HISTORY
The Seychelles Islands have a rich and fascinating history that dates back centuries. This archipelago, located in the Indian Ocean, has been inhabited by various groups of people over the years, including Arab sailors, Portuguese explorers, and French settlers. In the 18th century, the islands became a haven for pirates, who used the secluded bays and coves as hiding places. The Seychelles later became a British colony in the 19th century before gaining independence in 1976. Today, the islands are known for their stunning natural beauty, with pristine beaches, vibrant coral reefs, and lush tropical forests. Visitors to the Seychelles can explore historic sites such as the capital city of Victoria, where colonial-era buildings and landmarks stand alongside modern developments. The history of the Seychelles Islands is a captivating tale of exploration, colonization, and cultural diversity.The history of the Seychelles since the islands’ colonization in 1770 has been shaped by their physical geography, location in the western Indian Ocean, and peripheral status in the French and British colonial empires. The archipelago’s social, economic, and political history reflects its role in facilitating the slave trade that funneled hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and Malagasies toward the Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and Réunion between 1770 and the early 1830s, the development of cotton and then coconut plantation agriculture, and its status as a Mauritian dependency until it became a separate British Crown Colony in 1903. Economic and political life after independence in 1976 included a coup d’état in 1977 that led to the establishment of a one-party socialist state in 1979, a return to multiparty democracy in 1993, and the country’s increasing economic dependence on tourism during the late 20th and early 21rst centuries.
Keywords
Subjects
East Africa and Indian Ocean
Location and Geography
The Seychelles, an archipelago of some 115 islands in the western Indian Ocean situated between 4° and 11° south latitude and 46° and 56° east longitude, are composed of four principal island groups, with a total surface area of 175 square miles, only 5 percent of which is arable while another 45 percent is suitable for tree crops, such as coconuts. The central Mahé group consists of some forty granitic islands, the largest of which, Mahé, is located 995 miles (1,600 km) east of Mombasa. More than 85 percent of the Seychellois population, estimated at almost 99,000 in 2021, live on Mahé; most other Seychellois reside on the neighboring islands of Praslin and La Digue, 26 miles (42 km) northeast of Mahé. The archipelago’s Aldabra, Farquhar, and Amirantes groups, located south and southwest of the Mahé group, are coralline and mostly uninhabited. The islands’ physical geography and location in the western Indian Ocean played a major role in shaping Seychellois social, economic, and political history between the islands’ colonization in 1770 and independence in 1976 by ensuring that the archipelago remained a peripheral part of the French and, after 1814, British colonial empires.
Slavery, Slave Trading, and the Seychellois Economy
The history of the Seychelles must be understood in terms of the impact of European imperialism and colonialism in the Indian Ocean during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries; transoceanic slave trading; the creation of a colonial plantation economy; and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Cartographic evidence suggests that although the islands were probably known to Arab/Swahili sailors before 1500, they remained uninhabited by humans. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit the archipelago in 1502 when Vasco da Gama sighted and named the Amirantes during his second voyage to India. In 1609, an English East India Company expedition spent ten days in the islands. The Euro-American pirates who established themselves in northern Madagascar between circa 1690 and 1720 probably visited the archipelago occasionally, but the islands remained of little sustained European interest until 1742 when François Bertrand Mahé de La Bourdonnais, governor (1735–1746) of the French Compagnie des Indes’s colony of the Îles de France et de Bourbon (the modern Mascarene Islands of Mauritius and La Réunion, respectively), dispatched an expedition led by Lazare Picault to explore the archipelago.1 Picault visited the islands again in 1743 and 1744, and in 1756 the French formally claimed the archipelago which they named in honor of the Comte Moreau de Séchelles, Louis XV’s comptroller general of finances. In 1768, following the Compagnie’s bankruptcy and the advent of royal government in the Mascarenes, Governor François-Julien du Dresnay des Roches (1768–1772) and intendant (comptroller) Pierre Poivre (1767–1772) dispatched another expedition led by Marion Dufresne to reconnoiter the islands.
