Rémy Ollier And Imperial Citizenship

This essay discusses Rémy Ollier’s (1816–45) journalism. As an early claimant of citizenship through (rather than against) the British Empire during the 1840s, Ollier attempted to redress a gap that he perceived between the institutionalization of rights in Britain and Mauritius. Established accounts of Ollier’s political intervention provide a rich narrative of how his efforts are implicated in the development of rights in Mauritius and broader postcolonial nationalisms. However, I argue that facets of his expression of imperial citizenship reside apart from this genealogy. To explore how Ollier uniquely created imperial citizenship, an “acts”-influenced approach to citizenship is adopted. By analyzing his writings in La Sentinelle de Maurice, I reveal how imperial citizenship is generated through a subversive loyalism to Britain and an orientalist portrayal of indentured labourers. I conclude by mobilizing Ollier’s struggle as a challenge to the notion that citizenship realizes itself in teleological fashion