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Founding
Founding of Mauritius
island sovereign state off of East Africa in the Indian Ocean
- 12 March 1968
- Port Louis
Founding
island sovereign state off of East Africa in the Indian Ocean
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Mauritius, officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island country in the Indian Ocean, located about 1,100 nautical miles (2,000 km; 1,300 mi) off the southeastern coast of Africa, east of Madagascar. It includes the main island (also called Mauritius), as well as Rodrigues, Agaléga, and St. Brandon (Cargados Carajos shoals). The islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues, along with nearby Réunion, are part of the Mascarene Islands. The main island of Mauritius, where the population is concentrated, hosts the capital and largest city, Port Louis. The country spans 2,040 square kilometres (790 sq mi) and has an exclusive economic zone covering approximately 580,000 square nautical miles (2,000,000 km2; 770,000 sq mi).
The 1502 Portuguese Cantino planisphere has led some historians to speculate that Arab sailors were the first to discover the uninhabited island around 975, naming it Dina Arobi. Called Ilha do Cirne or Ilha do Cerne on early Portuguese maps, the island was visited by Portuguese sailors in 1507. A Dutch fleet landed at what is now the Grand Port District and took possession of the island in 1598, renaming it after Maurice, Prince of Orange. Short-lived Dutch attempts at permanent settlement took place over a century aimed at exploiting the local ebony forests, establishing sugar and arrack production. When French colonisation began in 1715, the island was renamed "Isle de France". In 1810, the United Kingdom seized the island and under the Treaty of Paris, France ceded Mauritius and its dependencies to the United Kingdom. The British colony of Mauritius now included Rodrigues, Agaléga, St. Brandon, the Chagos Archipelago, and, until 1906, the Seychelles. Mauritius and France dispute sovereignty over the island of Tromelin, the treaty failing to mention it specifically. Mauritius became the British Empire's main sugar-producing colony and remained a primarily sugar-dominated plantation-based colony until independence, in 1968. The country became a republic in 1992 but retained the Privy Council of the United Kingdom as its highest court of appeal.
In 1965, three years before the independence of Mauritius, the United Kingdom split the Chagos Archipelago away from Mauritius, and the islands of Aldabra, Farquhar, and Desroches from the Seychelles, to form the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The local population was forcibly expelled and the largest island, Diego Garcia, was leased to the United States, restricting access to the archipelago. Ruling on the sovereignty dispute, the International Court of Justice has ordered the return of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, leading to a 2025 bilateral agreement on the recognition of its sovereignty on the islands, signed in May 2025.
Given its geographic location and colonial past, the people of Mauritius are diverse in ethnicity, culture, language and faith. It is the only country in Africa where Hinduism is the most practised religion. Indo-Mauritians make up the bulk of the population with significant Creole, Sino-Mauritian and Franco-Mauritian minorities. The island's government is closely modelled on the Westminster parliamentary system with Mauritius highly ranked for economic and political freedom. The Economist Democracy Index ranks Mauritius as the only country in Africa with full democracy while the V-Dem Democracy Indices classified it as an electoral democracy.
Mauritius ranks 73rd (very high) in the Human Development Index and the World Bank classifies it as a high-income economy. It is amongst the most competitive and most developed economies in Africa. The country is a welfare state. The government provides free universal health care, free education up through the tertiary level, and free public transportation for students, senior citizens, and disabled people. Mauritius is consistently ranked as the most peaceful country in Africa.
Along with the other Mascarene Islands, Mauritius is known for its biodiverse flora and fauna with many unique species endemic to the country. The main island was the only known home of the dodo, which became extinct soon after human settlement. Other endemic animals, such as the echo parakeet, the Mauritius kestrel and the pink pigeon, have survived and are subject to intensive and successful ongoing conservation efforts.
The first historical evidence of the existence of the island now known as Mauritius is on a 1502 map called the Cantino planisphere which was smuggled out of Portugal, for the Duke of Ferrara, by the Italian 'spy' Alberto Cantino. On this purloined copy of a Portuguese map, Mauritius bore the name Dina Arobi or Dina Arobin (likely Arabic: دنية عروبي Daniyah 'Arūbi or corruption of دبية عروبي Dībah 'Arūbi).
