A small volcanic island in the western Indian Ocean with no native human population until the seventeenth century — where the Dutch, French, and British successively built a sugar-plantation colony worked by enslaved Africans and then by indentured laborers from India, producing in a few generations an entirely new multi-ethnic society from scratch. Mauritius was also, through the fate of the dodo, one of the first famous, well-documented lessons that human arrival could drive a species to extinction.
When Dutch sailors first stepped ashore on Mauritius in 1598, they found an island that had never seen a human being. No permanent human community lived there. In the forest, a large flightless bird walked up to the sailors without fear. It had no reason to be afraid. Nothing had ever hunted it. The sailors named it the dodo, and within a century of human arrival, it was gone — killed by hunting and, above all, by the pigs, rats, and monkeys that people brought with them. The dodo became the world's first famous extinction: proof that a species could be erased by human hands. But the dodo is only the first of Mauritius's extraordinary stories. This island, empty of people until the 1600s, was then filled — by force and by contract — with enslaved Africans, indentured laborers from India, settlers from Europe and China, producing one of the most dramatic social experiments in modern history: a whole new people, made from scratch, in the space of two centuries.