Chapter 20

Polanyi Goes to Mauritius

Economy and Society in the Postcolony

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Shortly after arriving in Mauritius in early 1986, I was struck by the dif-
ferent ways in which people marked the boundaries of their real estate.
Most Mauritians lived in single-family houses, from the very modest (a
few still had roofs made of straw, and many lacked piped water and elec-
tricity) to the extravagantly opulent. Some Mauritians had high fences
and iron gates surrounding their house and garden; others made do with
low fences in bricks and mortar; yet others had nothing at all with which
to mark the physical boundaries of their property, their yards segue-
ing into those of their neighbours, dogs, chickens and children freely
roaming across invisible boundaries with no sanctions imposed.
These differences may be said to be all about class. The more you
own, the more jealously you protect it. Ethnographic fieldwork among
the poor tends to be easy, at least in terms of access, since they have noth-
ing to lose and everything to gain by allowing a stranger into their lives;
by the same token, elite studies raise particular methodological problems
regarding regular access. However, in polyethnic Mauritius, class cannot
be understood without taking ethnicity into account. The two markers
of ethnic difference and social inequality are not entirely congruent, but
overlap. Briefly, then, the houses hemmed in by high fences would typi-
cally belong to the Franco-Mauritian elite, descendants of the plantocracy
that settled in the island with their slaves in the eighteenth century. Those
with lower fences that you could easily peer or climb over would often be
Hindus, descendants mainly of the indentured labourers recruited from
British India to replace the emancipated slaves, arriving in the island
from 1840 until the First World War. And the third category, those whose
268 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

territorial boundaries mattered least, if at all, would tend to be Creoles,

descendants of the aforementioned slaves.
Chris Hann’s important and highly influential work in economic
anthropology has a consistent empirical basis in his long-term and ongo-
ing fieldwork in Eastern and Central Europe. On one of my first visits to
the then recently established Max Planck Institute in Halle, he casually
remarked that in his department, the ethnographic focus was on ‘any-
where east of Halle’. At the same time, Hann’s comparativist approach
implies significant theoretical ambitions, as witnessed in his theorizing,
inspired by Jack Goody’s wide-ranging comparative research, about
Eurasia as a region as opposed to (Sub-Saharan) Africa or the societies
of the New World. Moreover, Hann has engaged increasingly with ques-
tions of values and religion as they articulate with the economy (which,
in a market society, emphasizes value rather than values), a perspective
which is expressed strongly in his recent REALEURASIA project, which
draws equally on Polanyi’s economic history and Weber’s sociology of
religion as sources of inspiration (Hann 2016).
In this contribution, I draw inspiration from Hann’s recent pub-
lications, including his important new monograph about markets in
the post-socialist Visegrád states of Central Europe (Hann 2019), in a
reflection on economy and society in the post-slavery plantation and
industrial society of Mauritius, discussing to what extent his Eurasian
perspectives can shed light on a main social, economic and cultural
faultline in the island, namely that which can be drawn between Hindus
and Creoles.

The Plural Economy of Mauritius

It is not obvious that Polanyi has any business going to Mauritius. It is in

many ways a New World society, uninhabited upon colonization in the
early 18th century. Yet some of its dominant demographic groups, nota-
bly the Chinese, the Hindus and the Europeans, arguably carry with them
a heavy baggage from the Old World where economy was not yet dis-
embedded from society. Franco-Mauritians, whose ancestors might have
arrived on the island before the 1789 revolution, may routinely assume a
semi-feudal relationship with their maids and gardeners, which entails
moral obligations and responsibilities towards them beyond that of
paying salaries. For example, if a housemaid falls ill, her employer would
typically take pains to ensure proper medical treatment, and should a
gardener’s son be a drug addict, the employer would be likely to look for
ways to help. Regarding the Chinese, or more accurately Sino-Mauritians
Polanyi Goes to Mauritius 269

