This paper will seek to combine historical considerations with structural analysis. More concretely, it retraces the structural stages of Mauritius, a deep-water island in the western half of the Indian Ocean, from around 1600 to the present.

To quote Clifford Geertz, the small island of Mauritius has been both a “model of” and a “model for” some significant economic and social-cultural developments that have taken place in the wider Indian Ocean world during the colonial and post-colonial periods. First and foremost, there is the once innovative establishment on Mauritius of a plantation economy based on “indentured labour”, which replaced slavery during the nineteenth century, while at present the geographically seemingly isolated island has made significant steps in developing into post-colonial multicultural “rainbow society”. Though Mauritius is only a “small island” seemingly lost in a large ocean, its history and development nonetheless invites one to highlight some of the “larger issues” connected to ports in the Indian Ocean world at large, both then and now.

More concretely, the paper will retrace the various structural stages through which Mauritius has passed from 1598 onwards, when a Dutch ship on its way to Indonesia was blown off course and found shelter on the uninhabited island. The various structural stages that followed have led the island from being a (Dutch) port of call, catering to the needs of ships travelling to India, to a vibrant (French) colony (with corsairs preying on Indiamen), to a (British) sugar plantation worked by Indian “coolies”, to a postcolonial “Small Island State” with an EEZ for textiles, and to a globally connected economy also marketing itself as a “cyber island” for investors and a “paradise island” for tourists.

The paper will conclude with some methodological and theoretical challenges, among others by arguing that the matter at hand is best understood, not by resorting to spatial representations or metaphors, but by looking at routes and hubs, and by applying a mobility-oriented perspective. Furthermore, it will be argued that concepts like circulation, flow and others must be critically assessed, as things do not flow but, hampered or triggered by shifting power relations, hop or jump instead. Finally, it could be discussed whether the Mauritian hub was one of the first real colonial hubs, that differed not only from pre-colonial hubs like Malakka or Calicut but also from the Portuguese “forts-and-factories”-strategy of taking a hold in the Indian Ocean world.

Burkhard Schnepel studied Social Anthropology in Berlin, Oxford and Heidelberg. He got his D. Phil from Oxford in 1986 and his Habilitation from Heidelberg in 1996 with theses on the Shilluk of the Southern Sudan and the Jungle Kings of East India respectively. From 2002 onwards, he was Professor of Social Anthropology (now retired) at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where he co-founded and headed the Institute of Social Anthropology and also held the position (2007-2021) as Director of the Centre of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. Apart from his studies on Africa and India, his research interests have focussed on the social anthropology and history of the Indian Ocean world. In this context he has led a major research project, as Max Planck Fellow, on Indian Ocean port cities with the title “Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean” from 2014 to 2021 and (co-)organized international conferences and Summer Schools in Halle, Berlin, Shanghai, Montreal and Oman. He recently co-edited 《运动中的连通：印度洋世界的岛屿枢纽》 (with Edward A. Alpers, Palgrave 2018), Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World (with Tansen Sen; Brill 2019) and Cargoes in Motion: Materiality and Connectivity across the Indian Ocean (with Julia Verne; Ohio University Press 2022). His latest monographs are: The King’s Two Bodies. Essays on Kinship and Ritual (Manohar and Routledge 2021) and Small Island, Large Ocean: Mauritius and the Indian Ocean World, Manohar and Routledge 2023).

本次讲座主持为 Tansen Sen, Professor of History, Director of the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai, and Associated Full Professor of History, NYU.