Mauritius is an African success story. Today, it is one of Africa's few Upper Middle Income countries, with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) six times its regional average. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Mauritius had annual per capita GDP growth similar to that of Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. Mauritius's Human Development Index is similar to theirs as well. It is a democratic and well-governed country. Mauritius is one of only five African countries to have earned a positive ‘stateness’ measure from the World Bank, an index used to represent its political stability, governmental capabilities, and rule of law (Bratton and Chang 2006, Appendix 2, Lange 2003, p. 402, Subramanian and Roy 2001, pp. 6–9). Mauritius is, by all accounts, extraordinary by African standards.
Explicating the causes of the ‘Mauritian Miracle’ has attracted considerable attention from economists and political scientists in recent years. They have found that, like many of the East Asian ‘Tigers’, Mauritius achieved its impressive economic growth since 1970 without strict adherence to the orthodox economic policies of the Washington Consensus (see Subramanian and Roy 2001). Instead, the strength of Mauritian state institutions seems to be at the core of its developmental success (e.g., Meinsenhelder 1997, Minogue 1992, Subramanian and Roy 2001). Mauritius has been successful because it possesses significant levels of what political scientists call ‘state capacity’. State capacity refers to the ability of government officials to implement their decrees – whether to collect taxes, regulate the economy, or provide public goods such as roads and schools (Mann 1984). In Mauritius, bureaucrats are recruited according to meritocratic criteria, helping to render the state relatively immune from rent seeking and corruption, particularly when compared to many African states. These rationalised bureaucratic precepts, and the existence of state capacity more generally, have played a central role in forging the Mauritian Miracle.
Yet this assessment of the Mauritian state begs the prior question: what were the sources of Mauritian state capacity which laid the groundwork for the country's developmental success after 1970? Recent studies point to some historical sources of Mauritius's contemporary accomplishments. For instance, Lange (2003, 2009) contends that the ‘directness’ of British rule in Mauritius, something brought about by labour unrest in the 1930s and 1940s, promoted the island's distinctive trajectory. Bräutigam (2008), alternatively, maintains that haggling between colonial officials and sugar planters over taxation positioned Mauritius for success, though she too emphasises developments in the twentieth century. While I agree that the colonial era helped Mauritius embark on a trajectory unlike that of most African countries, I accentuate factors that lie even further in the island's colonial past. In this article, I highlight how Mauritian sugar planters and colonial officials collaborated to encourage sugar exports in the nineteenth century and how their efforts promoted the growth of state capacity. This reservoir of state capacity almost certainly played an important long-term role in Mauritian economic and political development, given that scholars largely regard state building as a path-dependent phenomenon which centrally influences economic development (Evans 1995, Kohli 2004).
At the core of Mauritius's state-building projects was an export-oriented coalition between the island's sugar-exporting elite and the British colonial government. A narrow stratum of sugar planters, known as the ‘Franco-Mauritians’, dominated politics when the island's first major commodity boom, in sugar, began in 1825. This article depicts how the Franco-Mauritians lobbied British officials to assist export production, which propelled a tenfold increase in annual sugar exports from the island. Export growth revealed a number of economic bottlenecks, including an insufficient labour supply, rising transport costs, and problems with the island's undiversified sugarcane stock. Sugar elites organised themselves through groups such as the Chamber of Agriculture and pressed the state for help resolving these barriers to expanded export production. The state repeatedly aided the Franco-Mauritians by promoting immigration, ‘regulating’ the island's labour supply, building railways, and undertaking research and development initiatives. Collectively, these endeavours enhanced the capabilities of the Mauritian state as the century progressed.
The influence of this export-oriented coalition may help explain why Mauritius has been able to transcend pitfalls that have bedevilled other African countries, many of which seemed better poised for economic and political development than a far-flung island east of Madagascar. Indeed, although Mauritius exhibits some manifest differences from other African states, they share something fundamental: they were integrated into the world economy as colonial dependencies and thus relied heavily on primary commodity exporting, which should have sensitised them to export opportunities. Yet many post-war African governments undermined the vitality of their export sectors in the midst of unprecedented commodity booms. Others similarly failed to deepen nascent capitalist industries that seemed poised for success. Scholars from different perspectives suggest that coalitional politics affected these economic perplexities. Ruling political coalitions in Africa have typically not been led by groups with deep connections to economic production (e.g., Bates 1981, Boone 1992, pp. 4, 20–23). Whereas exporters were marginalised politically in many African countries, the opposite was true in Mauritius. The export-oriented nature of Mauritius's ruling coalition was central to why the colonial state eagerly assisted export producers via state building when they requested it.
