Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean over 1,200 miles from the southeast coast of the African continent, and over 6,000 miles away from Ireland. It is, perhaps, best known as the former home of the Dodo (raphus cucullatus), a flightless species of giant pigeon that became extinct within a century of the arrival of the first Europeans to reach the island in 1598. Mauritius is also known as a former sugar plantation with a history of slavery and indentured labour. It is natural therefore to approach its history with an expectation that there would be poverty, resentment against its former coloniser, and internal racial and class conflict far worse than that of Ireland. Yet the reality has turned out very differently. The roots of this can be traced to 1847 and the British government’s decision to restart Mauritius’s economy at the time of the Irish famine. Without that effort, some of the Mauritian population and its economy could well have ended up ‘as dead as a Dodo’. This chapter describes how the British government’s intervention avoided this outcome and how this should change the way historians think about policy mistakes made in Ireland during its famine.

In terms of civil war and conflict, Mauritian history could not be more different from that of modern Ireland.