Chapter 01 · Antiquity – 1598
The Empty Island & Its First Visitors
Mauritius is one of the few inhabited places on Earth with no indigenous population: a volcanic island left empty until ocean-going sailors began to call.
Lying some 800 kilometres east of Madagascar, Mauritius is a relatively young volcanic island that was never reached by humans in the long pre-modern settlement of the Indian Ocean. It had no indigenous people. The land that European settlers later found was instead inhabited by a distinctive fauna evolved in isolation, most famously the flightless dodo (Raphus cucullatus), a large ground bird with no instinctive fear of humans.
Arab and Malay sailors crossing the western Indian Ocean appear to have known of the island in the medieval period; it is often said to have appeared on Arab maps under the name 'Dina Arobi'. These mariners did not settle it, and the island remained uninhabited.
The first recorded European contact came with the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, as their navigators charted the Mascarene Islands (Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues) on the route to India around 1507. The Portuguese used the islands as a way-station for provisions but established no permanent colony, leaving Mauritius still without inhabitants when other Europeans arrived.
Turning points
- medieval periodPeoples & Migration
Known to Arab and Malay sailors
Mariners crossing the Indian Ocean are thought to have known the uninhabited island, reputedly recorded on Arab maps as 'Dina Arobi'.
See the data - c. 1507–1512Colonisation
Portuguese chart the Mascarenes
Portuguese navigators sight and map Mauritius and the neighbouring islands as a provisioning stop, but found no colony.
See the data
Chapter sources: Mauritius, Mauritius, Explore Mauritius — Republic of Mauritius
Chapter 02 · 1598 – 1710
The Dutch & the Dodo
The Dutch gave the island its name and the world a byword for extinction, but never made the colony pay, and abandoned it after little more than a century.
In 1598 a Dutch fleet under Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck took possession of the island and named it Mauritius in honour of Maurice of Nassau (Maurits van Nassau), the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic. For decades the Dutch used the island chiefly as a way-station; permanent settlement began only in 1638, with later attempts that never grew into a self-sustaining colony.
The Dutch exploited the island's ebony forests and introduced sugar cane, deer, pigs and other animals, and they imported enslaved labour. The combination of hunting, habitat destruction and introduced predators proved fatal to the island's defenceless endemic species. The dodo, encountered by the first Dutch visitors, was driven to extinction within decades; the last widely accepted sightings fall in the 1660s, and it is among the best-known human-caused extinctions in history.
The Dutch settlements were repeatedly troubled by cyclones, drought, disease, falling timber yields and rats, and never returned a reliable profit. The Dutch East India Company finally abandoned Mauritius in 1710, leaving the island once more without a governing power and largely depopulated of settlers.
“Within decades of the first Dutch landings, the dodo was gone — among the earliest extinctions firmly attributable to human activity.”
— Natural History Museum, London
Turning points
- 1598Colonisation
The Dutch name the island Mauritius
Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck claims the island and names it for Maurice of Nassau, stadtholder of the Dutch Republic.
See the data - 1638Colonisation
First permanent Dutch settlement
The Dutch East India Company establishes a settlement, exploiting ebony forests and introducing sugar cane and livestock.
See the data - 1660sCatastrophe
Extinction of the dodo
Hunting, deforestation and introduced animals wipe out the flightless dodo within decades of human arrival; last accepted sightings fall in the 1660s.
See the data - 1710Colonisation
The Dutch abandon Mauritius
After unprofitable settlements plagued by storms, pests and disease, the Dutch East India Company leaves the island.
See the data
Chapter sources: Mauritius, Mauritius, Explore Mauritius — Republic of Mauritius, The dodo bird: the real facts about this icon of extinction, Dodo
Chapter 03 · 1715 – 1810
Isle de France: Sugar & Slavery
France claimed the empty island as the Isle de France, founded Port Louis, and built a plantation economy on the forced labour of enslaved Africans and Malagasy.
