front cover of Creating the Creole Island
Creating the Creole Island
Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius
Megan Vaughan
Duke University Press, 2005
The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.

Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

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front cover of Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa
Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa
Social and Historical Perspectives
Edited by Megan Vaughan, Kafui Adjaye-Gbewonyo, and Marissa Mika
University College London, 2020
New perspectives on the changing epidemiology of sub-Saharan Africa.

Epidemiological Change and Chronic Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa offers new and critical perspectives on the causes and consequences of recent epidemiological changes in sub-Saharan Africa, with a special focus on the increasing incidence of “non-communicable” and chronic conditions. In this book, historians, social anthropologists, public health experts, and social epidemiologists present important insights into epidemiological change in Africa beyond theories of “transition.” The volume covers a broad thematic range, including the trajectory of maternal mortality in East Africa, the smoking epidemic, the history of sugar consumption in South Africa, the causality between infectious and non-communicable diseases in Ghana and Belize, the complex relationships between adult hypertension and pediatric HIV in Botswana, and stories of cancer patients and their families in Kenya. In all, the volume provides insights drawn from historical perspectives and from the African social and clinical experience that are of value to students and researchers in global health, medical anthropology, public health, and African studies.
 
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