The history of Mauritius

Mauritius had no human inhabitants until the seventeenth century, so its whole population descends from people who arrived by sea, many of them against their will. The Dutch settled it briefly and wiped out the dodo, the French built a slave-based sugar colony, and the British, who took it in 1810, replaced slavery with indentured labour from India that made Indo-Mauritians the majority. Independent since 1968, the country has become one of Africa's most stable democracies and prosperous economies, while pursuing a long dispute with Britain over the Chagos Archipelago.

Mauritius is a volcanic island about 800 kilometres east of Madagascar, part of the Mascarene group with Réunion and Rodrigues. Its forests sheltered animals found nowhere else, among them the flightless dodo and giant tortoises. Arab and Swahili sailors who crossed the Indian Ocean probably knew of it: a Portuguese map of 1502 shows the Mascarenes under names derived from Arabic, including Dina Arobi, which may refer to Mauritius. Nobody settled there, however.

Portuguese navigators reached the island in 1507, during the voyages that followed Vasco da Gama's opening of the sea route to India, and called it Cirne. The Mascarenes took their name from Pedro Mascarenhas, who visited in 1512. The Portuguese Empire had its East African base at Mozambique and preferred the Mozambique Channel route, so it left the island alone apart from occasional stops for water and food.

In September 1598 a Dutch fleet sheltered in a bay on the south-east coast, and its admiral named the island after Maurice of Nassau, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic. For four decades it served as a stopover for ships of the Dutch East India Company, whose crews cut its valuable ebony. In 1638 the company founded a permanent settlement at Grand Port, and in 1642 Abel Tasman set out from there on the voyage that took him to Tasmania and New Zealand.

The colony never prospered. Cyclones, drought, rats and shortages wore down the small garrison, which was abandoned between 1658 and 1666 and finally given up in 1710. The Dutch brought enslaved people from Madagascar to cut timber and work the fields, and many escaped into the forests, beginning the history of marronage on the island; recaptured slaves faced brutal punishments. The settlers introduced sugar cane from Java, deer and other animals. Hunting, forest clearance and introduced species drove the dodo to extinction by the late seventeenth century, making it a lasting symbol of human-caused extinction.

France, which already held neighbouring Réunion, claimed the empty island in 1715 as Isle de France and began settling it in 1721 under the French East India Company. The colony took shape after 1735 under Governor Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, who made Port Louis a naval base and shipyard, built roads and public buildings, and promoted sugar. The island became the French headquarters in the Indian Ocean, a base for rivalry with Britain in India.

Its prosperity rested on slavery. The Code Noir of 1723 regulated the enslaved as property, and slave traders brought tens of thousands of people from Madagascar, Mozambique, the Swahili coast around Zanzibar and India. By the late eighteenth century enslaved Africans and Malagasy made up about four-fifths of the population, and by the early nineteenth century there were some 60,000 of them. Runaway slaves formed maroon communities in the mountains, and the rock of Le Morne Brabant in the south-west, where maroons took refuge, is now a World Heritage site honouring their resistance. When the government of the French Revolution abolished slavery in 1794, the colonists refused to apply the decree and in 1796 expelled the envoys sent to enforce it.

During the Napoleonic Wars French privateers sailing from Port Louis did heavy damage to British shipping. The French won the naval Battle of Grand Port in August 1810, but in late November a large British force landed at Cap Malheureux, and the governor, Charles Decaen, surrendered on 3 December. The Treaty of Paris in 1814 confirmed British possession of Mauritius with Rodrigues and the Seychelles. The capitulation allowed the settlers to keep their land, their language and French law, so a French-speaking planter elite continued to dominate the economy under the British Empire.