(most arrived at the outset of the 20th century and cannot be consid-
ered simply Chinese), their economic organization is based on kinship,
more accurately the hierarchical patrilineal clan. The Muslims, whose
Indian ancestors arrived as indentured labourers on the same ships as the
Hindus, share many practices with the Hindus in their local organization.
In this short analysis, I limit myself to a comparison between Creole and
Hindu economic practices.
Social life in Mauritius is all about striking a balance between dif-
ference and similarity, unity and diversity. Seen by many if not most
Mauritians as a ‘rainbow society’ managing its cultural and ethnic diver-
sity in peaceful ways, the island, independent since 1968, is a function-
ing parliamentary democracy with the rudiments of a welfare state. At
the same time, there are strong correlations between class and ethnicity,
the causes of which are complex, while the effects are highly visible in
Mauritian society.
The traditional upper class (historically slaveowners, currently large
landowners) is made up exclusively of Franco-Mauritians, les quinze
familles of estate owners. There are nevertheless economic elites in every
ethnic group except the Creoles, and the Sino-Mauritian minority in
particular have been active forging and renewing ties with Hong Kong,
China and Singapore since the industrialization of Mauritius and the
surging forward of the Chinese economy. The large landowners remain
Franco-Mauritian, but others also own land, usually for growing sugar-
cane or raising livestock.
Le petit morcellement, ‘the small subdivision [of land]’, took place
between the end of slavery in 1839 and 1851. As shown by Richard Allen
(1999), a large number of ex-slaves purchased land in this process and
took up farming. As further emphasized by Peerthum (2016), there was in
Mauritius a great deal of arable land available at the end of slavery, unlike
in some Caribbean islands. The ex-slaves, or Creoles, who set up shop as
independent farmers, grew a variety of crops for their own consumption
as well as the market. Other ex-apprentices became agricultural labourers
on one of the large plantations, smallplanters or métayers (sharecroppers).
However, already by 1851, the proportion of Creoles who engaged in
agriculture had dropped significantly (Peerthum 2016). Peerthum pro-
poses several explanations for this shift, including demographic change
(Indian immigration mainly) and high mortality, but the most important
single factor was arguably the lack of credit. Setting up a small (or indeed
large) agricultural enterprise in a remote colony involves many uncer-
tainties and depends on the availability of credit. This was generally not
available through the banks, which de facto forced the Creole farmers to
relinquish their enterprises.
270 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

This historical detail deserves some attention because it later became

a stereotype, still alive today, to assume that Creoles have an aversion
to agricultural work. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries, few Creoles are involved in either livestock or sugarcane, except as
employees, and in the latter case, they tend to work at the mill and not in
the field.
Le grand morcellement from the 1860s to the early 1900s had more
enduring consequences and offers an important contrast to the immedi-
ate postslavery situation. It was aimed to enable Indian migrant workers
to contribute more effectively to the economy after the end of their inden-
tureship. As many as 400,000 Indians arrived as indentured labourers to
boost production and replace the slaves, changing the demographic com-
position of the island completely. When slavery ended in 1839, Mauritians
of African origin constituted the majority of the population; since the end
of Indian indentureship, they have made up less than 30 per cent. When
the indentureship contracts of the Indians expired, the colonial authori-
ties saw it as useful to encourage them to stay, which the vast majority
did, most as plantation workers, but many eventually as independent
small planters. They purchased land and paid their debts while mainly
producing sugar and keeping livestock, usually cattle (Benedict 1961).
By the time Mauritius became independent in 1968, an ethnic divi-
sion of labour was well established (see Eriksen 1988; Selvon 2001). The
Franco-Mauritians (≈2 per cent) were landowners and professionals; the
majority of the Hindus (52 per cent) were small planters and plantation
labourers; the Creoles (28 per cent, of African and Malagasy origin) were
fishermen, craftsmen and factory workers at the plantations; the gens de
couleur (≈3 per cent, of mixed European-African origin) were profession-
als such as lawyers, teachers and journalists, the Chinese (3 per cent) were
shopkeepers and the Muslims (16 per cent) were mainly field labourers,
but were also represented in many other professions. Naturally, there
were many exceptions to these crude generalizations, which nevertheless
continued, and continue even today, to serve as a cognitive map desig-
nating the groups that made up the ‘plural society’ (Furnivall 1948) of
Mauritius and their place in the economy of the island-state.
The late colonial division of the population into four large statisti-
cal categories was inconsistent and inaccurate; the four ‘communities’
were Hindus, Muslims, Chinese and the ‘General Population’. The latter
includes Creoles, people of mixed origin and Franco-Mauritians, pre-
sumably on the basis of their shared Catholic religion, but they have
no common identity that can be mobilized economically or politically.
Sino-Mauritians speak different dialects (Hakka and Cantonese), and
although most are Buddhists, many are Catholics. They are divided
Polanyi Goes to Mauritius 271

