Mauritius, an island nation in southeastern Africa, is isolated in the southwestern Indian Ocean. It is one of the few rich countries in Africa, with a per capita GDP of up to 11,360 US dollars, in the forefront of Africa, known as the "Switzerland of Africa", and it is also one of the world's top five romantic wedding honeymoon destinations, and the only African country to make the Spring Festival an official holiday. But it is such a country nearly 4,000 kilometers from India, but its main population is composed of Indians, accounting for 69%, so Mauritius is also called "Little India", so how did this phenomenon come about?
Colonial development, desert island into paradise
The entire territory of Mauritius consists of the island of Mauritius and other small archipelagos, with a total area of 2,040 square kilometers, with the nearest land being Madagascar, 800 kilometers away, and the African continent 2,000 kilometers away. This isolated geographical environment has left Mauritius with few indigenous populations since ancient times. In fact, not only Mauritius, but also in the southwest Indian Ocean, close to the eastern coast of Africa, among the few larger islands, only Madagascar has indigenous people, and other islands such as Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, etc., have only begun to settle on the islands in recent hundreds of years.
The first inhabitants were early colonists from Europe. The first to discover Mauritius was the Portuguese, but due to the limitations of navigation technology at that time, the fleet mostly sailed along the African coastline, so Mauritius, which was far from the African continent, was far from the main channel and was abandoned by the Portuguese. It was not until 1598 that the Dutch occupied the island and named it "Mauritius" after the Dutch monarch "Mauritius" as a supply depot, but due to the rat infestation that came with the island, the imported sugar cane could not be sustained, so it was abandoned in 1710.
Areas occupied by the Portuguese in the early colonial era
Schematic diagram of the invasion of Western colonists in the early colonial period of the 15th-17th centuries
In 1715, after the French occupied Reunion, they saw the comfortable subtropical maritime climate and fertile volcanic soil of Mauritius, so they occupied Mauqiu and renamed it "Île de France". While the French took over the sugar cane plantation, they seemed to agree with the Dutch introduction of species, continuing to introduce frogs from Europe, king lilies from South America, and palm trees from Southeast Asia.
However, due to the serious shortage of manpower, a large number of black slaves were trafficked from East Africa and Mauritius, and many Indians were also transported from the Indian colonies (the French Indian colony reached its peak in the mid-18th century, and then gradually squeezed out by the British), which was the first time Indians set foot in Mauritius.
From 1741 to 1754, French territories (purple) and spheres of influence (blue) in India were not taken over by India until 1954
With the rise of black slavery, the most evil by-product of the Age of Discovery, in Europe and the United States, which was still almost barbaric, islands such as Mauritius, which urgently needed labor for development work, received more and more black slaves from Africa and Madagascar, and by the end of the 18th century, the number of black slaves on the island had reached 50,000, far exceeding the white people and other races on the island. Since the French are not deeply rooted in racial discrimination like the Anglo-Saxons, they intermarried and multiplied, developing a race called the Creoles, which make up about 27% of the total population of Mauritius.
"Little India" Mauritius,
Of course, today's Creole people are not only a mixture of blacks and French, but have joined white Europeans (mostly French and Italian), Chinese, Indians, Southeast Asians, etc., so the Creole people are also known as cocktail blood. The Creoles are the second largest ethnic group in Mauritius, but make up 90% of the population in Seychelles, also a former French colony.
The reason why the Indian population came to the top was closely related to the British taking over Mauritius. In 1814, during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain sent troops to conquer Mauritius, which was confirmed by the Peace of Paris. With the improvement of ocean navigation technology by the Industrial Revolution, Mauritius has become an important transit point on the route from the Cape of Good Hope from South Africa to India and even to Australia, and is an important transshipment center in the world trading system at that time, and also the center of France's trade in the Indian Ocean, which naturally became a piece of fat in the eyes of the British.
In fact, the British acquired Mauritius, and indeed greatly consolidated its supremacy in the Indian Ocean trade. Since then, the plantation economy with sugarcane cultivation and sugar as the core has developed rapidly, and sugarcane is still the most important cultivation crop in Mauritius.
Slavery was abolished, and Indian laborers came to report
However, the situation in the world was reshaped by the influence of the popular Enlightenment ideological movement in the 18th century, in which human rights rationalism such as freedom, democracy, and equality emancipated the mind, and the abolitionist movement surged up; At the same time, the development of capitalism has been upgraded from primitive accumulation to capital accumulation, and the original "slave trade + plantation + raw material import" system, because it monopolizes the import of raw materials and imprisons a large number of labor forces, has not been conducive to the further development of capitalism, so industrial capitalists also support the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of black slave trade.
The British made Mauritius a pilot for the experiment of "replacing black slaves with free labor."
Between 1834 and 1920, nearly half a million indentured labourers came to Mauritius from British India, China, Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
So in 1833, the British State passed the Abolition of Slavery Act, and the British navy cruising the world's seas, especially off the coast of Africa, began to intercept all slave ships, and most of the rescued slaves were released on nearby islands, including Mauritius and Seychelles. The 65,000 black slaves on the island of Mauritius also became freedmen, generally refusing to continue working on the plantations, and there was a huge labor shortage.
Apravasi Gat, the capital of Mauritius, has been called "the birthplace of modern contract labour and the global economic system."
