War and Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean (review)

For the United States Navy, the war against Japan was the Pacific War. For the Royal Navy, until 1944 and the formation of its Pacific Fleet, the war was an Indian Ocean war. The British Army had been forced back to the India-Burma border but not defeated; the Royal Navy, suffering severe losses (and only spared even worse by good fortune), had been forced back also undefeated to the western shores of the Indian Ocean. The island colony of Mauritius, which had in any case a sufficiency of its own domestic problems and to which had been added those arising from its proximity to the Vichy French-controlled island of Madagascar, suddenly found itself very much in the Front Line.

Jackson's interesting and very well-researched book tells us of the many and varied effects of the war on this neglected colonial outpost, a small but instructive addition to British imperial history in the Second World War. Indeed, Jackson's introductory chapters, outlining the support received by Britain from her colonies should be read by all students of imperial history as a corrective to the more popular view that the Second World War was primarily the overture to postwar anticolonial nationalism.

Although small, Mauritius was a difficult territory for the colonial officials, many of considerable ability, to govern on account of its population mix, a Franco-Mauritian planter elite, an Indian majority population, and a substantial Creole minority. Some of the Franco-Mauritian elite even sympathized with the Vichy regime. The war was to have two significant consequences only to appear rather later, a power transfer from the Mauritian elite to the Indian majority, and a subtle culture shift, less francophone and more Anglophone.

But this is looking ahead. In Jackson's chapters we find valuable material on the naval strategic importance and role of the island in the war, the substantial labour and domestic garrison contributions made by the island, and other colonies, to the war effort, the effects of the war—price rises, food shortages, the arrival of a number of Central European Jewish refugees—on the home front, and two areas of especial interest to military historians, the intelligence gathering and Special Operations Executive work carried out from and on the island, and the unhappy story of the mutiny of the Mauritius Regiment on its arrival in Madagascar—a consequence of poor officering and the ethnic tensions within Mauritius society.

While the work concentrates on Mauritius in the 1939-45 period, Jackson also covers Britain's other smaller Indian Ocean territories, and in his final chapter summarises British post-1945 strategic thinking about the Indian Ocean until the end of the 1960s when naval commitments east of Suez were abandoned and the mantle passed to the United States.

The publishers can be congratulated on the attractive jacket, but not on their editing which could have been tidier, avoided some repetition and above all both given the proper accents of French place and persons' names and provided readers with maps, inexcusable failures by a reputable publisher who should have known better.

These blemishes aside, the book remains a pleasure to read, throwing light on much detail hitherto neglected. Jackson's final verdict summarises his argument (pp. 184-85): "In world wars, one did not stop to ask if subject peoples objected to their Territories becoming involved or their resources allocated, and by 1939 the British had come as far as any power ever to garnering the active participation of a vast empire in a world war without brutal means." This is the remarkable fact underpinning the material examined in this book.