Crown Colony of Mauritius

British Mauritius was taken from France in 1810 and confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1814, and its history is a study in what replaced slavery. The island had no indigenous population; the Dutch had cleared its ebony and extinguished the dodo, and the French had built a sugar economy worked by enslaved people from Madagascar and East Africa. Britain kept the French language, law and planters, and kept the sugar. When slavery was abolished in 1835 the roughly seventy thousand freed people largely refused to return to the estates, and the planters turned to indenture: over the following seventy years about half a million labourers arrived from India under contracts that bound them for five years, and two thirds of them stayed. The Aapravasi Ghat where they landed is now a World Heritage site, and the system pioneered there was exported to Fiji, Trinidad, Natal and Guyana. The result was a society whose majority is Indo-Mauritian, with Creole, Chinese and Franco-Mauritian minorities, and a politics organised around that arithmetic. Constitutional advance came slowly through the 1940s and 1950s, and independence was granted on 12 March 1968 under Seewoosagur Ramgoolam after a referendum campaign that split the island and produced communal rioting. Britain detached the Chagos Archipelago in 1965, three years before independence, and removed its inhabitants to make way for the American base at Diego Garcia - a separation the International Court of Justice ruled unlawful in 2019. Sugar remained the single export for most of the colonial period, which left the island acutely exposed to the world price. Cyclones in 1892 and 1960 each destroyed a large part of the crop and the housing. Malaria was eradicated in the 1950s, and the population growth that followed shaped the independence debate as much as any constitutional question.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history