Yet although Mauritian state building eventually had beneficial ramifications, it also had serious and brutal consequences. Mauritius's state building success came on the backs of relentlessly exploited slaves and indentured labourers. Sugar planters compelled the government to ignore mistreatment on sugar estates, implement unreasonable fines and annual passport fees in the name of preventing ‘vagrancy’, and harass those workers who tried to search for a better life in urban professions. Planters' actions were expressly designed to subjugate and repress the politically powerless in order to maximise their economic power. Moreover, the fact that class divides coincided with racial difference meant that economic and political contention between elites and labourers on Mauritius became imbued with what was, at times, virulent racism. The worst of these endeavours were related to the planters' quest to secure an adequate labour supply in the four decades after 1825. Later initiatives, such as railway construction and research and development programmes, were fairly benign. Together, these undertakings transformed the island's economy and governmental capabilities. In Mauritius, then, one finds something of a developmental paradox: although the long-term consequences of state building have led to a regional ‘miracle’, the way in which the island's elite and government laid the groundwork for it was normatively reprehensible.
Mauritian society at the start of the sugar boom, circa 1825
During the nineteenth century, Mauritius was a colonial dependency of Britain, but it was a marginal part of the British Empire. The colonial governor received few directives from London, so he had ‘considerable discretionary authority’ in policymaking and became closely aligned with sugar interests, since the colony's economic viability depended on sugar exports (Lange 2009, pp. 67, 76–77). In reality, the Franco-Mauritians ‘dominated island politics despite the façade of British rule’ and ‘pulled the levers of the colonial state’. Sugar elites controlled most of the seats in the colonial parliament and staffed much of the bureaucracy (Storey 1997, pp. 37, 55, 57). British officials may have formally exercised control in Mauritius but they did so in close collaboration with sugar planters.
Sugar elites formed the upper stratum of Mauritian society, representing around nine per cent of the population in the 1830s but holding most of the island's economic and political power (Lange 2009, pp. 72–73, Storey 1997, pp. 19–20). The development of Mauritius's landed elite was facilitated by the fact that the island was uninhabited prior to Europeans' arrival, thereby removing impediments to land consolidation that existed elsewhere in colonial Africa (Greig, Turner and D'Arcy 2011, pp. 158–160, Phillips 1989). Some sugar planters had obtained their landholdings as grants during French rule (1715–1810), which preceded British colonialism, and were therefore known as the Franco-Mauritians. Other sugar planters began as merchants and later diversified into landholding as export opportunities blossomed after 1825. The Franco-Mauritians were a small group, with a mere 150 large sugar planters in 1832 (Teelock 1998, pp. 297–301). Their main advocacy group was the Chamber of Agriculture, formed in 1853, though sugar planters mobilised collectively before the 1850s through groups such as the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences (Storey 1997, pp. 27, 35–37, Napal 1984, pp. 34–50). Sugar planters were also given half of the 14 seats on the colonial legislative council in 1831 (Carter 1995, p. 13). At mid-century, the colonial governor, George Anderson, increased the slots allotted on the legislative council for ‘unofficial members’ – drawn from the ranks of sugar elites and merchants – giving local interests a majority on the most important governing institution in the colony (Selvon 2001, pp. 285–288). The Franco-Mauritians were undeniably the leading economic, political, and social force in Mauritius.
At the other end of the spectrum, the popular classes were political marginalised throughout the nineteenth century. Around 1830, slaves, freedmen, and Creoles constituted nine-tenths of Mauritius's population. The French began importing slaves to Mauritius in the 1720s, and slaves were critical to the island's plantation economy. But Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in the early 1830s (slavery was officially abolished in Mauritius in 1835), which changed the composition of the labouring classes in Mauritius. Sugar planters accelerated the importation of indentured workers from India, as 338,000 Indians came to the island between 1843 and 1865; another 112,000 Indian and Chinese workers did likewise before 1920. Not all of these workers remained on the plantation, however. Maroonage during slave times and, later, desertion by indentured labourers were perennial concerns for sugar planters, as labourers often sought a better life in the capital of Port Louis as dockworkers, artisans, or in other urban jobs. Many planters suspected that many middle- and lower-class urban workers had deserted the rural sugar economy and believed the state should compel them to ‘re-engage’ on the plantation. Some labourers even became small-scale landowners once they fulfilled their service contracts, giving rise to a class of ‘Indo-Mauritian’ smallholders later in the nineteenth century (Lange 2009, pp. 72–77). Much of the island's politics consequently pivoted on sugar planters' desire for an adequate labour supply and the attendant conflict this need created with the popular classes, igniting class- and race-based discord that remains today.1
State building in colonial Mauritius largely stemmed from the exigencies of the expanding sugar economy and the economic goals of the Franco-Mauritian elite. In 1825, at the beginning of the sugar boom, the Mauritian state was characteristic of what scholars regard as a weak state. There was no countrywide system of taxation; instead, the government depended heavily on customs duties and other taxes collected in Port Louis. The island had virtually no transportation infrastructure, which can be useful to governments when they need to rapidly deploy their agents. The main road on the island, which would eventually connect Port Louis on the west coast to Mahebourg on the east coast, was under construction but not complete (Lamusse 1964b, p. 356). There was no standing state institutional presence outside of the capital city. The countryside was the unfettered dominion of sugar planters. In short, although the Franco-Mauritians exerted profound influence over the colonial government, state capacity was low.
