WELFARE state-building in the global South or ‘developing’ world in the early and mid-twentieth century followed three different routes.Footnote 1 In the more urbanised and industrialised countries in Latin America, organised workers in formal employment demanded contributory occupation- or sector-based social insurance programmes protecting them against the risks of sickness or disability, old-age, and sometimes unemployment, and funded out of contributions from employers and employees (with, sometimes, state subsidies). Authoritarian elites sought to use such programmes to placate or co-opt selected groups of workers. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) energetically promoted this route.Footnote 2 Across most of Africa, colonial regimes began to promote provident funds or social insurance programmes in the dying days of colonial rule, in the 1950s, as part of an attempt to ‘stabilise’ urban workers. Even then, however, these new programmes had very limited scope.Footnote 3 Most British colonies, especially in Africa, had already begun to follow a second route, with the appointment of social welfare officers and policies to manage processes of social change in both urban and rural areas. Social welfare officers sought to manage ‘juvenile delinquency’ in towns and to rebuild ‘community’ there and in rural areas.Footnote 4 Much more unusual was the third route, where states introduced non-contributory, tax-financed social assistance programmes aimed at the poor. Examples of this third route included South Africa (albeit initially on racial lines),Footnote 5 BarbadosFootnote 6 and other Caribbean colonies, and Mauritius.
In Mauritius, non-contributory, tax-financed old-age pensions were introduced in 1950 to supplement an already unusual poor law. By the late 1950s, more than 10 per cent of the colonial government's recurrent expenditure, or the equivalent of 2 per cent of GDP, was spent on public assistance (including outdoor relief as well as the pension programme).Footnote 7 Other social assistance programmes were introduced in the early 1960s. In the 1970s, a comprehensive system of contributory social insurance and non-contributory social assistance was introduced. In combination with heavy expenditure on public education and health care, these programmes amounted to a welfare state with few rivals across the global South.Footnote 8
Mauritius began to move down this route not in the 1950s or even the late 1940s, after the Second World War, but rather in the late 1930s. It was in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the early stages of the Second World War that Mauritius set out on a path quite different to the paths being trodden in most of the British colonies in mainland Africa as well as poor countries further afield in Latin America and elsewhere. As many scholars have recognised, the decade between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s was crucial in the transformation of social and economic policies, not only in the British colonial empire but also in independent republics of Latin America. It was in this period that the ILO aggressively promoted social insurance policies across Latin America, replicating widely the models used in pioneers such as Chile.Footnote 9 Across much of the British Empire, riots and strikes fuelled a ‘crisis of colonialism’.Footnote 10 The British government provided increased funding for colonial ‘welfare and development’ under new legislation in 1940 and 1945. The Colonial Office established a Social Services Department and advisory committees on education, health and social welfare, at the same time as it promoted labour legislation and rethought its ‘developmental’ agenda.Footnote 11
Mauritius proceeded down a social democratic route in part because of the more pronounced influence of social democratic ideas on non-white political leaders in Mauritius. The kind of ideas promoted by the Fabian Society in Britain were especially important on successive leaders of the Mauritian Labour Party, including Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who became de facto leader of the Mauritian Labour Party in the early 1950s, chief minister in 1961, and prime minister when Mauritius became independent.Footnote 12 The reasons why social democratic ideas had purchase, and why a local ‘Labour Party’ dominated anti-colonial politics, stemmed from the distinctive features of the Mauritian political economy and society. The island's economy was dominated by a heavily capitalist sugar industry, leaving the island vulnerable to either depressed sugar prices or the destruction of the crop by cyclones.Footnote 13 At the same time, the colonial bureaucracy was of high quality and enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the local Franco-Mauritian planter oligarchy.Footnote 14
A sugar cane economy had three specific consequences for welfare state-building. First, the shortage of land not planted with sugar ruled out developmental or welfare strategies that relied on the strengthening or establishment of a smallholding peasantry, growing food crops (or alternative cash crops). Faced, in the 1930s and early 1940s, with poverty and discontent, colonial regimes across most of Africa sought to strengthen the capacity of agrarian society both to provide materially for the poor and to control socially the actual or prospective perpetrators of delinquent behaviour. In Mauritius, too, social welfare officers were deployed, but colonial officials did not delude themselves over the prospects for this kind of reagrarianisation. Secondly, workers on sugar estates (and cane-growing smallholders) were capable of disruptive forms of resistance but were largely unorganised. This, together with the absence of significant numbers of workers in other, more organised sectors, meant that there was little pressure from below for employment-based social insurance programmes. Thirdly, because these economies were small and open and thus dependent on externally-set prices, rising costs undermined their competitiveness, which in turn meant that contributory social insurance programmes or high-wage strategies were potentially disastrous.
Political-economic factors largely explain why Mauritius went down the route of social assistance programmes, in contrast to most of Africa, which went down the alternative route of relying on social welfare officers (and, in some cases, later adopting social insurance programmes for selected groups of workers). In terms of its political economy, Mauritius was more similar to much of the Caribbean than it was to most of Africa. But the existence of political-economic factors favourable to one or another route of welfare state-building alone does not mean that that route was easily followed. In the case of Mauritius, successive governors chose political strategies that impeded the adoption of social assistance programmes, whilst the Colonial Office in London also generally discouraged reform, especially from 1940. These political decisions delayed the introduction of non-contributory old-age pensions in Mauritius.
