history of Mauritius
history of Mauritius, survey of the notable events and people in the history of Mauritius, an island country in the Indian Ocean, located off the eastern coast of Africa. Physiographically, it is part of the Mascarene Islands. Approximately two-thirds of Mauritius’s population is of Indo-Pakistani origin, most of whom are descendants of indentured laborers brought to work in the sugar industry during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Port Louis, a city founded in the 18th century by the French, is the country’s capital.
Mauritius’s outlying territories are Rodrigues Island, situated about 340 miles (550 km) eastward; the Cargados Carajos Shoals, 250 miles (400 km) northeastward; and the Agalega Islands, 580 miles (930 km) northward from the main island. Mauritius also claims sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago (including Diego Garcia), some 1,250 miles (2,000 km) to the northeast, though this has long been disputed by Britain. A tentative agreement between Mauritius and Britain, reached in October 2024 but not yet finalized, would recognize Mauritius’s claim.
Early history and colonial administration
Mauritius was long uninhabited, though it was probably known to Arab seafarers from the 10th century or earlier. It was visited by the Portuguese in the early 16th century, but they did not settle the island. The Dutch took possession of it from 1598 to 1710, called it Mauritius for the stadhouder (governor) Maurice of Nassau, and attempted to settle the island in 1638–58 and again in 1664–1710; abandoning their attempts, they left it to pirates. In 1721 the French East India Company occupied Mauritius, which was renamed Île de France. Settlement proceeded slowly over the next 40 years. In 1767 the French crown took over the island’s administration from the French East India Company. The French authorities brought enslaved people from Africa to the island and established sugar planting as the main industry, and the colony prospered.
At the beginning of the 19th century, when England and France were at war, privateers based on Île de France were a continual threat to British and Indian merchant vessels. In 1810 the British captured the island, and, upon restoration of peace in 1814, British sovereignty was confirmed by the Treaty of Paris. The name Mauritius was reinstated, but, in circumstances quite unique for a British colony, the customs, laws, and language remained French.
Pressure generated by the British abolitionist movement ended slavery there in 1835, and enslaved workers were replaced by indentured laborers from India. The country’s modern-day Indo-Pakistani population stems from this program of replacing slavery with indentured servitude (deemed Britain’s “Great Experiment”); by the time it ended in the 1920s, almost a half million indentured laborers had come from India to work on the sugar plantations. The laborers passed through an immigration depot, now known as Aapravasi Ghat, in Port Louis before being dispatched to work. Aapravasi Ghat was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2006.
Mauritius prospered in the 1850s, but competition from beet sugar caused a decline. The malaria epidemic of 1866–68 drove shipping away from Port Louis, which further declined after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. During World War I (1914–18), when sugar prices rose, the economy prospered, but the Great Depression of the 1930s changed the situation drastically, culminating in labor unrest in 1937. World War II (1939–45) did not improve the Mauritian economy, and after 1945 economic reforms were introduced. Political and administrative reforms were also initiated, which led to independence.
In 1965 Britain transferred one of Mauritius’s outlying territories, the Chagos Archipelago (including the Diego Garcia atoll), to a newly created administrative unit, the British Indian Ocean Territory. In the following years the inhabitants of Chagos were resettled, most of them moving to Mauritius, and a joint British-U.S. military facility was constructed on Diego Garcia.
Independence
Economic challenges
Mauritius became an independent state within the Commonwealth on March 12, 1968, with a governor-general on the island representing the British monarch as the head of state. In the first years of independence, Mauritius attempted to diversify its economy beyond the production of sugar but made limited progress. The combined effects, however, of Cyclone Claudette in late 1979, falling world sugar prices in the early 1980s, and political protest and social unrest generated by those who saw no economic future on the island led the government to initiate a vigorous and highly successful program of economic diversification. In 1991 the legislature voted to transition to a republican form of government, and on March 12, 1992, Mauritius became a republic, with a president as head of state.
