Slavery and Colonial Identity in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 189-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Vaughan

On 25 May 1785, a M. Lousteau arrived at the police station in Port Louis, Isle de France (now Mauritius) to complain that his slave Jouan had been abducted. He described Jouan as an ‘Indien’, ‘Lascar’ and ‘Malabar’, and said that he had learned that he had been smuggled on to the royal ship Le Brillant, bound for Pondicherry in southern India, by one Bernard (whom Lousteau describes as a ‘creol libre’ but who later is described as ‘Malabar, soi-disant libre’ and ‘Topa Libre’). The story of the escape had been told to him by a ‘Bengalie’ slave called Modeste, who belonged to the ‘Lascar’ fisherman, Bacou. A number of people had apparently assisted Jouan's escape in other ways—most importantly his trunk of belongings had been moved secretly from hut to hut before being embarked with him. Lousteau was a member of that ever-growing professional group of eighteenth-century France and its colonies: the lawyers. He was clerk to the island's supreme court, the Conseil Superieur. He supported a large family, he said, and the loss of Jouan represented a serious loss to their welfare. Jouan, it turned out, was no ordinary slave. He was a skilled carpenter who earned his master a significant sum every month; he was highly valued, and Lousteau had refused an offer of 5,000 livres for him. What is more, he could be easily recognised, for he was always exceptionally well turned-out and well-groomed. To facilitate in the search for his slave, Lousteau provided the following description of him:He declares that his fugitive slave is of the Lascar caste, a Malabar, dark black in colour, short in height, with a handsome, slightly thin face, a gentle appearance, with long hair … that he is very well dressed, abundantly endowed with clothes, such as jackets and shorts … wearing small gold earrings, a pin with a gold heart on his shirt, and on the arm a mark on the skin which he thinks reads DM.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Preis

Time and again, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the federal cause of action is "analytically distinct" from rights, remedies, and jurisdiction. Yet, just pages away in the U.S. Reports are other cases in which rights, remedies, and jurisdiction all hinge on the existence of a cause of action. What, then, is the proper relationship between these concepts?The goal of this Article is to articulate that relationship. This Article traces the history of the cause of action from eighteenth-century England to its modem usage in the federal courts. This history demonstrates that the federal cause of action is largely distinct from rights, closely related to (and sometimes synonymous with) remedies, and distinct from jurisdiction except where Congress instructs otherwise or the case implicates sovereign immunity. Sorting out these relationships provides several benefits, including refining the doctrine of prudential standing, clarifying the grounds for federal jurisdiction, and dispelling claims that Congress lacks power over certain causes of action.


Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 54-86
Author(s):  
David Wills

This chapter offers an examination of the refining of the instant of execution that takes place with the introduction of trap door gallows in the seventeenth century and, more spectacularly and explicitly, in the late eighteenth century with the French Revolution and the guillotine. The death penalty is thereby distinguished from torture and a post-Enlightenment conception of punishment is introduced, lasting to the present. But the guillotine is bloody, and that underscores a complex visuality of the death penalty that also obtains during the same time period, playing out across diverse genres such as the execution sermon, political and scientific discourses relating to the guillotine, Supreme Court descriptions of crimes, and practices of an entity such as the Islamic State. What develops concurrent with the guillotine—yet remains constant through all those examples--is a form of realist photographic visuality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 763-786
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler

This symposium essay contends that the image of the common law drawn by the Supreme Court in the Confrontation Clause context is both distorted and incomplete. In particular, the Court and scholars defending originalist positions rely almost entirely on English sources in their reconstruction of the common law basis for the Confrontation Clause, thereby neglecting the diversity of American common laws from the time of the Founding, a diversity that has already been unearthed by a number of legal historians. By drawing on hitherto untapped sources to furnish a bottom-up reconstruction of how testimony was treated in local criminal courts within mid- to late-eighteenth-century New Jersey, this essay demonstrates that, in at least some jurisdictions, the originalist vision of common law did not apply. The common law cannot, therefore, furnish a univocal answer to questions about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.


Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett

This chapter continues the discussion of Equiano/Vassa's autobiography, focusing on its role in the literary tradition as the most important eighteenth-century slave narrative in order for Barrett to set up the long tradition of the fugitive slave narrative in its pre-classic (prior to 1800), classic (1830–1865), and postbellum (1865 and later) versions. It then turns to a number of fugitive slave narratives and related abolitionist texts from the classic period: William Grimes's Narrative of the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1855); James Bradley's 1835 journalistic account of his own enslavement; David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829); Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Dessi Perdani Yuris Puspita Sari ◽  
Rani Hendriana

One solution to enforce traffic violation is by using E-ticket (e-tilang) penalties for traffic violators. Conceptually, E-tilang is the settlement of electronic-based traffic violation cases through information system and technology, as stated in Article 1 number 2 of the Republic of Indonesia Supreme Court Regulation Number 12 of 2016 concerning how to resolve traffic violation cases. E-tilang  is considered able to provide more practical and fast service compared to conventional ticket. The problem in this study is to identify how is the implementation and constraints of the e-tilang system fine sanctions in the settlement of traffic violations cases in Banyumas police station jurisdiction? This research is an empirical study using sociological juridical approach. The data is processed in a qualitative descriptive manner. The focus of this research is the implementation of e-tilang penalties for traffic offenders in Banyumas. The results of this study describe the application of e-tilang to facilitate the speed, convenience, and openness of the implementation of the ticketing process to replace in-place ticketing process.


Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 43-63
Author(s):  
Aline Helg

This chapter explores marronage as one of the ways in which slaves were able to win their freedom in a context in which slavery appeared unshakable. Marronage represented the slaves' primary form of revolt until the mid-eighteenth century and consisted of slaves running away and creating maroon societies within the inner frontiers of the Americas. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans and Afro-descendants favored marronage and the creation of fugitive slave societies such as unyielding palenques and quilombos. These forms of revolt corresponded well to a context of gradual colonization that left immense spaces uncontrolled by authorities or slaveholders. Though undetermined numbers of fugitives were captured, a great many escaped the yoke of slavery by surviving long-term in forests, mountains, or marshlands. Despite the proliferation of slave codes and the severity of punishments, marronage could not be eradicated.


2021 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Peter Irons

This chapter discusses the role of the legal system, including the Supreme Court, in upholding the constitutionality of slavery. It first examines the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842, in which the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in state court of Edward Prigg, a professional slave-catcher, for kidnapping Margaret Morgan, who escaped from slavery in Maryland to the free state of Pennsylvania. Ruling that state officials could not hinder enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the Court also held that state officials could decline to aid slave-catchers, leading to mass demonstrations in Boston over the “rendition” of escaped slaves George Latimer and Anthony Burns. The chapter includes a recounting of the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney held that no Black person was a citizen and that Blacks were “an inferior order of beings” who had “no rights that the white man was bound to respect.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of the impact of the Dred Scott ruling on the presidential campaign of 1860, in which Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and provoked the slave states to secede from the Union and launch the Civil War.


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