This state of affairs would change considerably in the wake of the country's first major commodity boom, in sugar, beginning in 1825. A number of factors created a long-term secular trend of rising sugar prices between 1825 and 1865. First, Britain repealed a preferential tariff on West Indian sugar in 1825, making Mauritian sugar more attractive to British importers. The change ‘revolutionized Mauritian agriculture’ and stimulated the doubling of sugar exports in the second half of the 1820s. Second, sugar prices paid in London rose by approximately 45% from the early-1830s to the mid 1840s, and there was a spectacular growth of sugar demand in Britain throughout the nineteenth century (Mintz 1985, pp. 74–150). Finally, in 1851, Britain repealed a ban on foreign ships in its colonial ports, opening Mauritius to the wider global economy. Mauritius was the leading supplier of sugar to Britain at mid-century and then accounted for 9% of global sugarcane production. Throughout the century, sugar exports always accounted for at least 85% of Mauritian exports. Annual exports rose from 11,107 tons before the 1825 tariff repeal to over 123,000 tons by the early 1860s; their value exploded as well, from £170,342 in 1824 to over £2.1 million annually by the early 1860s (Allen 1999, pp. 12–30, quote from p. 12, Storey 1997, p. 38).
The Franco-Mauritians were the principal beneficiary of the growth in sugar exports. They doubled the area devoted to sugar production in the first decade of the boom, from 24,967 arpents in 1826 to 57,933 arpents by 1835. From the 1860s on, sugar production spread across 123,000 arpents (Teelock 1998, p. 84).2 Throughout the century, sugar planters leaned on colonial administrators to help them achieve their economic goals. Gradually, the Mauritian state expanded its power and oversight of Mauritian society. During this early phase of expansion, the Franco-Mauritians' major policy concern was whether they could secure an adequate labour supply. In the second half of the nineteenth century, sugar prices stagnated with the rise of beet sugar production in Europe; after 1880, they steadily declined. In this later era, Franco-Mauritian planters pursued new public goods to reduce transport costs and improve the quality of their cane stocks, in order to remain internationally competitive. Subsequent state–elite collaboration helped the sugar industry remain viable amid hard times, and export production remained steady from the late 1850s to the early 1890s (usually around 115,000 tons annually) (Allen 1999, p. 23). The next two sections successively discuss how sugar planters impelled the state to intervene in the political economy during these two phases of growth and stagnation. The result of these efforts was an accretion of new state capacity.
Sugar planters impel labour coercion by the state, 1825–1871
The principal economic threat to the sugar elite in the early boom years was planters' uncertainty over the island's labour supply, particularly after the abolition of slavery in 1835. The way in which the state responded to help planters secure labour reflected both the government's sensitivity toward export elites, as well as its indifference toward the well-being of the majority of the island's population. The international competitiveness of Mauritian sugar hinged on abundant cheap labour, and until 1835, African slaves constituted the island's labour supply. But Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 (though the colonial governor in Mauritius, Robert Farquhar, lobbied unsuccessfully for the island's exemption from the ban). Mauritian planters turned to importing slaves illegally, but this practice ended in 1835, after the British banned slavery in its colonies following a large and deadly slave revolt in Jamaica, then Britain's leading sugar supplier.3 London compensated Mauritian sugar planters over £2 million for their losses, but the abolition of slavery created a labour supply problem as most former slaves left the sugar economy and became subsistence farmers (Allen 1999, pp. 14–15, Carter 1995, pp. 14–17, Northrup 1995, p. 20).
