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Mauritius
After the 1965 London conference tied independence to an election, Ramgoolam's Labour-led alliance won in August 1967 and the Mauritius Independence Act took effect on 12 March 1968; Britain had detached the Chagos Islands on the way.
- Independence
- March 12, 1968
- Before
- Colony of Mauritius
- Metropole
- United Kingdom
- Leader
- Seewoosagur Ramgoolam
- Transition
- Negotiated
- Movement
- Mauritius Labour Party, allied with the Independent Forward Bloc and the Comité d'Action Musulman as the Independence Party
Sugar, Slavery and Indenture
The Dutch, French and British each held the once-uninhabited island in turn; Britain captured it in December 1810 and the Treaty of Paris of 1814 confirmed the cession. Slavery was abolished on 1 February 1835, freeing 66,343 people while planters received compensation, and between 1834 and 1910 some 451,776 indentured labourers arrived from India to work the sugar estates. By 1871 more than two-thirds of the population was Indian. A Franco-Mauritian planter elite kept economic power, and the franchise of 1886 reached barely two percent of adults.
Labour and the Franchise
Maurice Curé founded the Mauritius Labour Party in 1936 amid riots in 1937 and a strike in 1938. The 1947 constitution opened the vote to all adults who could sign their names, and in 1948 eleven of nineteen elected councillors were Hindu. Universal adult suffrage followed under the 1958 constitution. Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, a physician who had led the party since 1958, became chief minister in 1961 and premier after the 1963 election. Britain agreed in 1961 that the winner of the next election would head an internal government.
Lancaster House, Chagos and the Vote of 1967
The London constitutional conference of September 1965 decided that Mauritius would become independent if an election returned a party favouring it. The price, settled at Lancaster House on 23 September 1965, was the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago, made part of the British Indian Ocean Territory on 8 November 1965 in return for compensation raised to £3 million; the pro-association PMSD walked out. On 7 August 1967 the Independence Party won 43 of 70 seats. Communal riots in Port Louis in January 1968 killed at least 25 people before British troops restored order, and the Mauritius Independence Act 1968 took effect on 12 March.
Chronology
- 3 December 1810 — British forces capture Mauritius; ceded by the Treaty of Paris, 1814
- 1 February 1835 — Slavery abolished; Indian indentured labour follows
- 1936 — Mauritius Labour Party founded by Maurice Curé
- 1958 — Universal adult suffrage introduced
- 23 September 1965 — Lancaster House: independence in principle; Chagos detached (BIOT created 8 November)
- 7 August 1967 — Independence Party wins 43 of 70 seats
- January 1968 — Communal riots in Port Louis; at least 25 killed
- 12 March 1968 — Independence under the Mauritius Independence Act 1968
- 12 March 1992 — Mauritius becomes a republic
Aftermath
Mauritius kept the Queen as head of state until it became a republic on 12 March 1992, and Ramgoolam governed until 1982. The island became one of Africa's most durable multiparty democracies and, from the 1970s, a manufacturing and tourism economy. Britain's removal of roughly 2,000 Chagossians between 1967 and 1973 remained a wound: the International Court of Justice advised on 25 February 2019 that British administration of Chagos should end, the General Assembly agreed by 116 votes to 6, and on 22 May 2025 Britain signed an agreement handing sovereignty to Mauritius while leasing Diego Garcia.
Legacy
A negotiated, electoral independence that produced one of the continent's steadiest democracies, and a territorial excision that took Britain six decades to reverse.