Who was Marie Rozette, our started from the bottom now we here?

Did you know that long before the mass arrival of Indian indentured labourers, there were Indian slaves in Mauritius?

There were a lot fewer of them than Malagasy and African slaves. For example, Indian slaves represented only around 7% of the slave population in 1761.

One of them was Marie Rozette.

Marie Rozette was a woman of Indian origin who lived in Mauritius (Ile de France back in the days), during the late 1700s. She had been enslaved by a French colonist named François Jouglard, but was eventually freed.

We don't actually know exactly how Marie made her first money after becoming free. The surviving records dont tell us how she was freed and what happened immediately after.

What we do know is that, within a few years, Marie Rozette had become mari riche.

In 1784, she acquired 164 arpents of land at Piton, in Pamplemousses.

Then in 1787, she was wealthy enough to lend 50,000 livres to a couple named Jacques LeBlanc and his wife.

In 1790, she made an agreement with Jean Victor Galdemar, a white surgeon and landowner, involving another 63,000 livres belonging to her, which he was to hold and eventually repay with interest.

Imagine Mauritius in 1790, savery is still legal, the French colonial system is still in place. An Indian woman who had previously been enslaved is now sitting on a large estate in Pamplemousses, owning land, making loans and signing financial contracts involving tens of thousands of livres with wealthy white colons.

Not exactly the image we normally have of 18th-century Mauritius.

Surprise surprise, she eventually became a slave owner herself.

The surviving notarial records show her buying and selling slaves as part of her property and financial dealings.

She doesn't fit neatly into the simplified version of Mauritian history where Europeans owned slaves, Africans and Malagasy people were slaves, slavery ended, and then Indians arrived as indentured labourers.

Marie continued managing her properties, loans and estate for years. She repeatedly went to notaries to sell land, make agreements, revise her will and manage her assets.

She eventually died on 9 August 1804.

We know all of this not because Marie left us a diary or wrote her autobiography. We know her because she left behind a massive paper trail. Loans. Land transactions. Wills. Contracts. Slave sales. More than 200 years later, historians were able to reconstruct the life of an Indian woman who went from being someone's property to becoming a landowner and creditor in colonial Mauritius.

Sources: (need institution access for the first two ones)

https://academic.oup.com/jsh/article-abstract/45/2/345/1238276

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/abs/slavery-and-colonial-identity-in-eighteenthcentury-mauritius/CDEBF7F905F34AE7D9783E81695E3E11

https://atjhub.csvr.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/TJC-Final-Report-Vol-2\_compressed.pdf