by clan membership, origins and religion. The approximate half of the

population who are Hindus do not share a strong corporate identity
either. Although the largest segments are of North Indian origin, Tamils,
Telugus and Marathis are also present in numbers that are not negligible
and consider themselves – and are considered by others – as forming
separate groups. Caste is important in politics, marriage practices and
informal networking, although it is undercommunicated publicly. The
Muslims, who are of Indian origin, are not typically described as Indians
(lendyen in Kreol), but are defined on the basis of religion (see Eriksen
(1988, 1998) for more details).

The Significance of Ethnicity

Overt racism or ‘communalism’ is frowned upon and sanctioned morally.

Yet at the same time, there is no public encouragement for the ‘commu-
nities’ to mix through intermarriage, even if this is not uncommon and
exists across Mauritian society (Eriksen 1998). In fact, in the early 1990s,
the Catholic Archbishop of the Mascareignes, Mgr. Jean Margéot, echoed
a widely shared sentiment when he said that the colours of the rain-
bow (society) should be kept distinct in order for it to remain beautiful
(Eriksen 1997). With the exception of certain milieus, informal networks
are usually monoethnic and people primarily tend to rely on their ethnic,
religious and kinship networks for support. Mauritius is a liberal multi-
party democracy, and thus the ethnic organization of society, especially
in the realms of politics and the economy, is regularly criticized and chal-
lenged. Yet, ethnicity remains very resilient. The Franco-Mauritian elite
has largely retained its control over the national economy despite fifty
years of independence (Salverda 2015), and Creoles are seriously over-
represented among the deprived and impoverished segments of society
(Boswell 2006).
The downside of the officially recognized multiculturalism of
Mauritian society is evident in the persistence of ethnic stereotyping and
uneven development. Although racism is strongly disapproved of in
public settings, ethnic stereotypes are routinely drawn upon in informal
social life in order to account for political and economic events. While
Hindus may speak of Creoles as lazy and undisciplined, the correspond-
ing Creole stereotype may depict Hindus as stingy and ‘clannish’. These
stereotypes build on real existing differences in social and economic
organization.
Economic changes in Mauritius since the mid-1980s have all but
eradicated unemployment, improved the material standard of living
272 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

considerably and led to massive infrastructural development, from high-

ways and shopping centres to a light railway currently being built to
connect the main urban centres, from Curepipe in central Mauritius to
Port Louis, the capital, in the northwest. At the same time, not all have
benefited equally from the economic boom, a result of deregulation lead-
ing to fast growth in the manufacturing sector and a consolidation of
tourism and sugar as important earners of foreign currency. Many vil-
lages and suburbs (cités ouvrières) primarily inhabited by Creoles have
changed, or developed, far less than the majority of the country. In the
1990s, concerned clergymen from the Catholic Church began to speak
about le malaise créole (the Creole ailment) as a social ill, the symptoms of
which were underemployment and an overrepresentation in unskilled,
badly paid work, substance abuse and teenage pregnancies, a lack of
strong organizations and interest groups, and low social mobility com-
pared to the rest of the population (Boswell 2006).