In 1507, Portuguese sailors visited the uninhabited island after being blown off course from their route to India via the Mozambique channel. The island appears with the Portuguese names Cirne (a typographical error where the 's' of the Portuguese 'Cisne' (Swan) became an 'r') or Do-Cerne (typo of 'do Cisne' meaning 'of' or 'belonging to the Swan') on early Portuguese maps, almost certainly from the name of a ship called Cisne which was captained by Diogo Fernandes Pereira in the 1507 expedition which discovered Mauritius and Rodrigues, which he called ilha de Diogo Fernandes, but poorly transcribed by non-Portuguese speakers as Domigo Friz or Domingo Frias. Diogo Fernandes Pereira may have been the first European to sail east of Madagascar island ('outer route' to the East Indies) rather than through the perceived safer route through the Mozambique channel, following the East African shore line.
In 1598, a Dutch squadron under Admiral Wybrand van Warwyck landed at Grand Port and named the island Mauritius, in honour of Prince Maurice van Nassau, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic. Later the island became a French colony and was renamed Isle de France. On 3 December 1810, the French surrendered the island to the United Kingdom during the Napoleonic Wars. Under British rule, the island's name reverted to Mauritius . Mauritius is also commonly known as Maurice (pronounced [mɔʁis]) and Île Maurice in French, as well as Moris (pronounced [moʁis]) in Mauritian Creole.
The island of Mauritius was uninhabited before its first recorded visit by Arab sailors in the end of the 10th century. Its name Dina Arobi has been associated with Arab sailors who first discovered the island.
The Treaty of Tordesillas, designed to prevent conflict between Portugal and Spain, gave the Kingdom of Portugal the right to colonise this part of the world. In 1507, Portuguese sailors came to the uninhabited island and established a visiting base. Diogo Fernandes Pereira, a Portuguese navigator, was the first European known to land in Mauritius. He named the island "Ilha do Cisne" ("Island of the Swan"). The Portuguese did not stay long as they were not interested in these islands. The Mascarene Islands were named after Pedro Mascarenhas, Viceroy of Portuguese India, after his visit to the islands in 1512. Rodrigues Island was named after Portuguese explorer Diogo Rodrigues, who first came upon the island in 1528.
In 1598, a Dutch squadron under Admiral Wybrand Van Warwyck landed at Grand Port and named the island "Mauritius" after Prince Maurice of Nassau (Dutch: Maurits van Nassau) of the Dutch Republic. The Dutch inhabited the island in 1638, from which they exploited ebony trees and introduced sugar cane, domestic animals and deer. It was from here that Dutch navigator Abel Tasman set out to seek the Great Southern Land, mapping parts of Tasmania, New Zealand and New Guinea.
The first Dutch settlement lasted 20 years. In 1639, the Dutch East India Company brought enslaved Malagasy to cut down ebony trees and to work in the new tobacco and sugar cane plantations. Several attempts to establish a colony permanently were subsequently made, but the settlements never developed enough to produce dividends, causing the Dutch to abandon Mauritius in 1710.
A 1755 article in the English Leeds Intelligencer claims that the island was abandoned due to the large number of long tailed macaque monkeys "which destroyed everything in it," and that it was also known at the time as the Island of Monkeys. Portuguese sailors had brought these monkeys to the island from their native habitat in Southeast Asia, prior to Dutch rule.
France, which already controlled neighbouring Île Bourbon (now Réunion), took control of Mauritius in 1715 and renamed it Isle de France. In 1723, the Code Noir was established to regulate slavery; it categorised one group of human beings as "goods", allowing the owner of these "goods" to be able to obtain insurance money and compensation in case of loss of his "goods". The 1735 arrival of French governor Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais coincided with the development of a prosperous economy based on sugar production. Mahé de La Bourdonnais established Port Louis as a naval base and a shipbuilding centre.
Under his governorship, numerous buildings were erected, a number of which are still standing. These include part of Government House, the Château de Mon Plaisir, and the Line Barracks, the headquarters of the police force. The island was under the administration of the French East India Company, which maintained its presence until 1767. During the French rule, slaves were brought from parts of Africa such as Mozambique and Zanzibar. As a result, the island's population rose dramatically from 15,000 to 49,000 within thirty years. Slave traders from Madagascar—Sakalava or Arabs—bought slaves from slavers in the Arab Swahili coast or Portuguese Mozambique and stopped at Seychelles for supplies before shipping the slaves to the slave markets of Mauritius, Réunion and India.