DEPRESSION, POVERTY, AND RIOTS
The first hesitant steps towards a welfare state in Mauritius were taken against the backdrop of the crisis in the global sugar industry in the mid-1930s. The economy, society, and politics of Mauritius were all dominated by the sugar industry. In the early 1930s, sugar accounted for 98 per cent of Mauritian exports.Footnote 15 Almost half of the island was planted with sugar cane, and between two-thirds and three-quarters of all employment was in the sugar industry. Mauritians ‘ate or starved according to the price of sugar’.Footnote 16
Most of the large sugar estates and the sugar factories (or mills) were owned by an established Franco-Mauritian settler elite, whilst almost all of the workers were Indo-Mauritian, the descendents of indentured labour brought from India. By the 1930s, some Indo-Mauritians had begun to prosper, becoming lawyers, doctors and even mill- and estate-owners. But most Indo-Mauritians were either very poorly paid workers on sugar estates or grew sugar cane on smallholdings (generally on inferior land). Colonial poor laws provided for both indoor relief (in infirmaries or orphanages) and outdoor relief (through small, discretionary cash payments), but the poor relief system was overwhelmed by the Depression. Even some planters recognised that sugar estate workers were ‘underpaid and underfed’, and needed improved housing and provision for old-age.Footnote 17 Although British governors enjoyed some independence from the powerful Franco-Mauritian planter oligarchy, the governor, Wilfrid Jackson, resisted suggestions from London that labour legislation should be reformed.Footnote 18 The colonial state in Mauritius might have had capacity,Footnote 19 but this counted for little in the absence of political will to act on the part of the governor.
Depressed sugar prices and official inaction led to protests from Mauritius's working poor. In 1936, the Mauritian Labour Party was formed under the leadership of a Francophile Creole doctor, Maurice Curé, who had long been active in municipal politics in Port Louis. The new party demanded the extension of the franchise and reform of the legislative Council of Government,Footnote 20 as well as reforms of labour and social policies. Curé's rhetoric was radical – he accused the colonial government of ‘subservience to the capitalist class’ – but his demands were modest, and his primary tactic was the petition, sent to the governor, the secretary of state for the colonies in London, and even the king. In one petition he explicitly asked that ‘legislation be introduced in Mauritius to ensure the working classes the right of association by trade-unions, old age pensions and other measures recommended’ by the ILO. To another he attached correspondence from the ILO on the application of ILO conventions to Mauritius, noting that the British government's reports to the ILO on, for example, trade union rights, were at odds with the reality on the ground in Mauritius. In a third, he requested the appointment of a commission to investigate conditions, unemployment relief, recognition of trade unions, and unemployment, health insurance and old age pensions ‘based on those actually in existence in United Kingdom’.Footnote 21
Governor Jackson was unyielding. He told the Colonial Office in London that the Mauritius Labour Party was ‘practically entirely dependent on the political activities of Dr Curé himself assisted by a small band of helpers’. Jackson insisted that he was not opposed to a ‘moderate extension of the franchise’, but a universal adult male franchise ‘among a population containing so large an uneducated element’ was an inappropriate solution to the real problem of the low price of sugar. He exaggerated his very modest reforms of labour legislation and public health care facilities, and claimed that social insurance and old age pensions were unaffordable.Footnote 22
Whilst there was no evidence that the Labour Party incited direct action, its activities surely encouraged dissent among sugar estate labourers and small planters as the price of sugar continued to fall. Plantation-owners sought to maintain profits by labour-saving investments and cutting wages whilst the millers changed the rates and methods of payment for the cane grown by smallholders. In mid-1937, a series of strikes and demonstrations, combined with arson in the cane fields, the cutting of telephone wires and sabotage at sugar factories, culminated in the killing of four people by managers on one estate and a fifth person by the police. The governor appointed a Commission of Enquiry, chaired by the colony's procureur-general, Charles Hooper.
THE POLITICAL CONTEXT AFTER THE RIOTS
The Depression encouraged new thinking about poverty, development, and welfare in many colonies and in the Colonial Office in London, and weakened the influence of settler, planter, and mercantile elites. The Mauritian governor's conservatism set him at odds with the prevailing trend. The Colonial Office in London recognised that ‘it is impossible to run a forward social policy on an empty Treasury’,Footnote 23 but nonetheless decided that Curé and the Mauritius Labour Party were justified in complaining about the slow pace of reform. ‘Franco-Mauritian predominance’ had hindered the reform of labour legislation and the extension of the franchise, judged one official in July 1937; the property restrictions on the franchise in Mauritius were unusually onerous, and that it was not unreasonable of Curé to request representation of the ‘labouring classes’ on the Council.Footnote 24 Arthur Dawe, a newly-promoted assistant under-secretary, minuted:
My instinct is that if we are to avoid storms we ought to set our political course a few points to the Left. The situation of the working classes is deplorable. The white planters are excessively ancien regime. For them the Bastille seems not to have fallen. They have, under the present constitution, an overweighted political power. They have their representative in London and understand the technique of making things uncomfortable for the Governor unless he moulds his policy generally to conform with their views and commercial interests.
