Previous studies of British plantation colonies, including the island of Mauritius in the south-western Indian Ocean, have paid little attention to the economic dimensions of the transition from slave to free labour that occurred during the early nineteenth century. Reports by Mauritian colonial officials make it possible to reconstruct the transformation of the island's economy between 1810 and 1860 from one oriented towards trade and commerce to one dominated by the production of sugar for the British imperial market. This transformation occurred in the midst of a series of interconnected developments that included an illegal trade in slaves between 1811 and circa 1827, changes in imperial tariff policy in 1825, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, the advent of the modern system of indentured labour in 1834 and the suspension of Indian emigration to the island between 1838 and 1842. The importance of domestically generated and controlled capital in shaping the Mauritian economy during this period highlights the need to examine the extent to which and the ways in which domestic capital framed the contours of social and economic life elsewhere in the nineteenth-century colonial plantation world.
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