Polanyi, Creoles and Hindus

I will now consider the Creole–Hindu contrast roughly through the

same Polanyian lens as that employed by Hann in his recent work (espe-
cially Hann 2019). Obviously, the differences are substantial. In Hann’s
work, the state is a central actor as a legislative and redistributive force,
while markets were less dominant during the socialist years. Although
Mauritius has the rudiments of a welfare state, the formal economic
system is emphatically capitalist and market-oriented. At a first glance,
Mauritius is thus a poor candidate for a study of the double movement
and the possible embeddedness of the economy in social institutions. The
fictitious commodities (Polanyi 1944) of land, labour and money were
always taken for granted in the colony and are no less so in independ-
ent Mauritius, which remains a small cog in the global capitalist econ-
omy. Settled in the eighteenth century as a trading port and, increasingly
throughout the nineteenth century, a sugar colony, the proto-factory of the
plantation (Mintz 1974) and the warehouse by the port were the templates
of the Mauritian economy from the first day. As noted by Benedict (1964),
the cash economy was part of the Indian indentured workers’ lives from
the very beginning, and the liberated slaves also immediately incorpo-
rated cash into their economy, often using it, as noted above, to buy land.
In other words, there were no traditional forms of land tenure or a
premonetized economy in Mauritius, and labour was also commoditized
from the beginning – indeed, in the most brutal and demeaning ways.
Would it still make sense to look for a double movement? Of the four
Polanyi Goes to Mauritius 273

Polanyian forms of integration – redistribution, reciprocity, household-

ing and market exchange – it may seem obvious that the latter domi-
nates in Mauritius. However, as emphasized by Polanyi himself and
demonstrated by Hann on numerous occasions, not least in his long-
term research in Tázlár, Hungary, the fact that one form of (economic)
integration is dominant does not mean that it is the only one. Moreover,
identifying the dominant form of integration is not always easy and
straightforward.
In the Creole village most familiar to me in the 1980s and 1990s, paid
work tended to be irregular, temporary and uncertain. Many families
had their main source of income through fishing, itself an unpredict-
able endeavour, and supplemented this through road maintenance work
for the government, secretarial jobs in local administration and odd day
jobs, while some had regular wagework outside the village. About half
a dozen of the women worked in the salt pans at Tamarin a short bus
ride away, while others were employed in one of the luxury hotels at Le
Morne, also just a few kilometres away. There are no major sugar planta-
tions in the area, which is the driest in Mauritius. Moreover, there was
a substantial informal sector involving fowls and pigs, marijuana and
miscellaneous services.
Although the village is massively dominated by Creoles numeri-
cally, other communities are also represented, and the division of labour
is strikingly ethnic in character. The village grocery is run by a Sino-
Mauritian family, like many similar shops on the island. The only Muslim
family in the village is responsible for the dispensary and complains of
being socially isolated. A handful of Hindu families also live in the vil-
lage, which is located in a part of the island that is strongly associated
with the Creoles, although the large village La Gaulette nearby is mainly
Hindu. Some of the Hindus were small planters selling their produce
to factories further north, one joint family consisted of a schoolteacher
and a small businessman, and at least two families ran small shops sell-
ing sweets, cigarettes and other inexpensive items. The village economy
also encompassed the services of itinerant hawkers on motorcycles, who
passed through once or twice a week selling items of clothing, household
utensils, pickled mangoes and miscellaneous small goods. The hawkers
were all Hindu (including Tamil). Another itinerant trader of more sub-
stantial influence was the banyan or middleman, also a Hindu, who was a
wholesale buyer of fish from the local fishermen.
Market exchange has been the main form of economic integration in
Mauritius since its foundation as a colony, but it was never the only one,
and I should argue that it is not even the dominant form at the level of
local integration.
274 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Hindu and Creole forms of social organization are in some respects