Some ‘timely and sympathetic concessions’ would be ‘prudent insurance’. Fortunately, Jackson was about to be replaced as governor. Dawe suggested that ‘it would probably be a good thing to let the new Gov. know that, if after studying the local problem, he thinks that a more progressive policy, both constitutionally and economically-speaking, would be desirable, the S. of S. will be prepared to back him up’.Footnote 25 The secretary of state concurred. Whilst Britain protected the Mauritian sugar industry through tariffs, he wrote, the ‘sugar capitalists’ in Mauritius must share the benefits with the ‘wage earning classes’. His wishes were clear: ‘We may have some trouble with the more conservative planters etc. but a more progressive labour policy in Mauritius as elsewhere is a policy which I desire to see carried out by the Governor’.Footnote 26
The new governor, Sir Bede Clifford, whilst on holiday in France prior to sailing to Mauritius, wrote to the secretary of state: ‘I imagine my first task will be to ascertain to what extent if any the [sugar] industry can reasonably be expected to assume additional wage burdens either in its present condition or as the outcome of more efficient or economical management’. He implied that he would play a modernising role, protecting labour, against the anticipated opposition of the planters on the Council of Government.Footnote 27 The secretary of state replied that he was ‘very anxious to see a more progressive labour policy’ in Mauritius, and that policies with respect to both the franchise and standards of living should be reoriented ‘in a direction more favourable to the working classes’. The secretary of state also suggested that Clifford meet with Curé.Footnote 28
On arriving in Mauritius, however, Clifford quickly developed a strong antipathy to Curé and the Mauritius Labour Party. The Colonial Office's view was that Curé may have been a ‘windbag’ but was also ‘a political force which has to be reckoned with if we are to run the place smoothly’.Footnote 29 In Clifford's assessment, however, Curé was a mere ‘politician’ (and was also ‘mentally unbalanced’).Footnote 30 Expanding the franchise, Clifford reported, would not solve the pressing social and economic problems, because self-serving ‘professional politicians’ would themselves become additional exploiters of the poor.Footnote 31 Clifford identified law and order as his priority. In order to reduce ‘the vulnerability of the mills and canefields to sabotage and incendiarism’, he concluded, he would need to strengthen the police and remove the incentive to ‘agitation’ by providing new procedures for ‘the orderly settlement of industrial disputes’, disregarding any complaints from either the planters or the ‘professional politicians’ in the Labour Party.Footnote 32 He would not embark on any significant political reform. When the secretary of state proposed that he appoint two new members to the Council of Government to ‘represent’ small planters and workers respectively, Clifford appointed a wealthy mill-owner and prosperous merchant. He would ‘have liked to have a representative of the casual labourers’, Clifford wrote to the secretary of state, ‘but they are so ignorant that it is difficult to find a competent representative of their point of view’.Footnote 33 The Labour Party's well-attended May Day rallies in Port Louis were always orderly, according to the police, but when stevedores went on strike in 1938, Clifford declared a State of Emergency, arrested striking workers, and temporarily deported the Labour Party's Emmanuel Anquetil to the island of Rodriguez. Clifford remained implacably opposed to extending the franchise, even with a literacy qualification. This would result, he warned, in the rise to power of a ‘semi-educated intelligentsia’ of ‘loafers and agitators’.Footnote 34 Clifford's strategy was to take conflict out of the cane fields and into the court-room, not into government.
Curé and the Mauritius Labour Party were not entirely without influence, however, because of their close links to the British Labour Party. Curé and Anquetil were in regular correspondence with the Labour Party Member of Parliament Arthur Creech-Jones, who raised their concerns in Parliament and in correspondence and meetings with the Colonial Office. Anquetil's deportation to Rodrigues was ended in part through the intervention of Creech-Jones.Footnote 35 Creech-Jones's exchanges with the Colonial Office exposed differences of opinion within the latter as to how to manage Clifford – and indeed over the role played by MPs such as Creech-Jones himself. In reply to Creech-Jones over complaints made by Anquetil, one Colonial Office official conceded in June 1939 that ‘there may be a great deal of truth in what Mr Anquetil says’. In a note to his superiors, he added that he was ‘not entirely happy’ over Clifford's progress and suggested that Clifford be asked to submit a report. This suggestion was immediately opposed by his superior, who criticised Creech-Jones' ‘interference’ and mused that ‘Sir Bede Clifford may soon begin to wonder whether he or Mr Creech Jones is responsible for the government of Mauritius’.Footnote 36 The following year, Creech-Jones suggested that the Colonial Office's Labour Advisor (Major Orde-Browne) should meet with Anquetil and Curé on his forthcoming visit to the colony. Colonial Office officials reacted with hostility, echoing Clifford's dismissal of Curé as ‘an agitator who seeks personal power’ and minuting privately that ‘we in the Colonial Office are getting heartily sick of Mr Creech Jones and his enquiries’. It was left to the new parliamentary under-secretary, the Labour Party MP George Hall, to support his colleague's suggestion that Orde-Browne meet with the leaders of the Mauritius Labour Party.Footnote 37 By this time, however, the Mauritius Labour Party's support may have been in decline: ‘Curé and Anquetil were full of promises’, Simmons argues, ‘but could claim no achievements, and nothing to show their followers’.Footnote 38
Policymaking in post-1937 Mauritius was thus framed by a complex cast of players in both Mauritius itself and London. On the island, the Franco-Mauritian sugar planters seemed to have little direct power, although the governor was slow to compel them to pay and treat their workers better. The Mauritius Labour Party clearly had some support, especially in town, but was probably poorly organised in the countryside. The governor, Clifford, was implacably opposed to the Labour Party's leaders, and was determined to resist any extension of the franchise or meaningful reform of the Council of Government. The governor himself was subject to oversight from the Colonial Office in London. Within the Colonial Office, officials were initially divided over whether to support or chastise Clifford over his treatment of the Labour Party and the pace of his reforms. The Colonial Office itself had to pay some attention to MPs such as Creech-Jones, who was in repeated correspondence with Curé and Anquetil. Indeed, the demands of the Mauritius Labour Party were shaped by information from Britain as well as the ILO. Policymaking in Mauritius was framed by the global spread of ideas as well as the multiple relationships between Britain and its colony. As the Mauritius Labour Party itself put it, in May 1939: ‘Mauritian workers rely on British equity to extend to the coloured workers of the Empire the social and political reforms which have led to the progressive state occupied today by European workers’.Footnote 39
One measure of the pressure on Clifford was his next nomination to the Council of Government. When one of his nominees died, Clifford appointed in his place Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. Ramgoolam had grown up in a poor family on a sugar estate, but success at school had led to a medical degree in London, where he had joined the Fabian Society and met rising Labour Party leaders as well as prominent anti-colonial leaders from India. Whilst he engaged with Marxism, he was drawn more to the gradualist pragmatism of Laski and other Fabians. Ramgoolam returned to Mauritius in 1935. In 1940, he established a daily newspaper, Advance, and was also elected to the Port Louis Municipal Council.Footnote 40 Clifford probably saw Ramgoolam, who was not yet part of the Labour Party leadership, as a moderate and Anglophile alternative to Curé. Ramgoolam was, nonetheless, a much more determined and progressive moderniser than either of Clifford's earlier nominees.
