Colony of Seychelles

The Seychelles were claimed by France in 1756, taken by Britain in 1810 and formally ceded in 1814, and administered as a dependency of Mauritius until becoming a separate crown colony in 1903. The islands were uninhabited before the eighteenth century; the population descends from French planters, the enslaved Africans they brought, and the liberated Africans landed there by the Royal Navy's anti-slavery patrols after 1861, who were put to work on the same estates under apprenticeship. The economy was coconut, cinnamon and vanilla, dependent on a few crops and a few families, and the colony was poor and remote enough that Britain used it as a place of exile - the Ashanti king Prempeh, the Zanzibari sultan, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus and Palestinian and Egyptian nationalists were all held there. The opening of an international airport in 1971 created a tourist industry and, with it, a politics. Independence came on 29 June 1976 under James Mancham, in a coalition with France-Albert René, who overthrew him a year later while he was abroad and ruled a one-party state for a quarter of a century. A mercenary attempt to reverse that in 1981, led by Mike Hoare with men posing as a drinking club, failed and ended in a hijacked airliner. Multi-party politics returned in 1993. The Chagos separation of 1965 also took three Seychellois islands, which were returned at independence. Fewer than sixty thousand people lived there at independence, making it among the smallest states in Africa by population. The granite islands are fragments of Gondwana rather than volcanic or coral, which is why their plants and animals are found nowhere else. Coco de mer, the largest seed in the world, was a royal monopoly under both French and British rule.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration