British rule and the end of slavery, 1814 to 1903

The transfer to Britain was settled far away, at the Treaty of Paris in 1814, which handed Seychelles and Mauritius to the British Crown. What makes Seychelles unusual among British colonies is how little the British presence changed its character. The islands kept their French language, their French-derived law and their Roman Catholic faith. British governors came and went, English became the language of administration, but the soul of the place stayed Creole and Francophone. That is why a Seychellois today speaks Kreol at home, meets the state in English and prays in a church whose roots are French.

The defining event of the century was the end of slavery. Britain abolished slavery across its empire in the 1830s, and in Seychelles emancipation took effect in 1835. For the enslaved majority it was liberation. For the planters it was ruin, because their entire economy had rested on unpaid labour. Cotton and food crops that needed many hands gave way to coconut, vanilla and cinnamon, which needed fewer, and the coconut palm in particular came to define the islands' economy for the next hundred years.

Then came a second, less remembered wave of arrival. From the 1860s the Royal Navy patrolled the Indian Ocean to suppress the Arab slave trade, and when it intercepted a slave dhow it had to land the freed people somewhere. Thousands of these liberated Africans were brought to Seychelles. They arrived with nothing, were often bound into harsh apprenticeships, and yet they became a foundational part of the population. A great many Seychellois families descend from these liberated Africans, and it is one reason the search for one's own roots, which the diaspora feels so strongly, so often runs into the silence of the archives.

Through all of this Seychelles remained a dependency of Mauritius, governed from another island a thousand miles away. That would change at the turn of the century.