In 1815, as the British Empire tightened its grip on Mauritius, the new colonial administration ordered a full census of every enslaved person on the island. The Slave Registration returns of 1815–1826 weren't just bureaucratic paperwork — they became a battleground between planters, abolitionists, and the enslaved themselves. This episode unpacks the registry: how it was compiled, the brutal mechanics of counting human beings as property, the quiet resistance embedded in the records, and what those dusty ledgers reveal about Mauritian society after the 1810 British takeover. We meet the commissioners who oversaw the counts, the Franco-Mauritian planters who fought every clause, and the maroons and girmitiyas whose lives are traceable only through these imperial lists. Lucas and Luna also explore how the registry's flaws—misrecorded ages, faked deaths, and the politics of comparison with the 1804 French-era roll—shaped the path to abolition in 1833. A story of power, paperwork, and the human cost of empire.
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