Slavery was abolished on 1 February 1835, freeing about 66,000 people, but the planters, not the enslaved, received compensation of more than two million pounds, and the freed population was bound to a period of "apprenticeship" before full freedom. To replace their labour, planters turned to indentured workers, above all from India. Between the 1830s and the 1920s close to half a million indentured labourers arrived, most through the immigration depot at Port Louis now known as the Aapravasi Ghat, a World Heritage site, after sailing from ports such as Kolkata and Chennai. Many endured harsh conditions, low pay and restrictions on movement, and in 1871 a petition organised with the help of Adolphe de Plevitz led to a commission of inquiry and reforms. Those who stayed made Indo-Mauritians, Hindu and Muslim, the majority of the population, while Creoles of African and Malagasy descent, Franco-Mauritians and a smaller Chinese community made up the rest. Sugar dominated the island, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced its importance as a port of call.

Politics slowly widened beyond the sugar oligarchy. A limited elected element entered the Legislative Council in 1886, and in 1901 Mahatma Gandhi, passing through on his way from South Africa to India, urged Indo-Mauritians to seek education and political influence. The Mauritius Labour Party was founded in 1936, and after the Uba riots of 1937 and dock strikes in 1938 trade unions were legalised. During the Second World War Mauritians served in British forces, and in 1943 police killed four strikers at the Belle Vue Harel sugar estate. A new constitution in 1947 extended the vote to all adults who could write their name in one of the island's languages, and the 1948 elections brought Indo-Mauritians and Creoles into the council in numbers. Universal adult suffrage followed in 1959, and the Labour Party under Seewoosagur Ramgoolam won successive elections.

Independence was contested along communal lines. The Labour-led Independence Party won the 1967 election, while the Parti Mauricien Social Démocrate, backed by many Franco-Mauritians and Creoles, opposed independence. Communal violence flared in 1965, and riots in Port Louis in January 1968 killed 25 people. At the 1965 Lancaster House conference Britain secured the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius before independence, forming the British Indian Ocean Territory, and leased its largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States for a military base during the Cold War. Between 1967 and 1973 the British authorities removed the islands' entire population, more than a thousand Chagossians and by some counts about two thousand, mostly to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where many lived in poverty.

Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968, as part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Ramgoolam as prime minister and Elizabeth II as queen. A new left-wing party, the Mouvement Militant Mauricien under Paul Bérenger, led strikes in 1971 that brought a state of emergency and the jailing of its leaders. Economic policy proved more successful than its turbulent politics suggested. An export processing zone created in 1970 drew textile and clothing investment, sugar earned well under preferential trade agreements, and tourism grew, so that the overcrowded sugar island of the 1960s became an upper-middle-income economy, often described as the Mauritian miracle. In 1973 it was declared free of malaria.

In 1982 an alliance of the MMM and the Parti Socialiste Mauricien won a landslide, taking all sixty seats on the main island, and Anerood Jugnauth became prime minister; he soon broke with Bérenger and founded the Mouvement Socialiste Mauricien, which governed for most of the following years. Power has since alternated peacefully between coalitions led by the Jugnauth and Ramgoolam families, often in alliance with Bérenger. Mauritius became a republic within the Commonwealth on 12 March 1992, with a largely ceremonial president. Rodrigues gained its own regional assembly in 2002, and the country developed into a financial and offshore services centre.

Mauritius has long claimed the Chagos Archipelago, and in 2019 the International Court of Justice advised, by thirteen votes to one, that Britain was obliged to end its administration as rapidly as possible; the UN General Assembly backed this in a resolution supported by 116 states. After negotiations from 2022, the two governments signed a treaty on 22 May 2025 under which Mauritius is sovereign over the whole archipelago and Britain may exercise sovereign rights over Diego Garcia for an initial 99 years in return for payments. Ratification stalled in Britain in 2026 amid objections from the United States, and as of October 2026 the treaty had not entered into force. Chagossians themselves remain divided, some welcoming the chance to resettle and others opposing transfer to Mauritius.

At home, Pravind Jugnauth succeeded his father as prime minister in 2017. In 2020 the bulk carrier MV Wakashio ran aground off the south-east coast and spilled about a thousand tonnes of oil into protected lagoons, one of the worst environmental disasters in the region. In the November 2024 election the opposition Alliance du Changement won 60 of 64 seats, and Navin Ramgoolam returned as prime minister.