Madeleine's Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France's Indian Ocean Colonies

Madeleine's Children uncovers a multigenerational saga of an enslaved family in India and two islands, Réunion and Mauritius, in the eastern empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tale of legal intrigue, it reveals the lives and secret relationships between slaves and free people that have remained obscure for two centuries.

As a child, Madeleine was pawned by her impoverished family and became the slave of a French woman in Bengal. She accompanied he...