The constant demand of the French: The mascarene slave trade and the worlds of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic during the eighteenth and Nieteenth centuries

Abstract

Analysis of an inventory of 641 slaving voyages involving Mauritius|and Re´union between 1768 and 1809 reveals that the Mascarene Islands were at the center of a substantial and dynamic regional slave trading network that also reached into the Americas in ways that raise questions about the relationship|between the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.