British Mauritius

British Mauritius was the crown colony of the western Indian Ocean island off the southeast coast of Africa. The island had been French as Isle de France since 1715, but Napoleon lost it to Britain during the wars: although the French won the Battle of Grand Port in August 1810, Commodore Josias Rowley's force captured the island on 3 December, and the Treaty of Paris of 1814 confirmed the possession de jure. French institutions stayed, including the Napoleonic code and the language. The first governor Robert Townsend Farquhar pushed rapid social and economic change, most importantly the abolition of slavery on 1 February 1835, when some three thousand Franco-Mauritian planters shared in the government's twenty-million-pound compensation for the liberation of about twenty thousand slaves brought from Africa and Madagascar in the French years. After abolition the sugar fields were worked by indentured Indians landed through the Aapravasi Ghat, the ancestors of the Indo-Mauritians, alongside the Creole population and Muslim merchants from the subcontinent. An 1885 constitution and the election of 1886 began limited representation, and British rule lasted until Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968.