This is a story map that will explore Dutch and French colonization of Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles off the east coast of Africa, during the 17th and 18th centuries. It will specifically analyze the depletion of ebony forests, and the subsequent environmentalism that arose in response to this depletion. This history provides a unique and important perspective on how religion and capitalism are intertwined and informed European colonizers’ relationships to the environment. This environmental is unique and especially interesting because Mauritius had The implications of these understandings of religion, capitalism, and environmental reponsibility continue to resonate in history, politics, and culture today.
Mauritius is perhaps best-known in popular culture because it was the habitat of the dodo bird, which went extinct by the early 18th century as a result of hunting, habitat destruction, and invasive species (species that were not native to Mauritius, and which made it impossible for the dodo to survive) that European colonizers introduced. The dodo went extinct largely because colonizers did not have any motivation to save it: they did not deem it useful for food, furs, or anything else they might be able to sell. Ebony, on the other hand, is different: colonizers valued the ebony tree for its wood, which they could sell. As a result, they had an incentive to conserve ebony, which makes the history of ebony one where conservation is more relevant than it is in the history of the dodo.
My main sources for the historical facts in the presentation are the books Mauritian History: from Its Beginnings to Modern Times by Vijayalakshmi Teelock and Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 by Richard Grove. Grove's book is the main inspiration for the more conceptual historical arguments I am making. For contextual European history and definitions, I consulted the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as some other articles and books. The primary sources (historical documents) I used are named during relevant parts of the story map. All of these sources are cited in greater depth at the bottom of this webpage.
Some notes about the the background map: This is a 1763 map by Jacques Nicolas Bellin, the most notable French hydrographer (scholar of bodies of waters) of the 18th century. This map was made during the "end" of my story, and was made during French colonization of Mauritius. I chose it because influence of the French on Mauritius ended up being much greater than that of the Dutch: most of the place names on the island today are French, French is still spoken there while Dutch is not, etc. This map also provides a useful opportunity for parts of the maps to function as symbols for places. Because Mauritius is so remote, there are few (if any) maps from this time period that include Mauritius on the same page as Europe or even other European colonies. Therefore, I will be using parts of this map as symbols for other places. The title of the map in the lower right-hand corner of the map, which includes the coat of arms of the King of France, represents Europe (either Holland or France, depending on the context); while the illustrated coastline view of Mauritius in the upper left-hand corner represents the Cape of Good Hope, because it is the view of Mauritius by an outsider. The zoomed-in map of Port Louis in the lower left-hand corner of the map will represent Port Louis once France takes possession of the island, while Port Louis on the unzoomed-in map while represent Port Louis during Dutch colonization, for reasons that will be explained in the presentation.
Throughout completing this project, I intended to use the browser extension Carbonalyser to track the environmental footprint of the project. I downloaded it in the beginning of the semester onto Firefox, because it is only available on Firefox. At first, it was difficult for me to remember to use Firefox when working on this project, because I am used to automatically using Chrome, so the numbers I got were not entirely accurate. However, the numbers were still instructive. I learned, for example, that downloading large files such as maps used way more data than I had expected. Downloading readings also took up more data than I thought. These realizations encouraged me to be more mindful of what I downloaded off the Internet.
For some reason, possibly because my computer is very old, Firefox crashed a few weeks into the semester, and with the crash, I lost all my Carbonalyser data. I redownloaded it a few times, and after each time it crashed again. A few weeks from the end of the semester, I redownloaded Firefox and intended to use those few weeks as a sample of the rest of the semester. However, I realized a few days from the deadline that I had forgotten to reinstall Carbonalyser onto the browser, so I had no data. I also deleted the screenshot from my earlier draft. Thus, due to technical difficulties and my own errors, I have no concrete data about my environmental impact.
Although I don’t have any final data, using the Carbonalyser on a day-to-day basis shifted my thinking around Internet usage and academic work. I had always thought of carbon emissions in terms of things like turning off the lights when you leave a room—I had never thought of it in terms of Internet usage or academic work. I think this is because A. I don’t conceptualize Internet usage the same way I do more “traditional” uses of carbon like light bulbs, and B. academic work always felt very important and “off-limits” to attempts at conservation to reduce carbon emissions. It was kind of jarring to realize that both the Internet and academia do have environmental impacts that we must think about.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Environmental Footprint
Sources
Introduction Before the Story Map
Story Map
Licensing
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