Mauritius Products
Mauritius Sketchbook
Ever since the 18th century, Mauritius has been enriched by inflows of people from Europe, Africa, India and China. The result, on the island today, is a harmonious mix of cultural and religious traditions (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism).
Mauritius Sketchbook
Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius
The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.
Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.
Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius
Blue Mauritius: The Hunt for the World’s Most Valuable Stamps
The dramatic tale of the world’s most sought-after stamp and the passionate story of the first stamp hunters
In September 1847, Mauritius’s very first stamps were produced to send out admission cards to a costume ball. No one at the party would have guessed that the envelopes bearing these stamps would one day be worth more than a million dollars each.
When a two-pence “Blue Mauritius†surfaced on the fledgling French stamp collecting market in 1865, collectors were driven to bag the stamps as if they were big game. Then in 1903, a perfect specimen was discovered in a childhood album; the Prince of Wales bought the stamp at auction, and the Blue Mauritius gained super-star status. Exhilarating and expansive, Blue Mauritius tells the story of the most coveted and valuable stamps in history as they traveled around the globe and entered the hearts and imaginations of collectors everywhere.
Blue Mauritius: The Hunt for the World’s Most Valuable Stamps