The state assisted sugar planters to obtain labourers in two main ways. First, the state helped planters acquire workers from India through a subsidised immigration programme. Second, the state used the judicial branch to tilt legal decision-making in the planters' favour, thus providing labourers flimsy legal recourse against their overlords once on the island. Immediately after slavery was outlawed in Mauritius, sugar planters took to importing Indian labourers on their own because they believed it would be easier than coercing the newly emancipated slave population. Between 1834 and 1838, nearly 24,000 labourers arrived in Mauritius, which amounted to roughly 35% of the slaves who had been emancipated in 1835. Treatment of these workers was as bad as during slavery, though the government did little to temper the harsh treatment of Indians. In some respects, the judiciary buttressed planters' behaviour. A group of bureaucrats known as the stipendiary magistrates was responsible for overseeing labour relations. Stipendiary magistrates had been appointed originally to implement the abolition of slavery in Britain's colonies and were retained afterwards as the judicial officials who oversaw vagrancy and breach of contract cases. By 1837, there were 16 magistrates in Mauritius (Green 1974, pp. 43–44, Nwulia 1978, p. 91, Smith 1995, p. 268). Few had proper legal training, and most were half-time military or naval officers. More important, stipendiary magistrates were given ‘wretchedly low salaries to adjudicate cases arising between masters and apprentices’ (Green 1974, pp. 43–44). Low salaries and improper training limited the ability of the stipendiary magistrates to act independently of powerful social forces.
Stipendiary magistrates in Mauritius typically sided with planters in their investigations of labourers' circumstances and zealously awarded corporal punishment for transgressions by labourers, so much so that officials in London inquired about the high rates of corporal punishment in Mauritius during the late 1830s. Magistrates' sensitivity to planters' interests was due to their low pay, as well as the influence planters had to sometimes remove magistrates if they infringed on sugar elites' behaviour. A British missionary noted in 1838 that: ‘It is said that those who have been removed from the office of special magistrate have universally been those who filled it the most efficiently, in the performance of their duty as the protectors of the Apprentices [labourers]’ (quoted in Nwulia 1978, p. 95). Magistrates' site visits to plantations were ‘cursory and largely ineffective’. They had little de facto power to sanction estate owners, and the interpreters magistrates needed to communicate with the labourers were chronically lacking. Overall, ‘stipendiary magistrates and appeal court judges closed ranks against the Indian immigrants’ (Carter 1995, pp. 209–212).
The harsh treatment of Indian labourers created opposition to the labour trade among abolitionists in both India and Britain. In 1838, India outlawed emigration to Mauritius due to planters' labour practices, creating a dire labour supply problem. Sugar production declined by one-third despite rapidly rising global prices (Allen 1999, pp. 23, 55–56, Carter 1995, pp. 18–21, Lamusse 1964b, p. 357). Planters responded quickly to the immigration ban, holding public meetings and forming the Mauritius Free Labour Association (MFLA). They desperately wanted to resume the labour trade because indentured Indians cost them about one-third less than employing freedmen. Sugar planters used the MFLA to outline plans for improved treatment of indentured Indians, from their well-being on the voyage from India to a free passage back there upon the completion of service contracts. The MFLA built support for the resumption of labour imports by getting the colonial government to pledge to better regulate labour practices, which bolstered confidence in Indian and British officials. The emigration ban was repealed in 1842, mainly due to planters' collective action. The state subsidised the cost of new labour imports, at the rate of £7 per immigrant. The subsidies were financed by wine and liquor duties, which were spread among the population, not levied solely on sugar elites. The immigration subsidies cost the government £423,579 between 1843 and 1848, representing one-third of the colonial state budget (Lamusse 1964b, p. 357). The Mauritian state was clearly doing the bidding of sugar planters.
Yet, despite the promises of Mauritian officials, the state exercised virtually no oversight of labour treatment on the plantation. It concentrated instead on ‘regulating’ labourers outside of the plantation system by passing anti-vagrancy statues and internal passport requirements in 1847, both of which planters sought in order to intimidate the masses. The harshest policy was the ‘double cut’ system, which imposed a penalty of two days of extra work for each day (or partial day) missed on the plantation. This system effectively extended a typical labour service contract from five to seven years. These actions helped sugar planters alleviate their labour supply problem, as nearly 94,000 indentured Indian migrants came to Mauritius during the 1840s, with another 1840,000 following in the 1850s (Napal 1984, pp. 88–98, Northrup 1995, pp. 115–119, 159).
Desertion and ‘vagrancy’ perennially concerned sugar planters. Rates of desertion and illegal absences from plantations rose steadily after the abolition of slavery in 1835 and became particularly troublesome, from the planters' perspective, in the 1860s (Allen 2008). By then, a considerable portion of former indentured labourers had fulfilled their service contracts and were moving into urban jobs; others became small landholders (i.e., the rise of the Indo-Mauritian smallholders). The labour supply utilised by sugar elites was shrinking, and, although immigration remained an option, planters had come to prefer the trained labourers that had previously worked on their estates. Sugar planters therefore lobbied the state to pressure former field labourers to ‘re-engage’ on the plantation, the result of which was Ordinance 31, passed in 1867. The new legal code was draconian. Internal passports, which now included the immigrant's photograph, had to be carried at all times and tied Indians to their districts of residence. All Indians indentured or free – had to carry passports, at an annual cost of £1 (roughly two months' pay). Planters also compelled the government to institute fines for early termination of service contracts and to apply special taxes on Indians who worked outside of the sugar industry as domestic servants, petty retailers or gardeners (Carter 1995, pp. 198–205, Napal 1984, pp. 109–117). The state created a legal labyrinth to control the labouring classes during the 1860s, a time when global sugar prices were stagnating and planters were feeling increasingly anxious about their international competitiveness. These actions substantially expanded the activity of the government in identifying, tracking, and coercing the masses through new state initiatives.
