Sue Peabody

This social biography of an enslaved family in the Indian Ocean World between 1750 and 1850 examines the transition from slavery to emancipation from a personalized perspective heretofore neglected: that of the people who lived in France’s empire. The book uses the tumultuous, riveting, and unusually well-documented story of one enslaved family over two generations as a lens through which to understand the historical changes that connected India, Madagascar, East Africa, France, Britain, and the Mascarenes from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, particularly with respect to slavery and freedom.