The archipelago remained uninhabited, however, until August 27, 1770, when a small group of settlers from the Île de France established themselves on the small island of Sainte Anne near Mahé. The reasons for the archipelago’s colonization remain a subject of debate. Guy Lionnet and William McAteer assert that its settlement was prompted by Pierre Poivre’s desire to encourage spice cultivation in the Îles de France et de Bourbon.2 Claude Wanquet holds that although the islands’ initial settlement reflected this aspiration, colonization after 1777–1778 was governed by two other considerations: the existence of a good harbor at Mahé and the archipelago’s reputation for having a healthful climate, which made the islands well suited to serve as a naval base from which French interests in India could be supported, and the desire to develop the islands into an agricultural colony.3 More recently, Peter Nicholls has argued that colonization was spurred by the need for a “refreshment” station to service the increasing numbers of ships carrying slaves from Mozambique and the Swahili Coast to the Îles de France et de Bourbon after a 1769 royal decree opened the Mascarenes to free trade by French citizens, a privilege extended to American merchants in 1784 and all other foreign nationals in 1787.4 Jehanne-Emmanuelle Monnier, in turn, contends that the archipelago provided poor whites on the Île Bourbon with access to land and other economic opportunities that were unavailable to them on that island.5
Regardless of the reasons for the islands’ settlement, the colonization process proceeded slowly. In 1788, the islands housed only 250 inhabitants as well as a royal establishment of some twenty soldiers, one pilot-fisher, and twelve slaves. The archipelago’s population continued to increase between 1788 and 1810, with the most notable growth occurring in the size of its slave population, which rose from 487 in 1791, to 1,820 in 1804, and to 3,015 in 1810 (table 1).6 This increase stemmed in part from the Seychelles’ importance as a refreshment station for the ships that exported an estimated 99,600 to 115,200 enslaved men, women, and children from Mozambique and the Swahili Coast toward Mauritius and Réunion between 1770 and 1810.7 Archival sources document a minimum of fifty-four slaving voyages from eastern Africa to the Mascarenes during the 1770s, 78 during 1780s, and 128 during the 1790s.8 Although the number of such documented voyages declined to forty during the first decade of the 19th century, in part because of increasing Royal Navy activity in the western Indian Ocean after 1803 as Britain waged war against Napoleonic France, at least forty-six other voyages that involved the transfer of slaves from the Seychelles to Mauritius and Réunion occurred between 1796 and the British capture of the Mascarenes in 1810.9 At least fifty-nine slave ships are known to have called at the islands between 1774 and 1809, a figure that undoubtedly underrepresents the number of such visits by a substantial margin.10 These ships remained an average of thirty-three days to make needed repairs, permit their human cargoes to recover from disease and the hardships of the Middle Passage, and take on water and provisions needed to complete their voyage to the Mascarenes.11 Visiting captains often sold part of their human cargoes during their stay in the archipelago, sometimes to cover their expenses while there.
Mauritius and Réunion’s capture by the British in 1810 and the subsequent enforcement of the 1807 parliamentary ban on slave trading by British subjects spurred the development of an
Table 1. Population of the Seychelles, 1788–1931
Year Whites Free Persons of Color Slaves Total
1788a 20 9 221 250
1791 65 20 487 572
1803/4 215 86 1,820 2,121
1810 317 135 3,015 3,467
1818 471 2 6,638–7,323 7,323
1824 739–815 218–301 5,755–6,525 6,712–6,741
1825 582–759 323–407 5,920–6,058 6,963–7,070
1826 733–790 378–407 6,069–6,525 7,180–7,722
1830 – – 4,698 –
184 – – – 5,453
1845 - - - 5,949
1851 - - - 6,811
1861
–
–
–
7,486
1871
–
–
–
11,082
1881
–
–
–
14,081
1891
–
–
–
16,440
1901
–
–
–
19,237
1911
–
–
–
22,691
1921
–
–
–
24,523
1931
–
–
–
27,444