The state followed up its new legal code with a flurry of aggressive behaviour toward Indians in order to push them back onto sugar plantations. Police commonly entered Indian residences, ostensibly to search for so-called vagrants – which marked a new, palpable state presence. Harassment was common, even when one's papers were in order. Throughout the 1860s, the state arrested approximately 20,000 Indians annually (about 12% of the Indian population) on vagrancy-related charges. The fact that police officers received half of the fines paid by their arrestees undoubtedly encouraged zealous arresting, but police officers' behaviour nonetheless illustrates the remarkable activity of state functionaries in Port Louis, Indian towns, and the countryside (Carter 1995, pp. 196–198, 213, 219–220, Mishra 2009, p. 240). Labour coercion by state agents was pronounced in Port Louis, where 84% of contractual labourers were arrested for vagrancy annually, on average, from 1864 to 1871. Government officials were trying to expel urban workers into the rural sugar economy (Allen 2008, pp. 149–150).
State action in the countryside was one-sided. Indians had little recourse, as the judicial officials overseeing labour law, the stipendiary magistrates, were aligned with the planters. In practice, the ‘Stipendiary Magistrates had made the punishment severe and harsh so as to discourage immigrants in doing liberal jobs [i.e., those outside the plantation economy], urging them to re-engage as a means of protection’ (Carter 1995, pp. 198–205, Napal 1984, pp. 109–117, quote from p. 113, Smith 1995, p. 273).4 Within three years of enacting the anti-vagrancy Ordinance 31, the proportion of Indians engaged on sugar estates rose from 48% to 59% (Lamusse 1964a, p. 120). Government intimidation of Indian labourers was coupled with worse repression on sugar estates. On the plantation, sugar elites exercised coercion through their estate managers, known as sirdars. Private jails were common and used by planters to exact extra-legal retribution on deserters, freed Indians who would not ‘re-engage’, and those who filed complaints with the authorities (Carter 1995, pp. 196–198, 213, 219–220).
This situation persisted throughout the century, despite an overhaul of the judiciary in the 1850s, when the state established a centralised legal system with district courts and placed the police forces under the authority of local magistrates (Lange 2009, pp. 71–72). But little changed. In 1871, Arthur Hamilton Gordon became governor of Mauritius and ‘found the judicial system in Mauritius biased and hopelessly intertwined with the planting interest’ (Smith 1995, p. 268). Napal (1984, p. 71) concludes that the ‘labour system was so bad that the labourers were powerless against the employers, the police were corrupt and violent, while some magistrates were said to be ignorant and partial’. Throughout the century, the state toiled to serve the narrow interests of planters by diligently repressing labourers.
In the process, the state's presence in the countryside became palpable and was dramatically different than what it had been at the start of the sugar boom. State capacity expanded as government agents ‘regulated’ the labour supply throughout the island. The island's court system handled over 20,000 cases in 1886 alone, for example (Lange 2009, p. 72). State efforts to surveil Indian labourers made them ‘legible’ to government officials, even after their service contracts were fulfilled, since passport requirements applied to all Indians, indentured or free. The Immigration Department became ‘a nucleus of registration and identification’ and supplied vital information to the Stipendiary Magistrates (Carter 1995, p. 206, Smith 1995, p. 273). Rendering populations ‘legible’ marked extraordinary leaps in state capacity historically in early modern Europe, as well, as governments created and then sustained new bureaucratisation for the oversight of their societies. Governments gleaned much information about their subject populations through efforts to ‘simplify’ the complex societies over which they ruled. Such ‘legibility’ facilitated state intervention in society, whether for good or ill (see Scott 1998).
