Slavery in Seychelles existed until its final abolition in 1835. Slaves were brought to the Seychelles when the island was first populated by French planters and their slaves from Mauritius. The British banned the slave trade on the island when it became British territory in 1815, and slavery itself was abolished twenty years later.

The Seychelles was uninhabited when it was annexed by France in 1756, and inhabited in 1770 by French planters and their slaves by the French colony of Mauritius.

Slave traders from Madagascar - Sakalava or Arabs - bought slaves from slavers in the Swahili coast or Portuguese Mozambique and stopped at the Seychelles for supplies before shipping the slaves to the slave markets of Mauritius, Réunion and India.^[1]

When the Revolutionary Government of Paris abolished slavery in 1794, the French colonies in the Indian Ocean - Mauritius, Réunion and the Seychelles - all refused to enforce the law, and slavery was reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802.

Britain occupied the Seychelles in April 1811, and the island officially became a British colony in 1815. British law had prohibited the slave trade in 1807, and this law was enforced in the Seychelles when the island became British territory, legally outlawing open slave trade. However, slave traders caught by the British often managed to circumvent the law by claiming that the slaves they shipped from East Africa were not free people recently enslaved and victims of slave trade, but rather people who had been born as slaves and were simply being mowed by their owners, which made it legally difficult for the British to interfere.^[2]

Slaves in the Seychelles were placed in four broad categories. Firstly there were the Creoles (the largest group), those of mixed African and European blood who were brought from Mauritius and had children born on the island; they were often regarded as superior in intellect.^[3]