The Island of Bound Masters

How enslaved workers provided the labor as well as the architectural expertise needed to build and sustain Mauritius

Unlike most other sites of European colonialism, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius had no indigenous population when the French set out to incorporate it into their imperial network. How, then, did its development differ from other colonial enterprises? And what lessons does that story hold? The Island of Bound Masters is an innovative and multifaceted history of the enslaved Africans and Indians who turned local basalt, coral, earth, and wood into economically viable built environments on Mauritius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dwight Carey shows how the labor and the ecological building knowledge of enslaved workers from overseas transformed the island’s terrestrial resources into functional domestic infrastructure and a commercial architecture that ensured the subsequent rise of a successful multicultural society. This groundbreaking book draws upon laboratory analyses of structural and ecological remnants, archival research, and insights from geological and botanical science. Its interdisciplinary approach captures the essence of the intangible heritage of Mauritius and reveals how the enslaved sustained life through the strength of their ecological knowledge and the force of their labor.