SOCIAL REFORMS, 1938–42
Clifford viewed the institutionalisation of employment relations as both necessary for the maintenance of law and order and alternative to political reform. He established a new Labour Department, headed by an official brought from Malaya, and appointed labour inspectors. He also established representative committees bringing together the large estates and the small planters. The 1938 Labour Ordinance set out minimum wages and working conditions, and an Industrial Association Ordinance made qualified provision for trade unions and the institutionalisation of industrial disputes. Disputes between smallholders and millers would also be subject to institutionalised arbitration.Footnote 41 Although the implementation of these reforms was later acknowledged to have been delayed and uneven, they were a beginning.
Under Clifford's governorship, officials proposed and investigated the introduction of old-age pensions and other welfare reforms, but the proposals were not effected. Curé and the Labour Party had called for pensions and other welfare reforms prior to the 1937 riots. The Hooper Commission endorsed the call for old age pensions and sickness insurance, subject to careful and expert investigation and on condition that they ‘apply to all sections of the population and not merely to persons employed in the sugar industry’. It also recommended the establishment of a Department of Labour and Social Welfare ‘to deal with … such matters as old age pensions, sickness insurance and supervision of the welfare of widows and orphans’ as well as labour issues.Footnote 42 Clifford asked the Colonial Office to send copies of the British pension legislation – and received also the very recent Barbados legislation on non-contributory pensions.Footnote 43 He then appointed a committee to report ‘on the need for social insurance and the prospects of successfully and economically promoting such measures in the Colony’, chaired by his director of labour, Edward Twining. While in London in 1940, Clifford and Hooper enquired about social insurance.
At this stage of the war, the Colonial Office advised caution.Footnote 44 A. B. Acheson of the Colonial Office told Hooper ‘that these matters should not be hurried, particularly in present circumstances’. His colleague Hibbert (in the Social Services Department) described social insurance and pensions as ‘somewhat ambitious in the present circumstances of Mauritius’. Even the Colonial Office's labour expert, Orde-Browne, minuted that ‘it is difficult to understand how Mauritius could introduce such an ambitious measure, especially at this time’, although ‘exploratory inquiries might however be useful’. The Colonial Office suggested that information about unemployment and health insurance in Britain should be studied carefully ‘with a view to ascertaining whether it could be adapted to circumstances in Mauritius’.Footnote 45
Whilst the Colonial Office was discouraging, officials in Mauritius itself continued to work on proposals. The Twining Committee reported in January 1941. Its unpublished report referred to the ‘breakdown of the old system’, based on the family, and the need for a new system based on ‘self-help’. This should be based on a contributory pension scheme, not one based on taxation, because it would be ‘inequitable that the full responsibility of providing for the aged should be transferred entirely from the family to the taxpayer’. The Report proposed old-age pension and health insurance schemes that would cost about £22,000 p.a. and £60,000 p.a. respectively. A general system of unemployment insurance was considered to be impracticable, although further information should be collected. The old-age pension scheme (which included provision for widows and orphans) would be compulsory for low-wage workers, who would pay modest contributions and, once eligible, would receive a pension of about 12 rupees per month.Footnote 46
Several members of the Twining Committee dissented from all or parts of the report. The representatives of the sugar industry expressed the fear that the cost would eventually fall onto the industry. A more comprehensive dissent was written by Dr E. Millien, who was the only non-white member of the committee. Millien complained that the Committee included representatives of the sugar estates but not of working people, and that there had been insufficient consideration of options. Twining himself apparently knew about pension schemes in Barbados and South Africa, but the only documentation that was circulated was on British policy. Millien recommended that social insurance be funded by employers, the state, and high-earning employees but not by low-wage workers, that is, that pensions and health insurance should be partly tax-funded and thus much more redistributive to the poor.Footnote 47
The colonial government in Mauritius itself was in a double bind. On the one hand, the government was reluctant to assume responsibility for tax-financed schemes, which is perhaps why the Twining Committee was directed to investigate social insurance, and why the documentation on the Barbados pension scheme was not circulated. On the other hand, officials were cautious about contributory schemes that imposed costs on employers and employees. The junior officials (Hooper and Twining) appeared more ambitious than the governor, but also seem to have accepted the need for fiscal prudence. Clifford himself was said to be enthusiastic about the proposed non-contributory old-age pensions, but opposed to health insurance because of the cost. Amidst continued indecision, Clifford wondered whether they might ask the South African government actuary for advice on the South African pension scheme.Footnote 48
Although colonial officials were constantly asking the Colonial Office for advice, it was often in the colonies themselves that innovative schemes were developed whilst thinking in London lagged behind. The Twining Committee's proposals and additional enquiries from Clifford prompted admissions of ignorance within the Colonial Office: ‘The question of the possibility of social insurance schemes on modern lines being introduced in the Colonies … is a subject of which I am afraid I have little or no knowledge’, admitted Hibbert.Footnote 49 The Colonial Office was far from monolithic, however, and some officials began to dissent from the predominant conservatism. The Economic Department, at this time, was guardedly positive about the potential for unemployment insurance, and favoured a non-contributory rather than a contributory old-age pension scheme.Footnote 50 Orde-Browne, the Labour Advisor, changed his mind after visiting Mauritius in 1941 and endorsed both non-contributory old-age pensions and a contributory insurance system. The existing poor relief system was so deplorable, he reported, ‘that almost any change would be for the better’.Footnote 51