As Mauritius approached the new millennium, the problems facing the country remained, for the most part, economic in nature. The poorer people in Mauritius—largely Creoles—did not share in the fruits of economic development in the late 20th century. This led to two large and unexpected outbursts of rioting and social unrest in 1999, the first real domestic disturbances since independence. Unemployment rose at the beginning of the 21st century, in part because of the detrimental effects of international trade on textile and sugar manufacturing. The government responded by focusing the country’s economic strategies on the development of more lucrative sectors: information technology and business and financial services.
Piracy in the 21st century
An uptick in piracy in the Indian Ocean in the early 21st century was a threat to the island’s economy as well as international commerce. In 2010 the country deployed specially trained National Coast Guard commandos to help combat the threat of piracy. Mauritius also signed agreements with the European Union in 2011 and the United Kingdom in 2012 for the use of Mauritian courts to prosecute alleged pirates caught in the region by European military patrols. The first group of suspected pirates to be tried arrived in early 2013.
Leadership by Navin Ramgoolam, Anerood and Pravind Jugnauth, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, and Prithvirajsing Roopun
Meanwhile, National Assembly elections were held on May 5, 2010. The alliance led by incumbent Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam of the Mauritius Labour Party (MLP; Parti Travailliste [PTr]) was victorious, in part because of Ramgoolam’s success in promoting stable economic development.
Ideological clashes between Ramgoolam and the country’s president, Sir Anerood Jugnauth—a long-serving politician in the Militant Socialist Movement (MSM) who became president in 2003 and had also previously served as prime minister (1982–95 and 2000–03)—surfaced in early 2012, and Jugnauth resigned from the presidency in March. He then led a coalition in opposition of the MLP, formed by the MSM and the main opposition party, the Mauritian Militant Movement (MMM).
Political partnerships were rearranged in 2014, with the alliance between the ruling MLP and the Mauritian Social Democratic Party (Parti Mauricien Social Démocrate; PMSD) breaking up and the MLP pursuing a new alliance with the MMM. The MLP-MMM alliance intended to pass constitutional reforms, which included provisions to increase the role of president and make that position directly elected, rather than one that was elected by the National Assembly. A new coalition, which included the PMSD and the MSM and was known as Lepep, was against such changes. The National Assembly was dissolved in October, and new elections were planned. When the polls were held on December 10, 2014, Lepep soundly defeated the MLP-MMM alliance, the former taking 47 of the 62 elected seats and the latter winning only 13. Ramgoolam lost his legislative seat and was succeeded by Jugnauth as prime minister later in December.
History was made in 2015 when the National Assembly elected the country’s first female president, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim. She was sworn in to the primarily ceremonial post on June 5. Her tenure was cut short, however, when she was accused of having engaged in financial misconduct in 2018. She denied the allegations but nonetheless offered to resign, stepping down on March 23, 2018.
Meanwhile, Jugnauth resigned in January 2017, handing the premiership to his son, Pravind Jugnauth. Although the younger Jugnauth was the leader of the MSM, the largest party in the Lepep coalition, and was therefore next in line for the position, the maneuver prompted criticism from the opposition. The elder Jugnauth remained active in government, stepping into the new position of “Minister Mentor” as well as being assigned other ministerial portfolios.
The run-up to the 2019 elections saw a reshuffling of alliances. The MSM was now part of the Morisien Alliance, while the PMSD was part of the National Alliance. The Morisien Alliance won 38 of the 62 elected seats in the November 7 polls, securing the prime minister post for Pravind Jugnauth. The National Alliance won 14 of the elected seats. The next month, the National Assembly elected Prithvirajsing Roopun, former minister of arts and culture, to the presidency.
Jugnauth’s term as prime minister saw many challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an environmental disaster, and various scandals. Although the government generally received high marks for taking measures to limit the number of COVID infections when the virus arrived in Mauritius in 2020, the country’s economy, which was heavily reliant on tourism, suffered. Later that year, a tanker ran aground off the coast and leaked 1,000 tons of oil, which devastated the country’s pristine lagoons and endangered coral reefs, mangrove forests, aquatic and terrestrial wildlife, and the health of the Mauritians who lived close to the shore. The disaster also severely damaged the country’s tourism and fishing sectors, which were already weakened from the impact of the pandemic. The incident was the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history and among the worst in the Indian Ocean.
