A periodisation of globalisation according to the Mauritian integration into the international sugar commodity chain: (1825 - 2005)

This paper shows that the analysis of commodity chains (CC) can be fruitfully employed to respond to recent calls in the field of global/world history for a periodisation of globalisation.2 The CC approach is ideally suited for advancing global historians’ understanding of the way that particular places are positioned within a changing capitalist world system. This is important because it is this capitalist world system that ultimately defines globalisation in a particular place and therefore also the periodisation of globalisation. The place to be studied in this paper is Mauritius, a small island in the Western Indian Ocean that has a very particular history of colonial and postcolonial integration into the capitalist world system. The entry of Mauritius into the British Empire brought about a particular kind of integration of the island into the capitalist world system. Central to this integration was the production of sugar under the West Indian Sugar Protocol, with this ultimately turning Mauritius from a free port into a plantation economy. This shaped the island's economic and political practice, and brought the formation of a range of institutions that sustained a high degree of inequality among Mauritians by finding ever newer ways of conciliating socioeconomic mobility with exploitation. I discuss Mauritian history through the framework of bilateral and multilateral trading agreements that had significant impact on the sugar industry and kept the island economically dependent on this single crop