Of the 80,000 slaves imported to Réunion and Mauritius between 1769 and 1793, 45% was provided by slave traders of the Sakalava people in North West Madagascar, who raided East Africa and the Comoros for slaves, and the rest was provided by Arab slave traders who bought slaves from Portuguese Mozambique and transported them to Réunion via Madagascar. During the late eighteenth century, African slaves accounted for around 80 percent of the island's population, and by the early nineteenth century there were 60,000 slaves on the island. In early 1729, Indians from Pondicherry, India, arrived in Mauritius aboard the vessel La Sirène. Work contracts for these craftsmen were signed in 1734 at the time when they acquired their freedom.
From 1767 to 1810, except for a brief period during the French Revolution when the inhabitants set up a government virtually independent of France, the island was controlled by officials appointed by the French government. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre lived on the island from 1768 to 1771, then went back to France, where he wrote Paul et Virginie, a love story that made the Isle de France famous wherever the French language was spoken. In 1796 the settlers broke away from French control when the government in Paris attempted to abolish slavery.
Two famous French governors were the Vicomte de Souillac, who constructed the Chaussée in Port Louis and encouraged farmers to settle in the district of Savanne, and Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux, who saw to it that the French in the Indian Ocean should have their headquarters in Mauritius instead of Pondicherry in India. Charles Mathieu Isidore Decaen was a successful general in the French Revolutionary Wars and, in some ways, a rival of Napoléon I. He ruled as Governor of Isle de France and Réunion from 1803 to 1810.
British naval cartographer and explorer Matthew Flinders was arrested and detained by General Decaen on the island from 1803 to 1810, in contravention of an order from Napoléon. During the Napoleonic Wars, Mauritius became a base from which French corsairs organised successful raids on British commercial ships. The raids continued until 1810, when a Royal Navy expedition led by Commodore Josias Rowley, R.N., an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, was sent to capture the island. Despite winning the Battle of Grand Port against the British, the French could not prevent the British from landing at Cap Malheureux three months later. They formally surrendered the island on the fifth day of the invasion, 3 December 1810, on terms allowing settlers to keep their land and property and to use the French language and law of France in criminal and civil matters. Under British rule, the island's name reverted to Mauritius.
In the 19th century, Mauritius imported and exported convict labour, along with other British colonies. These migrations were caused both by labour shortages, due to the abolition of slavery, and by unmanageably large prison populations, partially attributed to social unrest in India. In 1811, the East India Company briefly stopped penal transportation sentences because, due to reports from returning convicts of indulgent treatment, they were no longer a deterrent to crime. Transport sentences were reinstated two years later due to swelling prison populations resulting partially from growing rebellion and unrest across the realm of the East India Company.
The British administration, which began with Sir Robert Farquhar as its first governor, oversaw rapid social and economic changes. However, it was tainted by the Ratsitatane episode. Ratsitatane, nephew of King Radama of Madagascar, was brought to Mauritius as a political prisoner. He managed to escape from prison and plotted a rebellion that would free the island's slaves. He was betrayed by his associate Laizaf and was caught by a group of militiamen and summarily executed.
In 1832, d'Épinay launched the first Mauritian newspaper (Le Cernéen), which was not controlled by the government. In the same year, there was a move by the procureur-general to abolish slavery without compensation to the slave owners. This gave rise to discontent, and, to check an eventual rebellion, the government ordered all the inhabitants to surrender their arms. A stone fortress, Fort Adelaide, was built on a hill, now known as the Citadel hill, in the centre of Port Louis to quell any uprising. After 1833, slavery was gradually abolished over several years, and the planters ultimately received two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves, who had been imported from Africa and Madagascar during the French occupation.
The abolition of slavery had important effects on Mauritius's society, economy and population. The planters brought a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites. Additionally, the British brought 8,740 Indian soldiers to the island.
Aapravasi Ghat, in the bay at Port Louis and now a UNESCO site, was the first British colony to serve as a major reception centre for indentured servants. The labourers brought from India were not always fairly treated, and a Frenchman of German origin, Adolphe de Plevitz, made himself the unofficial protector of these immigrants. In 1871 he helped them to write a petition that was sent to Governor Gordon. A commission was appointed and recommended several measures that would affect the lives of Indian labourers during the next fifty years.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Mauritius”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.