Despite new evidence of poverty and malnutrition on the island, and some pressure from Ramgoolam in the Council,Footnote 52 the governor and Colonial Office continued to prevaricate on policy reform. On Orde-Browne's recommendation, the Colonial Office sought an expert on pensions to send to Mauritius, and they took up Clifford's suggestion to ask the South African government for assistance. Programmatic reforms should not be introduced without a much more thorough costing, and this required statistics that were not available. Clifford was said to be ‘very anxious to get ahead with his social services’, but in the meantime all he did was establish emergency employment schemes.Footnote 53 Simmons blamed the lack of real change in labour policy on Twining, the head of the Labour Department.Footnote 54 But Clifford must bear much of the responsibility. He was preoccupied with the threats posed by Vichy French regimes in Reunion and Madagascar to the west, and the Japanese to the north-east.Footnote 55 Whilst he favoured a limited institutionalisation of industrial relations, his hostility to ‘agitators’ precluded cooperation with local, non-white political leaders.
THE EMBRACE OF ‘DEVELOPMENT’, 1943–48
In both London and Mauritius, official policy shifted between 1942 and 1944. Hitherto, the Colonial Office lacked a clear policy on how precisely governments in colonies such as Mauritius might use funding from London or their own funds to promote ‘development’ and ‘welfare’. Most innovations originated in the colonies. The Colonial Office itself was consistently cautious, but the absence of reform in cases such as Mauritius reflected primarily a lack of dynamism on the part of the governor. After 1943, the Colonial Office adopted much clearer policies, including active discouragement of programmatic welfare reforms. In Mauritius, the appointment of a new governor led to a change in the direction of official policy. Donald Mackenzie-Kennedy, although viewed as being much more conservative than his predecessor Clifford,Footnote 56 attached greater importance to constitutional reform. This was to transform the political context and result in the introduction of old-age pensions, despite opposition from the Colonial Office.
The Colonial Office finally began to clarify its policy on development and welfare in mid-1943. On the positive side, the state should assume responsibility for managing long-term economic development, and providing selected social services (housing, health, and education) through five- or ten-year plans. More negatively, colonial governments should not try to emulate the kinds of welfare reform set out for Britain itself in Beveridge's Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. When disparate colonial governments enquired, often enthusiastically, about the Beveridge Report, Colonial Office officials prepared a memorandum on Social Security in the Colonial Territories that argued that the policies proposed for Britain were only appropriate in the ‘more advanced’ sections of colonial societies. The memorandum emphasised that the priority in most poor countries should be to preserve and strengthen the existing agrarian social structure.Footnote 57 The Colonial Office discussed sending the draft memorandum to Mauritius in September 1943, even prior to its approval by the secretary of state, so that ‘knowledge of our present general attitude might affect the Governor's views’ on welfare reforms.Footnote 58 The key points were reiterated in a covering letter attached to the final, printed version, sent to Mauritius the following year.Footnote 59 The Colonial Office instructed colonial governments to prepare ‘development and welfare plans’, whilst making it clear that (as the secretary of state put it) plans should emphasise ‘the particular importance of economic development as distinct from welfare’.Footnote 60
In Mauritius, the new governor, Mackenzie-Kennedy, was initially positive about welfare reforms. Old-age pensions, he reported in March 1943, would be the first step.Footnote 61 On social insurance, he awaited further information from the British government actuary. In August, Twining met with the government actuary in London, and consulted extensively with the Colonial Office. The Colonial Office wrote formally to Mackenzie-Kennedy, enclosing the final actuarial report, and discouraging him from action. ‘You will no doubt agree with the Government Actuary's views … that a general improvement in the social conditions of the people of Mauritius is most desirable in itself and affects closely the possibility of the successful establishment and maintenance of any scheme of contributory pensions’. Before proceeding, the governor was told, it was imperative to gather additional data (through a census, which could be financed through Development and Welfare funds from London). Whilst the Colonial Office did not instruct the governor not to proceed, there was no doubt about its message:
Since finance must inevitably be a limiting factor in schemes of social improvement, it will of course be necessary in planning these measures to decide, particularly in the light of the probable economic position of Mauritius in the post-war period, some order of priority between them. You may possibly consider that there are other social services of greater urgency than social insurance measures. You will also be fully alive to the need of ensuring that the rates of benefit under any scheme decided upon are not beyond the financial capacity of the Mauritius Government …
Social insurance schemes, the Colonial Office emphasised, could not be funded using Development and Welfare funds, that is, they must be funded out of entirely local revenues.Footnote 62