One of the scandals under Jugnauth erupted in 2022, when the CEO of Mauritius Telecom, Sherry Singh, resigned his position and accused Jugnauth of having authorized a third party—later alleged to have been India’s foreign intelligence agency—to install an eavesdropping “sniffer” device on an internet landing station in Mauritius in 2021. The landing station was part of the South Africa Far East (SAFE) underwater fiber-optic Internet cable network, and the possibility that internet traffic had been spied on upset many Mauritians. There were calls for Jugnauth to step down over the incident, with Ramgoolan calling Jugnauth’s alleged actions treasonous. Jugnauth claimed that he had requested technicians from India to perform a survey of the site for security reasons—not to install any equipment—and ignored the calls for him to resign.
In early October 2024 Jugnauth’s administration negotiated a tentative agreement with Britain regarding the two countries’ decades-long competing claims over the Chagos Islands (see below Ongoing Chagos Archipelago sovereignty dispute), which he hailed as the completion of the decolonization process. The next month National Assembly elections were held. In preparation for the elections, Ramgoolam’s MLP formed a new coalition, the Alliance for Change (Alliance du Changement; ADC) that also included the MMM. Just a few weeks before the election, another scandal erupted when secretly recorded telephone conversations between reporters, politicians, lawyers, and other figures began being leaked on social media; it was unclear who was responsible for the actual wiretapping or the leaking of the conversations. As the elections drew closer, the government issued a temporary ban on social media from November 1 until the day after the November 10 elections, citing potential harm to national security from the leaked conversations. However, the ban was fiercely opposed and was quickly rescinded.
The ADC was triumphant in the November 10 elections, winning 60 of the 62 elected National Assembly seats. Jugnauth’s Lepep coalition did not win any of the elected seats but received 2 of 4 allocated seats. As Lepep’s imminent defeat became clear during the vote tabulation process, Jugnauth conceded. Ramgoolam once again was appointed prime minister and was sworn in on November 13. A week later he announced he had ordered an audit of the country’s finances, alleging that financial data as reported by the previous administration was incorrect and had been distorted to present a more positive picture of the economy.
Ongoing Chagos Archipelago sovereignty dispute
The sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago had long been a point of disagreement between Britain, which had administered the territory since 1965 as part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, and Mauritius, which maintained a claim to it. The archipelago was the subject of several court cases in the 21st century regarding the former inhabitants’ right to return and a proposal for the creation of a protected marine reserve around it. Of note was a case at the International Court of Justice. During the proceedings, Mauritius stated that it had been coerced into giving up the islands of the Chagos Archipelago in exchange for its independence in 1968. The court’s ruling, issued in 2019, found that Britain’s decolonization of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed and that Britain should end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as soon as possible. The court’s ruling, however, was an advisory opinion and not legally binding.
In October 2024 Britain and Mauritius announced that they had come to a tentative agreement about the fate of the Chagos Islands. Britain would recognize that Mauritius held sovereignty over all the islands, including Diego Garcia, and would also establish a fund for Chagossians, who would be allowed to return to any of the Chagos Islands other than Diego Garcia. Britain would lease Diego Garcia from Mauritius and keep the joint British-U.S. military base there operational for 99 years while providing payments to Mauritius during that time. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Mauritian Prime Minister Jugnauth welcomed the deal. However, the agreement still needed to be finalized, and it was criticized by various parties. Some Chagossians were upset that they were excluded from the negotiations, and some U.S. and British politicians voiced concerns that the agreement would undermine their countries’ security. Though both Britain and Mauritius vowed to finalize the agreement as soon as possible, the likelihood of that appeared to be at risk the next month. After November elections in Mauritius, Ramgoolam replaced Jugnauth as prime minister. Ramgoolam, who had been openly critical of the deal when it was announced, ordered an independent review of it after taking office. The outcome of the November presidential elections in the United States also introduced some uncertainty. While U.S. Pres. Joe Biden had been supportive of the deal at the time it was made, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had warned that the terms of the agreement would threaten the national security of the United States.