Mauritian state action in the labour sector during the nineteenth century portended a more institutional approach to labour regulation in the twentieth century. In the late 1930s, hard times in the sugar economy stoked popular consternation among small sugar farmers, as sugar factories owned by Franco-Mauritians resisted pressing the ‘Uba’ cane varietal because it was more fibrous and more taxing on their pressing equipment than other varietals. When some factories decided to purchase Uba canes for 15% less than other varietals, small planters mobilised, eventually spawning violence in August 1937. The state repressed the protestors easily. More important, it then created a set of institutions to manage collective bargaining, incorporate the budding farmers' movement, and thereby control the avenues of political competition on the island (Storey 1997, pp. 141–149, see also Bräutigam 1997, pp. 55–56). State action in the 1930s continued the long-standing policy to control the subaltern classes in order to promote the interests of the Franco-Mauritians, a policy which began in the 1840s with efforts to identify and render the masses legible to the government.
State assistance to sugar exporters continues amid hard times, 1865–1895
The collaborative relationship between the Franco-Mauritians and the state continued in the second half of the century, when Mauritian sugar exports faced new challenges and uncertainty. A number of factors threatened the vitality of the sugar economy. First, beet sugar cultivation was growing in Europe, with France, Germany, Russia, and other countries generously subsidising their domestic producers. Beet sugar production exerted downward pressure on global prices for cane sugar, the staple of the Mauritian export economy. Second, the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and rendered Mauritius a more remote sugar supplier to many markets. Third, the island experienced climatic disasters in the 1860s, including a drought in 1866, a malaria outbreak in 1867, and cyclones in 1868 and 1874. Finally, the island had a borer pest infestation that threatened its non-diversified cane stock. These developments jeopardised the international competitiveness of Mauritian sugar. Planters responded by asking the Mauritian state to provide new public goods, specifically transportation infrastructure and research and development initiatives. In both cases, the state aided the Franco-Mauritians, and state capacity expanded as a result.
One means to promote sugar exports was by building railways, in order to reduce planters' transport costs. In the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the sugar exported from Mauritius exited at Port Louis. Mauritian sugar estates were largely situated in coastal areas, so producers would transport their crop by boat to Port Louis. The island's inland producers were served by a couple of main roads, built by the colonial government with convict and slave labour in the 1820s. A road linking Port Louis on the west coast to Mahebourg on the east coast was completed in 1832. A branch line to Souillac in the south was finished in 1830. Until the 1850s, this infrastructure sufficed, as high sugar prices dissuaded interest in railways or a substantial inland road network. There was some foreign interest in building a railway in Mauritius during the global railway bonanza of the mid-nineteenth century. Railway entrepreneurs in London bought advertising space in The Railway Times in 1845 to raise start-up capital for a then-unspecified project on the island (Jessop 1964, p. 1, Lamusse 1964b, p. 356). But there was little interest among the Franco-Mauritians because sugar prices were then at their highest level in 25 years. Prevailing transport costs were tolerable.
By the 1850s, transport costs were rising as the sugar economy continued to grow and sugar production moved further inland. (Mauritius exported about 56,000 tons of sugar annually in the late 1840s; 10 years later, exports were nearly 112,000 tons annually.) Expanding sugar production taxed the island's paltry infrastructure, which carried an estimated 4500 carts and carriages on existing roadways. Inland estates created higher transport costs on both ends of production: first to build and equip a factory, which needed to be located near the point of cultivation, and then to transport refined sugar overland to Port Louis. The boilers used in modern sugar plants were of particular concern to inland sugar planters. At mid-century, transporting three boilers 18 miles inland cost around £1200, a significant sum for an estate owner. Falling international prices after mid-century heightened these cost concerns. In 1856, planters mobilised through the Chamber of Agriculture and lobbied the colonial government to survey the island for railways. The government did so in 1858–59, after the colonial secretary in London dispatched an engineer to Mauritius (Jessop 1964, pp. 1–2, Lamusse 1964b, p. 359). The state assisted with the initial planning stages of Mauritius's railways. The government would need to be involved with financing as well, as local merchant capital had dried up in the late 1840s (see Lamusse 1964b, pp. 355–359). Building railways in Mauritius, in other words, was necessarily a state building project.
State action reflected the political dominance of the Franco-Mauritian sugar exporters. About one year after the government surveyed the island for railways, it contributed £200,000 from its Reserve Fund for two railway lines, which were estimated to cost £1 million. Construction began in January 1862 (Jessop 1964, p. 2). The colonial state also obtained debt financing by issuing seven bonds in the London bond market between 1862 and 1876. The average rate of interest on Mauritian bonds was 5.5%, among the lowest rates secured by any colony or developing country at the time (Bräutigam 2008, p. 152). The Mauritian state was, in essence, externalising the costs of railway construction for the Franco-Mauritians, who were relatively capital-poor and could not finance the new transportation infrastructure on their own.5 The first railway was the North Line, completed in 1864 and stretching from Port Louis north into the island's sugar-producing heartland and then around the northeast coast. The Midland Line was completed in 1865 and tapped into the south-eastern portion of the island known as Grand Port. A number of feeder lines were built off of the Midland Line over the next few decades. The government operated the railways at a chronic deficit, a sign of the industry's weight in island politics (Jessop 1964, pp. 2–5, Napal 1984, p. 213). The state helped sugar estates remain profitable by coordinating and financing railway construction and then through an implicit subsidy (the operating deficit).