There were still pressures for reform, in both Mauritius and London. In September 1943, further strikes and protests on the island's sugar estates culminated in the police shooting dead three people. As in 1937, a commission of enquiry was appointed under the new procureur-general (and sometime acting governor), Sydney Moody. The 1944 Moody Report, like the earlier Hooper Report, attributed protests to the awful conditions on sugar estates, and was critical of police actions. The report found that little of the new labour legislation had been implemented, and urged that the recommendations of the Hooper and other reports be implemented immediately. ‘Laws may be passed, administrative machinery may be erected, money may be spent’, the Commission reported, but ‘the situation may nevertheless remain unchanged’.Footnote 63 The Mauritius Labour Party continued to press for welfare reforms,Footnote 64 and to utilise sympathisers in London to promote this. Rita Hinden, the secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, wrote to the Colonial Office in October 1943, emphasising the ‘particular importance’ of contributory and non-contributory pension schemes. ‘In colonies where wage-earning has become the prime factor in the social and economic structure’, she suggested, ‘the safeguards to the wage-earning system should be rapidly introduced with due regard to local circumstances’.Footnote 65 Labour Party MPs continued to raise conditions in Mauritius in debates in the British Parliament.Footnote 66
The colonial government in Mauritius did introduce some other reforms, including additional emergency employment programmes, raising the minimum wages for sugar estate workers, providing milk to school pupils, and decentralising the administration of the poor laws (renamed ‘public assistance’) so as to expedite applications (with the result that expenditures rose significantly).Footnote 67 But it set aside the proposed social assistance and insurance schemes. In line with the new policy from London, the colonial government in Mauritius focused its efforts instead on planning ‘development’.Footnote 68 The governor recognised that the imperial project of fostering development sat uneasily with local demands for welfare reform. At the inaugural meeting of a new Central Development and Welfare Committe, in March 1945, the governor urged caution:
It would be unfortunate if we attempted to apply to this Colony some one or other of the precise plans now being discussed elsewhere without first examining the essential nature of social security at various stages of development, considering how needs change in the process of evolution and finally arriving at provisional conclusions as to the possibilities of Government action in a colony of this type, always remembering that finance must be the limiting factor, that is that policy must be limited by the funds that can be made available from the aggregate income of the community and by the extent to which the wealthier members of the community can be expected to contribute towards the maintenance of those who fall below an ascertained minimum standard … There are no short cuts to the local situation of a problem which has occupied the best brains of the civilized world over a number of years and we should be deceiving ourselves if we thought that we could launch grandiose schemes of social security in this island before we had examined the implications of the problem …Footnote 69
This echoed the advice given by the Colonial Office when it sent the governor the Memorandum on Social Security. In separate correspondence, defending the colony's policies in response to the Moody Report, the governor was careful not to dismiss entirely the possibility of welfare reforms. They were, he wrote, still being considered, ‘as part of the general plan’ for economic development.Footnote 70 The ensuing ten-year Development and Welfare Plan focused on projects to combat malaria, improve housing (especially after an unusually destructive cyclone in 1945), and education, thus focusing more on social than narrowly economic activities. It did not, however, provide for either social insurance or assistance programmes.Footnote 71 It was criticised, the governor reported, by both ‘(a) the reactionary elements and (b) the purely destructive political opportunists’.Footnote 72
The immediate challenges of supporting the poor therefore continued to depend on the family, supplemented with ‘public assistance’ (that is, outdoor relief). ‘The real social security of the average worker rests on the family’, reported the colonial government, rosily echoing the ‘line’ from London: ‘The small size of the island keeps the members of the family in touch with each other, and the working members look after those who are too young or too old to fend for themselves’.Footnote 73 This disregarded the finding of the Twining Committee, in 1941, that the familial system was breaking down – another example of what Lewis has called the ‘fantasies’ of many colonial officials in Africa at this time.Footnote 74 The colonial government emphasised the ‘serious’ effects of a ‘general lack of employment’, which required a system of public assistance.Footnote 75 The implication, of course, was that development was needed to increase employment. The colonial government's concern with ‘welfare’, in line with policy from London, entailed primarily ‘welfare projects’ to rehabilitate the destitute or delinquent: new sports fields, sewing or handicraft classes, libraries, and giving Christmas ‘treats’ to poor children.Footnote 76 Mauritius's poor law was reorganised to focus less on the provision of relief to the poor and more on the rehabilitation of the destitute.Footnote 77 The colonial government in Mauritius had embraced wholeheartedly London's new discourse of development and (non-programmatic) welfare, and social assistance and insurance had dropped off its agenda.
DEMOCRATISATION AND WELFARE REFORM, 1947–50
Other reforms, however, were to transform the political landscape, and ensure that welfare programmes were returned to the agenda. Mackenzie-Kennedy, although viewed as being much more conservative than his predecessor Clifford,Footnote 78 attached much greater importance to constitutional reform. In 1948 the existing Council of Government was replaced with a Legislative Council, a majority of whose members were elected, with the franchise extended to all literate adult men and women. Although many eligible voters failed to register for the first election, the voters' roll nonetheless grew from fewer than 12,000 to more than 70,000.Footnote 79 The power of the Franco-Mauritian elite was conclusively broken.