In 1715 France took possession of the island and renamed it Isle de France, though active colonisation began only when the French East India Company assumed control in 1721. The colony's character was set by its most consequential governor, Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, who arrived in 1735. He developed the harbour at Port Louis into a fortified naval base, dockyard and capital, making the island a strategic French anchor in the Indian Ocean.
The colonial economy rested on sugar cane and other plantation crops, and on slavery. Tens of thousands of enslaved people were brought from Madagascar, East Africa, West Africa and India to clear forest and work the estates; by the late eighteenth century enslaved people formed the great majority of the population. Their resistance left a lasting mark on the landscape: escapees, known as maroons, took refuge on the near-inaccessible mountain of Le Morne Brabant in the island's southwest.
Beyond its plantations, the Isle de France served France as a privateering base and a hub of Indian Ocean commerce, while neighbouring Île Bourbon (Réunion) and Rodrigues formed part of the same colonial sphere. The island's strategic value made it a target once France and Britain were again at war during the Napoleonic Wars.
Turning points
- 1715Colonisation
France claims the Isle de France
France takes formal possession of the uninhabited island, renaming it Isle de France; colonisation begins under the French East India Company from 1721.
See the data - 18th centuryEconomy & Trade
A slave-worked plantation economy
Enslaved Africans, Malagasy and others are imported in large numbers to work sugar and other estates; they become the majority of the population.
See the data - 1735–1736Formation
- 18th – early 19th centuryPeoples & Migration
Maroons of Le Morne Brabant
Escaped slaves take refuge on the isolated cliffs of Le Morne, later inscribed by UNESCO as a symbol of the struggle for freedom.
See the data
Figures of the era
Chapter sources: Mauritius, Isle de France (Mauritius), Le Morne Cultural Landscape (World Heritage List), Le Morne Brabant
Chapter 04 · 1810 – 1910
British Mauritius: Abolition & Indenture
Britain captured the island in 1810; after abolishing slavery in 1835 it imported nearly half a million indentured Indians, remaking the island's people for good.
Britain captured the Isle de France in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars. A British squadron suffered a sharp defeat at the Battle of Grand Port in August 1810 — the only naval victory inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe — but a far larger British expedition landed and forced the French garrison to surrender in December 1810. The Treaty of Paris of 1814 confirmed British possession; Britain restored the name Mauritius while allowing the French settlers to keep their language, laws, religion and property.
Britain abolished slavery in its empire in the 1830s, and emancipation took effect in Mauritius on 1 February 1835, followed by a period of 'apprenticeship'. To replace the freed labourers, planters turned to indentured workers from British India under a system begun in 1834 and known as the 'Great Experiment'. Between 1834 and the early twentieth century roughly half a million indentured Indians arrived; most landed and were processed at the immigration depot at Port Louis now known as the Aapravasi Ghat, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006.
Indian indenture transformed the island's demography, making people of Indian origin the largest community and adding to a population that already included Creoles descended from enslaved Africans and Malagasy, Franco-Mauritians, and later Chinese traders. The economy remained dominated by a single crop — sugar — leaving Mauritius highly vulnerable to cyclones and to swings in world sugar prices, a dependence that would shape its politics into the twentieth century.
“Aapravasi Ghat was the first site chosen for the 'great experiment' in the use of indentured rather than enslaved labour.”
— UNESCO World Heritage Centre
Turning points
- August–December 1810War & Rupture
British capture of the Isle de France
After the French naval victory at Grand Port, a large British force lands and compels the surrender of the island in December 1810.
See the data - 1814Colonisation
Treaty of Paris confirms British rule
Britain retains the island and renames it Mauritius, while French settlers keep their language, laws and religion.
See the data - 1834–c. 1910Peoples & Migration
Indian indenture and the Aapravasi Ghat
Around half a million indentured labourers from India arrive through the Port Louis depot, the 'Great Experiment', reshaping the island's population.