In order to solve this problem, the British began to carry out experiments in Mauritius, carrying out experiments to "replace black slaves with free labor" and actively recruiting indentured labor, and Mauritius became the "birthplace of modern indentured labor and the global economic system". The Apravasi Gat complex in Port Louis, the capital of Maoqiu, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2006 because it is a transit point for modern labour migrants.
In 1810, the British East India Company began transporting labor from Guangdong, China, to Mauritius.
Between 1834 and 1920, nearly 500,000 indentured labourers came to Mauritius from British India, China, Southeast Asia, etc., entering Apravasi Gat, either staying in the sugar cane forests and sugar mills of Mauritius or transported to Australia, South Africa, East Africa or the Caribbean of North America, including tens of thousands of Chinese labourers. The influx of these laborers surpassed that of black slaves and white immigrants who had been breeding in Mauritius for nearly a century.
Number of Indian laborers emigrating from 1830 to 1917.
The large base also makes its descendants the largest ethnic group in Mauritius. So of the total population of 1.26 million in Mauritius (2020), 69% are of Indian and Pakistani descent, 27% are Creoles (mixed European and African descent), and the remaining 2.3% are Chinese and 1.7% European.
Statue of Hindu Shiva in Mauritius.
After the dominance of the Indians, their living habits and religious beliefs affected all aspects of Mauritian society, and Hinduism became the dominant religion in Mauritius. Political and economic power in Mauritius also began to shift from French Mauritians and Creoles to Indians. Of course, this transfer is also inseparable from the support of the British.
From 1776 to 1986, 56 countries became independent from the "sun never sets" British Empire.
Indentured employees rose and went all over the world in a "coating"
We know that the British Empire in the colonial era is known as the empire of the sun never sets, controlling 33.67 million square kilometers of land, accounting for about 24.75% of the world's total land area, and the total population of Britain at its peak was only 66 million, if you exclude the elderly, children and housewives, only less than 30 million can actually participate in production and colonial activities, and there is a serious shortage of manpower, so the Indians with a large population, flexible brains and lack of self-improvement consciousness have become the best choice for the British to train and manage India and even a number of colonies.
During the concession period, the Indian "red-headed Asan" of the Shanghai patrol house was a Sikh ethnic group, named after the red cloth head.
Of course, the British also found that some Indians are passive, unreliable, opportunistic, but mostly concentrated on Hindus, so the British mainly cooperate with Sikhs who believe in Sikhism in the military, and the Indian "red-headed Asan" of the Shanghai patrol house during the concession period is the Sikh nationality, named after the red cloth head, and the proportion of Sikh soldiers in the Indian army is still very high; In terms of business, it mainly cooperates with the Parsi who believe in Zoroastrianism, and the Tata consortium, the earliest Tata consortium in India, is run by the Parsi.
When the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China in 1900, the British army at that time was almost all Indian troops, and they were considered the best at finding treasures in the Eight-Nation Alliance.
These people gradually developed into the "wrapping" of the British (wrapping is equivalent to household slaves, referring to the slave group of emperors and princes who served for generations under the Eight Banners system of the Qing Dynasty, but this is only relative to the master, basically in society and the general banner people in the Eight Banners are in the same rank, they are slaves to the ruling class, but outside the ruling class, they are "white gloves"), and eventually brought by the British to colonies around the world, such as the British as officers, Indians as soldiers of the colonial army, Military and police patrols in charge of law and order work are the root cause of why there are still more than 1.3 million Indians in South Africa.
The colonial army in which the British were officers and the Indians were soldiers solved the problem of insufficient British manpower and reduced war losses.
After these "coatings" arrived in the colonies with the British "masters", they brought a large number of fellow villagers, so the Indians relied on this relationship and the British foolish indentured labor treatment, and they all left their homeland. According to rough statistics, in the 20th century, more than 20 million Indians left India and emigrated to other countries, which is far more than the number of immigrants from China. For example, "Mahatma" Gandhi, after returning from his studies in the UK, his lawyer's business history was hit, and after he could not get mixed up, he received a case from an Indian in South Africa, so he went to South Africa to "brush up on experience", and only returned to India more than 20 years later to lead the national liberation movement.
Mahatma Gandhi's visit to Mauritius in 1901 inspired the independence movement in Mauritius, and the President of Mauritius laid a wreath at Gandhi's statue
In addition to "recruiting" Indians to work on the plantations in Mauritius, the British brought nearly 9,000 Indian soldiers to maintain law and order in Mauritius. Mahatma Gandhi's visit to Mauritius in 1901 inspired the Indian workers in Mauritius to demand greater rights, and eventually gave birth to the first political party in Mauritius, the Labour Party, which began to organize the independence movement in Mauritius. Of course, these are all afterthoughts.
Indian-inspired curry rice is a common element in the Mauritian diet.
"A Hindu temple in the Indian style of the capital of Mauritius
Since then, the population composition of Mauritius has completely completed the "shuffle", and Indians have always been the largest ethnic group in Mauritius, so when you cross the ocean and come to Mauritius, the curry-flavored food floating on the streets makes you suddenly have the illusion of coming to India.
References: "Paradise - Mauritius" - Reference Network;
Mauritius, why is 67% of the population of Indian descent? --Eurasian Society for Systems Science;
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Note: This article is the sixth issue of the "Paradise Island" Mauritius series, just a word of the family, welcome to correct and forward. In addition, the picture in the article is quoted from the Internet, if there is a copyright private link, please delete.