indian Ocean colonies. Bourbon (Réunion) and Isle de France (Mauritius), jointly administered by the French East India Company and, after 1767, the French Crown, functioned as crucial waypoints between the Atlantic world and Asia. From the early eighteenth century, the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists) was contracted to provide for the spiritual needs of a growing settler population and was granted land and enslaved laborers for financial support. This arrangement has received little attention from historians, who have largely focused on the islands’ cash crop plantations (coffee, sugar, cotton, and vanilla), a sector in which the missionaries—officially barred from commerce—had limited involvement. However, missionary-run estates played an outsized role in developing subsistence agriculture on the islands (grains, vegetables, manioc, watercress, and cattle raising), contributing to their important provisioning trade. As Dorit Brixius and Megan Vaughan have argued of this region, enslaved people from East Africa, Madagascar, and South Asia played key roles in introducing knowledge about Indian Ocean plants and animal husbandry traditions to the missionaries. This paper presents these details, drawn from correspondence between the clergy and their superiors in Paris, as well as documentation from the confiscation of Church properties during the French Revolution. It also maps, for the first time, the locations of the Lazarists’ estates within the highly variable topographies and climates of Réunion and Mauritius, shedding light on their environmental impact.