strikingly different from one another. Hindus have deep genealogies, pat-
rilineal kinship systems supplemented by caste and strong moral injunc-
tions to take responsibility for relatives. Drawing on village fieldwork in
the late 1950s, Benedict (1964) showed the ways in which Hindus were
able to pool money for major investments, offer interest-free loans to each
other within the extended kin group and make collective plans for their
economic improvement. Strategic alliances between kin groups were
forged through arranged marriages (and still are).
The Creole moral economy is based on a different set of values and,
one might say, a different concept of personhood. Individual freedom
is valued highly among Creoles. Possibly a legacy from slavery (Eriksen
1986), this value encourages creativity in music and the arts – many of the
most popular musicians and poets are Creoles – while at the same time
militating against collective organization. Creole genealogies are shallow,
no strict principle of endogamy is practised, and rules of inheritance are
flexible. While social mobility in other ethnic groups in Mauritius often
relies on connections and networks established within the group, this is
not possible to the same extent among Creoles. Partly owing to the weak
kinship organization, upwardly mobile Creoles have no culturally sanc-
tioned obligation to help less resourceful Creoles to improve their lot.
Among Hindus, by contrast, it is a paramount kinship obligation to assist
family members if one has the opportunity to do so.
It might seem, at first glance, as if the Creole ethos – individualist,
presentist – is perfectly compatible with, and indeed encompassed by,
the logic of market exchange, while the Hindu ethos remains staunchly
Eurasian (in Hann’s sense; Hann 2015, 2016) in incorporating the econ-
omy seamlessly into social life, where reciprocity and redistribution are
necessary elements in the reproduction of the community. However, the
reality is more complicated.
Sharing is a moral obligation in the Creole community. Fishermen
whiling away the day after returning from sea may congregate in the
shade of a clump of large trees near the village shop, where they play
dominoes and share whatever snacks, drinks and cigarettes they have.
When I first arrived in the village, I knew nobody and asked the first
person I met if he knew a family that might be able to rent out a room.
He consulted his friends and they agreed that I should approach a par-
ticular family because they were struggling and needed the money. Like
the Caribbean island Providencia described in Peter J. Wilson’s Crab
Antics (Wilson 1978), persons who have received a windfall without shar-
ing with their neighbours and friends are frowned upon and avoided.
Economic resources are perceived not as an end in themselves, but as a
Polanyi Goes to Mauritius 275

means to strengthen friendship, social capital, moral standing and a host

of other qualities reminiscent not only of Polanyi’s descriptions but also
of Mauss’ exploration of reciprocity (Mauss 1954 [1925).
Among Hindus, accounts are kept, debts of gratitude are quantified,
often in pecuniary ways, and the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land and
labour are taken seriously. At the same time, their economy and society,
at the local and domestic levels, are thoroughly ‘Eurasian’ in the sense
that they are seamlessly integrated, often through the principles and prac-
tices of kinship (cf. Hann (2019: 163) on classes and clans). The disembed-
ding presumably wrought by the monetization of the economy has not
taken place either with the Hindus or with the Creoles, although their his-
torical trajectories were very different: with the Hindus, there was a deep
continuity with India and they were able to re-create their Hindu villages
after arrival in Mauritius (Eisenlohr 2001). The ancestors of Creoles were
uprooted and severed from their social and political life in Africa, and
were thrown into the cruel, dehumanizing world of slavery. The fact
that something resembling a human economy (Hann and Hart 2009) has
grown out of the legacy of slavery may suggest that the opening lines of
Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where the author argues that laissez-
faire economics have proved their limitations once and for all, still hold
true. Market exchange is necessary for the supply–demand mechanism to
function, but it is totally inadequate as an organizing principle for society.

Human Economy in the Disembedded Society

Redistribution, reciprocity and householding are fundamental to the eco-

nomic lives of both Hindus and Creoles in village Mauritius, although
in different forms and based on different histories, kinship systems,
moral principles and notions of personhood. In this brief chapter, I have
exaggerated the contrast, and the usual caveats apply. Of course, there
are hybrid forms, individual exceptions, historical changes and various
idiosyncrasies. However, since the moral obligations founded in kinship
differ between Creoles and Hindus, and since their economic situation dif-
fers owing to the different outcomes of the morcellements of the nineteenth
century, the structural difference between the groups is there, notwith-
standing individual variations. Moreover, just as the double movement
witnessed by Hann in postsocialist Central Europe produces tensions
between a moral economy and a pecuniary economy, so are compara-
ble tensions visible in Mauritius, between ‘redistribution and exchange
as the dominant forms of integration’ (Hann 2019: 326), although the
former takes place at the community level and involves the state to a
276 Thomas Hylland Eriksen

lesser degree than in Hann’s material. This observation nevertheless sug-

gests that Hann’s ambitious comparative work across Eurasian societies
may fruitfully include some of their diasporic offspring as well, and that
the state may not necessarily be the main or even most efficient source of
redistributive practices.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the

University of Oslo and former President of the European Association of
Social Anthropologists. His research has mainly focused on the cultural
implications of globalization, identity politics and creolization. Recently,
he has directed research on ‘overheating’, accelerated global change and
its local implications.

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