The new railways were of obvious benefit to the Franco-Mauritians, and they also held positive implications for the development of state capacity. Railways enabled the Mauritian state to more rapidly deploy its agents, and the ongoing regulatory oversight of railways promoted bureaucratisation as well. The Railway Department employed 863 people in 1888, for example (Jessop 1964, p. 19). By 1895, Mauritius had 167 kilometres of railway. This level of railway track yields a ‘railway density’ measure of 0.08 (kilometres of railway ÷ total square kilometres of land). The density of Mauritian railways was roughly 10 times larger than even those African countries, like Senegal, that were well-endowed with railways as of the mid twentieth century. In fact, only Gambia and South Africa had higher measures of road density in 1950 than Mauritius's score for railway density in 1895 (Herbst 2000, p. 86). Mauritius's road density in 1897 was 0.51, or 10 times the level typically observed in African colonies circa 1950 (Colony of Mauritius 1898, p. HH1). Of course, the fact that Mauritius is a tiny island helps account for these impressive measures (see Greig, Turner and D'Arcy 2011), though the country nonetheless had a precocious transportation infrastructure at the turn of the last century. It was the close collaboration between the island's sugar exporters and colonial administrators that facilitated the creation of new transportation infrastructure and logistical power.
A second way in which the colonial state aided sugar exports after 1850 was through research and development initiatives. Much of what ailed the Mauritian sugar industry after mid-century were exogenous factors beyond the control of the state or sugar planters. They could not stop the cultivation of beet sugar in Europe, close the Suez Canal, or avoid occasional climatic disasters. But planters and government officials could do something about the island's borer pest infestation. Much of Mauritius's sugarcane stock was non-diversified, leaving it susceptible to a borer which was inadvertently introduced to the island around 1850. The Chamber of Agriculture solicited ideas to eliminate the borer menace in the mid 1850s, but the campaign and other individualised efforts at limiting the impact of the borer failed. Government assistance could expediently address the situation because it could avoid the collective action problems associated with individualised solutions (i.e., the reluctance any one planter might feel to innovate and search for better cane varietals, given fears that others might copy the innovation without incurring any of its costs). By the mid 1860s, sugar elites were convinced that ‘if the sugar industry was to thrive, then [the state] needed to underwrite institutional efforts to discover new canes’ resistant to the borer (Storey 1997, pp. 50–51).
The state assisted the Franco-Mauritians with the borer infestation through research and development initiatives. As with state efforts to ‘regulate’ the island's labour supply and build new railways, the government's research and development efforts encouraged the growth of state capacity. At the request of the planters' Chamber of Agriculture, the colonial government devoted its Royal Botanic Gardens in Pamplemousses (a town northeast of Port Louis) to the collection, husbandry, and dissemination of new cane stocks. Improving the island's cane stock entailed significant effort to import cane varieties from around the world. The state financed these efforts upfront, recovering their costs in part through the sale of successful cane varietals later. Sales were robust, which underscored the continuing failure of growers to remedy the borer infestation through individualised efforts. By 1875, the Pamplemousses gardens were a recognised international leader in sugarcane research, as the colonial government had substantially improved its scientific capabilities to aid the sugar planters over the prior 10 years (Storey 1997, pp. 44–56).
The planters' Chamber of Agriculture oversaw much of the day-to-day operations at the Pamplemousses research facility. Over time, the Chamber became so integrated with government officials that the distinction between the two groups blurred. The cooperation between sugar planters and the state helped the Franco-Mauritians obtain a handful of new, useful cane varieties (out of 250 different types tested). The government's action, directed by the powerful sugar elite, was designed for their benefit. In fact, the records of cane sales from Pamplemousses do not list any small-scale Indo-Mauritian landowners as customers. The new cane varieties were purchased by the Franco-Mauritian elite. Moreover, the state subsidised its research efforts with taxes on the Indo-Mauritians, who ‘lacked access to the political arena, and … were not allowed to participate in debates about new sugar cane varieties’ (Storey 1997, pp. 55–67, quote from p. 55). Government assistance helped Mauritian sugar production weather deteriorating global price conditions, as sugar exports remained steady, averaging more than 111,000 tons annually throughout the remainder of the century (Allen 1999, p. 23).