These political reforms encouraged competition for the support of new voters. The Labour Party, under the last of its founding leaders, campaigned on a platform inspired in large part by its British counterpart: social security and old-age pensions, compulsory education, housing and limited nationalisation. But the party excluded many of the emerging, more popular leaders (including Ramgoolam).Footnote 80 The election returned only four successful Labour Party candidates, who were outnumbered on the new Council by an informal group of five progressive members led by Ramgoolam. Ramgoolam became the de facto leader of the progressive caucus and, soon after, took over the leadership of a reconstituted Labour Party. Faced with an overwhelming reformist majority among the elected members, the governor appointed additional conservative members. Despite this, and despite also the inexperience, ill-discipline and intermittent rowdiness of the newly-elected Council members, the terms and ambit of political debate had clearly shifted.Footnote 81 The new Council supported strongly many of the projects set out in the Ten-Year Plan, such as malaria eradication schemes, but also pushed for policy reforms with respect to wages and social security.Footnote 82
In December 1949, newly-arrived governor Sir Hilary Blood reported to the Colonial Office that he planned to introduce an old-age pension scheme. Means-tested, non-contributory pensions, paying Rs12/month to elderly men and women from the age of 65, would be introduced in mid-1950. The governor did not seem very enthusiastic. ‘In my opinion it is most desirable that from the start Mauritius should understand that social security schemes have to be paid for’, he wrote to the Colonial Office; ‘this is particularly important in view of grandiose ideas on the subject expressed from time to time’.Footnote 83 The Colonial Office was similarly unenthusiastic. One official advised that ‘we should go very cautiously over this and not countenance the introduction of such a scheme without our having approved it in detail’. Mauritian finances ‘are not yet in a very healthy state’ and it was unclear ‘whether the Colony can afford a non-contributory scheme at the present time’. Another official shared this concern, but noted pragmatically that there had long been demands for pensions in Mauritius and the colony's government had now promised to introduce them: ‘I don't see how they can retract’. The Colonial Office favoured a self-funding, contributory social insurance scheme, not tax-financed social assistance. The Colonial Office sent the governor a telegram, expressing concern over the cost, and urging him to postpone the implementation of any scheme pending actuarial advice.Footnote 84
The governor was, however, under considerable pressure within Mauritius, from the elected members of the Legislative Council. One Colonial Office official, who had been in Mauritius during the budget debate in 1950, remarked that ‘though fairly accustomed to the eccentricities of immature unofficial majorities, I followed the proceedings with considerable distaste’.Footnote 85 Legislation providing for a non-contributory old-age pension system was tabled in the Legislative Council on 21 March 1950. This was reportedly intended as a temporary scheme, until a ‘proper’ social insurance system could be established.Footnote 86 A motion on social insurance was also proposed, amended, and carried at the same Legislative Council meeting. The original motion, proposed by one of the elected representatives for Port Louis, called on the colonial government to ‘initiate without delay a Social Insurance Scheme for all workers in this Colony’, funded in part from London. The amended motion, offered by the colonial secretary and accepted, proposed instead that the colonial government ‘as soon as possible submit proposals for a Social Insurance Scheme in the Colony and that the United Kingdom Government be asked to advise in the preparation of the Scheme’.Footnote 87
The non-contributory old-age pension scheme was referred to the Standing Committee on Finance, which proposed a much more generous scheme. Pensions would be doubled, to 25 rupees per month. The governor seems to have been able to sidestep this proposal, by agreeing to a compromise of 15 rupees per month. In July, the Legislative Council agreed to changes in import and excise duties to raise the necessary funds, and in August the scheme was approved by the secretary of state in London.Footnote 88 Applications were already flooding in. The first pensions were paid out at the end of September 1950, but were back-paid retrospectively to July. More than 10,000 pensions were being paid by the end of the year, mostly at the maximum rate of 15 rupees (or about £1 per month, which amounted to approximately one-fifth of the earnings of a government typist or police constable in Mauritius, but compared more favourably to unskilled wages).Footnote 89 The total cost was just over 3 per cent of the colonial government's recurrent budget. The governor had anticipated that some of the costs of the pensions would be recouped by reduced spending on public assistance. The elected members of the Legislative Council, frustrated by their failure to get the higher pensions they had wanted, got their revenge by blocking the governor's attempts to reduce expenditure on public assistance.Footnote 90 The result was a social assistance system that relied on continued public assistance as well as the novel old-age pensions.
CONCLUSION
The introduction of old-age pensions in Mauritius proved to be the first step in the construction of the Mauritian welfare state. In 1953, on the eve of another election, the qualifying age for the pension was reduced from 65 to 60 for women, and the maximum pension payable was raised from 15 to 20 rupees per month, doubling the total cost of the programme. In 1958, the means-test was abolished, and an official inquiry recommended major further reforms. In 1962, a second social assistance programme, family allowances, was introduced. In 1950, however, the colonial government had no road-map for the years ahead, and indeed had been reticent about even this first reform (although this did not stop it from claiming the credit).Footnote 91 Over the preceding fourteen years, the colonial government in Mauritius and the Colonial Office in London had generally dragged their heels, and the impetus to reform came from below, first through the threat posed by riots on sugar estates in 1937 (and 1943), and secondly (and most importantly) through pressure from elected members of the Legislative Council after 1948. This is not to say that colonial administrators in either Mauritius or London were uniformly opposed to welfare reforms such as the introduction of old-age pensions. Proposals for old-age pensions, first made by Dr. Curé and the Mauritius Labour Party, were endorsed by both the Hooper Commission and the Twining Committee, both of which were chaired by colonial officials. Clifford and Hooper, and Twining discussed pensions in London in 1940 and 1943, respectively. In the Colonial Office in London, also, a succession of officials, including the influential Orde-Browne after his change of mind in 1941, recommended that pensions be introduced in Mauritius. Even the 1943–44 memorandum on Social Security in Colonial Territories, whilst generally discouraging welfare reforms, left open the possibility of reform in societies such as Mauritius where peasant society was no longer capable of containing poverty (and there was no prospect of it being revitalised). Overall, however, successive governors on the island and the Colonial Office in London were, at best, ambivalent about this reform. Pensions were introduced in Mauritius despite their ambivalence.
