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Mauritius Rise of the Sugar Economy
Under the British, Mauritius was no longer a free port.
To
compensate for the resulting loss in trade, the government
encouraged sugar production. In 1825 Britain equalized the
duty
on sugar from all of its colonies, providing a strong
stimulus
for Mauritians to produce more sugar. Production leaped
from
11,000 tons in 1825 to 21,000 tons in 1826; by 1854
production
exceeded 100,000 tons. By the mid-nineteenth century,
Mauritius
had reached the apex of its importance in the world sugar
market:
it was Britain's main sugar-producing colony and produced
9.4
percent of the world's sugarcane between 1855 and 1859.
Although
overall production would continue to rise into the
twentieth
century, declines in world prices and a massive increase
in
production in other countries robbed Mauritius of its
dominant
role in subsequent years. Nonetheless, as sugar increased
in
economic importance, the percentage of food crop
production
dropped accordingly, and landownership became concentrated
in
large, profitable estates.
Indentured workers from India replaced slaves as a
source of
cheap labor for the sugar plantations. Between 1834 and
1910 (the
last year of arrivals), 451,776 Indians migrated to
Mauritius,
the majority arriving before 1865. Because 157,639 of
these
Indians left, the island had a net gain of 294,137 Indians
during
the period. Most workers came from Bengal and Madras,
under
contract to work for at least ten years for low wages
under harsh
conditions. At the end of their contracts, workers
supposedly had
the option of returning home, but plantation owners often
succeeded in eliminating this choice. Many plantation
owners
punished workers with beatings, hunted down those who ran
away
and imprisoned them, and unjustly withheld pay. In 1878 a
labor
law regularized the pay system, and in 1917 the indenture
system
formally ended. Moreover, a 1922 law permitted workers to
choose
their places of work.
By 1871 more than 68 percent of the population was
Indian, of
which more than 25 percent had been born in Mauritius. In
1931
the proportion of Indians in the population was the same,
but
more than 93 percent of them were natives. By contrast,
Mauritius
had no immigration from Africa. The freed slaves and their
Creole
offspring left the plantations to become fishers,
dockworkers,
and civil servants and formed about 20 percent of the
population
in 1931. A number of Chinese immigrated during the
nineteenth
century, and this group made up about 2 percent of the
population
in 1931. The Indian rupee became the island's official
currency
in 1876.
Starting in the 1860s, the island's sugar economy
declined in
the face of varied pressures. As sugar beet production and
sugarcane production in other countries increased, world
prices
declined. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shifted
trade
routes away from the Indian Ocean. And, in addition to
regularly
occurring droughts and cyclones, a deadly malaria epidemic
killed
more than 40,000 people between 1867 and 1869. The FrancoMauritian plantation owners responded in several ways.
They cut
costs by centralizing sugar production in fewer factories.
Furthermore, to increase the profitability of their
operations,
from the 1870s to about 1920 the planters sold the less
productive portions of their landholdings. The process was
known
as the grand morcellement, and it permitted many
Indians
who could put together enough capital to become small
landowners.
This meant that for the first time, sugar was produced on
small
plots with free labor. Between 1864 and 1900, according to
one
scholar, Indians purchased 24 million rupees worth of
land. By
1921 Indians owned about 35 percent of the island's
cultivated
land.
Data as of August 1994
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