The scientific expertise created at the Royal Botanic Gardens led to new bureaucratisation and the growth of state capacity. In 1909, the Franco-Mauritians' Chamber of Agriculture officially requested that the government establish a Department of Agriculture to institutionalise its efforts in scientific husbandry. The Department was founded in 1913, and it was a bureaucratic progeny of the nineteenth-century collaboration at Pamplemousses (Storey 1997, pp. 103–108). After the Uba riots in 1937, the Department of Agriculture played a key role in defusing popular discontent. It undertook the ‘Uba Replacement Scheme’ from 1938 to 1944, whereby the department distributed alternative cane varietals to Uba growers and also instructed them in the use of fertiliser to improve their yields. The Department of Agriculture illustrated growing state power, as colonial administrators used it ‘as a means of staving off a social and political revolution’ during hard times (Storey 1997, pp. 150–151).
The expansion of state capacity through research and development, the creation of the island's judicial machinery, and railway building was evident in growing bureaucratisation on the island. In the early 1880s, the colonial governor Pope Hennessy began pushing for the ‘Mauritianisation’ of the colonial civil service. Bureaucratic development came quickly to the island, as the civil service grew to 4000 strong by 1900. In all, 93% of bureaucrats were Mauritians and obtained their posts through competitive civil service exams, rather than obtaining posts through personal connections, which had typified an earlier era (Bräutigam 2008, pp. 146–147, Lange 2009, pp. 69–70, Selvon 2001, pp. 296–297). The scientific rationalism that characterised the state's efforts in Pamplemousses paralleled a more general process of rationalisation underway in the colonial bureaucracy.
Conclusion
Throughout the nineteenth century, Mauritius made impressive strides in state building. The state bureaucracy expanded, and the recruitment and promotion of bureaucratic officials became more meritocratic and rationalised in the Weberian sense. Scholars emphasise the importance of these bureaucratic norms to the Mauritian Miracle in the contemporary era (e.g., Meinsenhelder 1997), and their origins lie in the nineteenth century. The island's relatively dense transportation infrastructure, which enabled the rapid deployment of state agents, also has its roots in the first century of British rule. So too did the development of the island's judicial machinery, even though it was initially a tool to coerce labourers and promote the narrow interests of the Franco-Mauritians. Its aims may have been reprehensible, but it nevertheless helped state capacity take root.
Much of what enabled Mauritius to forge an atypical developmental trajectory in the twentieth century germinated from the close political alliance between the island's coterie of Franco-Mauritian sugar planters and British colonial administrators. Indeed, Bräutigam (2008) notes that haggling between these groups over taxation promoted Mauritian state building. Yet haggling over taxation was but one part of a broader set of issues bound up with promoting the international competitiveness of sugar exports, dating from the initial boom in 1825. Similarly, while emphasising the reforms of the post-war era, Lange (2009, pp. 77–83) notes that Mauritius's remarkable state building after 1945 would not have been possible without the precursors of the nineteenth century. This article identifies the causal origins of Mauritius's early state building, in order to understand why the Mauritian state grew considerably stronger during the colonial period, even as most African countries recorded less impressive gains during their colonial eras.
Coalitional politics, especially with respect to exporters, may be at the heart of why Mauritius has succeeded in recent decades while other African countries have foundered. Historically, Mauritian sugar planters and the colonial government worked together to help planters maximise their export opportunities. The by-product of these efforts was the growth of state capacity. By the 1970s, the Franco-Mauritians may have no longer enjoyed the political dominance that they did at the turn of the century, but their earlier collaborations had left a state building legacy which, in part, enabled Mauritius to perform so well. It seems that Mauritian state capacity expanded impressively during the nineteenth century because an export-oriented coalition leader held political sway when the country experienced its first major commodity boom.
Such powerful, export-oriented coalitions have been rare in most African countries. The desire for political stability during the early phases of European colonialism on the continent typically meant that the interests of export-oriented actors were subordinated to those of local village chiefs, the principal political allies of European powers up until World War II. The imperative of political stability may have not only compromised economic development during the early phases of European colonialism (Phillips 1989), but also forestalled state building such as that which occurred in Mauritius. After World War II, European powers turned to nationalist political elites as their governing partners. These new coalitions spawned urban bias and compromised the vigour of the export economy, even though there was unprecedented demand for Africa's primary export commodities at the time (Bates 1981). Nationalist elites lacked a direct stake in exporting, and such non-export-oriented coalitions may be the reason commodity booms did not encourage the sort of state building observed in Mauritius. Variation in coalitional politics may go far to explain roots of the Mauritian Miracle, as well as why it has proven difficult to replicate in many other African countries.
Note on contributor
Ryan Saylor is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tulsa. His principal research examines state building in the non-European world. He is completing a book entitled Windows of opportunity: commodity booms, coalitional politics, and state building in Latin America and Africa.