See the data - 1 February 1835Politics & Power
Chapter sources: Mauritius, Mauritius, Battle of Grand Port, Aapravasi Ghat, Aapravasi Ghat (World Heritage List), Le Morne Cultural Landscape (World Heritage List)
Chapter 05 · 1910 – 1968
The Road to Independence
A sugar-island society of descendants of the enslaved and the indentured organised, won the vote, and steered a divided colony to independence in 1968.
Through the early twentieth century the descendants of indentured labourers and of enslaved people pressed for political and economic rights against a planter elite. Labour unrest in the 1930s and 1940s, and the gradual extension of the franchise, opened the way to representative politics. The Mauritius Labour Party, founded in 1936, became the principal vehicle of this movement.
Its leading figure was Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, a London-trained doctor who emerged as the dominant politician of the late-colonial era. Under his leadership the Labour Party built multi-ethnic support and won successive elections as Britain widened self-government. Constitutional conferences in London negotiated the terms of independence, against the anxieties of communities who feared domination in a plural society.
Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968, remaining within the Commonwealth with the British monarch as head of state and Ramgoolam as the first prime minister. The transition was overshadowed by communal tension and by a decision taken before independence: in 1965 Britain had detached the Chagos Archipelago to form the British Indian Ocean Territory, a separation Mauritius would contest for decades.
Turning points
- 1936Politics & Power
- 1965Politics & Power
- 12 March 1968Independence
Independence from the United Kingdom
Mauritius becomes an independent state within the Commonwealth, with Seewoosagur Ramgoolam as first prime minister.
See the data
Figures of the era
Chapter sources: Mauritius, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam (1900–1985), Chagos Archipelago, Expulsion of the Chagossians, Mauritius — Independence, Economy, Culture
Chapter 06 · 1968 – present
Republic & African Success Story
From a one-crop colony, Mauritius built a diversified economy and a durable multi-ethnic democracy, while pursuing its claim to the Chagos Archipelago.
Independent Mauritius defied early predictions of failure. Beginning in the 1970s it diversified out of sugar through an export-processing zone for textiles and garments, then through tourism and offshore financial services, achieving sustained growth and rising into the ranks of upper-middle-income countries. With strong human-development indicators and a peaceful tradition of alternating governments, it is frequently cited as an African success story and one of the continent's most stable democracies.
The country became a republic on 12 March 1992, replacing the British monarch with a Mauritian president as head of state while retaining its parliamentary system. Its politics have remained genuinely competitive, with power passing between Labour, the Mauritian Militant Movement and other parties, and its society has managed a notably plural mix of Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sino-Mauritian communities without large-scale conflict.
Mauritius has long maintained that its decolonisation was incomplete because Britain retained the Chagos Archipelago, whose inhabitants were forcibly removed between 1968 and 1973 to make way for the US military base on Diego Garcia. In 2019 the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that Britain's continued administration was unlawful and should end, and the UN General Assembly endorsed this. After negotiations, the United Kingdom and Mauritius signed an agreement on 22 May 2025 recognising Mauritian sovereignty over the archipelago while leasing the Diego Garcia base back to the UK for an initial 99 years.
“Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago in its entirety, including Diego Garcia.”
— UK–Mauritius Agreement, signed 22 May 2025
Turning points
- 1970s onwardEconomy & Trade
Diversification beyond sugar
An export-processing zone, tourism and financial services transform a one-crop colony into a diversified, growing economy.
See the data - 12 March 1992Politics & Power
- 2019Politics & Power
- 22 May 2025Politics & Power
Figures of the era
Sir Anerood Jugnauth1930–2021
Prime Minister and later President
Dominant figure of post-1982 politics who oversaw much of the island's economic diversification and the transition to a republic in 1992.
Chapter sources: Mauritius — Independence, Economy, Culture, Mauritius, Mauritius Overview, Chagos Archipelago, 2025 treaty on the British Indian Ocean Territory / Chagos Archipelago, Mauritius No. 1 (2025): Agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago including Diego Garcia