This was a period of extraordinary reform in colonial policy, as is widely acknowledged in the existing literature. The Colonial Office formulated a new doctrine of planned economic development whilst colonial governments implemented a range of innovative projects and schemes. In terms of ‘welfare’ policy, colonial states assumed unprecedented responsibility for housing, sanitation, public health, and education. In most colonies, the state sought to deploy social welfare officers to regulate or restructure the lives of individuals and ‘communities’. In some cases, colonial governments began to consider, and in exceptional cases introduced, programmatic reforms such as old-age pensions or social insurance. Which policies were introduced, and when, depended in significant part on the choices made by colonial governments, and in particular on colonial governors. Given the powerful pressure for some kind of ‘progressive’ reform and the lack of unambiguous leadership from the Colonial Office in London, colonial governors had some discretion over the precise direction of reform.
In some cases, notably Barbados, reforming governors propelled reforms in a direction that the Colonial Office clearly did not like but did not feel able to prevent.Footnote 92 In most cases, the mix of conservatism and reform that characterised the Colonial Office meshed better with the instincts of colonial governors. Across most of Africa, governors sought to modernise aspects of colonial rule and stimulate increased agricultural production whilst not undermining social order in rural areas. In the early and mid-1940s, social welfare officers combined with agricultural extension and ‘development’ officers in the ‘second colonial occupation’.Footnote 93 It was because most African people were viewed as backward that it was thought that they needed to be ‘developed’ and were not ready for the kinds of pension and other welfare programmes enjoyed by people in Britain. When the Colonial Office distributed its memorandum on Social Security in the Colonial Territories, in late 1944, most of the responses from colonial governors in Africa indicated that they concurred that welfare programmes were inappropriate. The governor of the Gambia wrote that there was ‘no particular need at present for social security schemes in the proper sense for the rural population’, whilst his counterpart in the Gold Coast wrote that the priority was to raise productivity and hence wealth through improving the health, education, and especially nutrition of the rural population, whose ‘family system’ continued to protect against want.Footnote 94
Urban areas, however, posed a dilemma for colonial officials. Strengthening agrarian society and expanding rural production would not help the urban poor if the latter were ‘detribalised’ and lacked rural homes or supportive rural kin. Some aspects of urban disorder – notably juvenile delinquency – might be addressed through the deployment of social welfare officers in towns. In 1941, the first social welfare officer to be appointed in a British colony was deployed to Lagos, to tackle the newly-‘discovered’ problem of juvenile delinquency there.Footnote 95 More general problems of urban poverty, and perhaps urban disorder, required more programmatic interventions. In response to the 1944 memorandum on social security, several West African governors suggested that social security schemes might be, or were, appropriate in towns such as Bathurst, Freetown and Accra.Footnote 96 (Later, colonial governments would turn to the kinds of social insurance programmes promoted by the ILO, to provide for African urban workers, mostly employed in the public sector).Footnote 97 In the dominion of Southern Rhodesia, an official report concluded, white, coloured and Indian people needed pensions and other welfare programmes, but the urban African population did not because they could be returned to rural areas when not employed.Footnote 98 South Africa extended pensions to its African population in 1944 because it recognised that rural production was no longer sufficient, and agrarian society too compromised, to provide for the elderly even in rural areas.Footnote 99 The need for pensions and similar programmes was thus strongest in colonies where deagrarianisation was most advanced, and the possibility of reagrarianisation most constrained.
In Mauritius, much of the Caribbean, and those parts of Africa dependent on non-peasant-produced exports, economic and social conditions seemed to favour the introduction of social assistance programmes. Dependency on the price of commodity exports, a shortage of land for subsistence agriculture, and the weakness of trade unions among African workers combined to make tax-financed social assistance programmes a more appropriate means to mitigate poverty than either contributory social insurance or an approach focused on social welfare officers. These cases were also ones where the state had stronger public finances and institutional capacity (although it is unclear how far state capacity was a consequence of as well as a prerequisite for state-building, including welfare state-building). The Fabian version of social democracy that entailed a gradualist combination of economic planning and programmatic social policies resonated with conditions in these societies, pulling emergent ‘nationalist’ political leadership into ‘Labour’ parties.
Even where deagrarianisation favoured the introduction of social assistance programmes, political realities made it difficult. In South Africa, old-age pensions were extended to African people in 1944 by a reformist wartime government under pressure from sections of civil society as well as magistrates in poor areas. The circumstances of war both sharpened the pressure on the government and made it easier for the government to secure the acquiescence of the legislature. In Mauritius, by contrast, colonial governors generally resisted these reforms. Unlike the reformist governor of Barbados in 1937,Footnote 100 they did not try to construct a coalition of reformist officials, white politicians, and emerging non-white political leaders, and did not take advantage of either riots or the war to overcome opposition from the local conservative elite and the Colonial Office in London. Indeed, successive governors of Mauritius belittled and undermined emergent non-settler Mauritian leaders. Although marginalised by the colonial governors in Mauritius itself, the emerging political leadership on the island was not entirely without influence, in part because they had strong links with the (British) Labour Party and Fabian Colonial Bureau in London. Strengthened by these linkages, and then empowered following partial democratisation in the late 1940s, reformist local politicians were able to overcome the reticence of governors and the Colonial Office. The origins of the Mauritian welfare state thus lie in both local political, economic, and social conditions, and the ways in which Mauritius was located in global economic markets, networks of ideas, and networks of power.
