While previous episodes have explored the dramatic escapes of maroons and the tragic extinction of the dodo, Episode 259 turns its gaze to the invisible force that shaped Mauritius for centuries: water. In the mid-eighteenth century, a severe drought threatened to collapse the fledgling sugar industry on Île de France, forcing Governor François Mahé de Labourdonnais to make desperate engineering decisions that still define the island’s landscape today. We trace the construction of the Grand Bassin and the controversial diversion of rivers, revealing how colonial ambition collided with fragile ecology. This conversation examines the specific mechanics of the irrigation systems, the forced labor behind their creation, and how these hydraulic wars laid the groundwork for the plantation economy that would follow. By looking at the aqueducts and canals rather than just the fields, we uncover a different layer of resistance and survival among the enslaved population, who understood the waterways as both tools of oppression and potential paths to freedom.
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