SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter explores the significance of the Mauritian economic development trajectory by connecting the experience of Mauritius to debates on structural economic transformation and on the perceived vulnerabilities and prospects of Small Island Developing States (SIDS). The chapter offers a rationale for a political economy analysis of Mauritius’s economic development trajectory as holding important lessons for African countries as well as SIDS. The vchapter argues that Mauritius’s experience is an example of economic development through continuous structural change, and development policy as the ‘art of the possible’. Possibilism à la Hirschman helps in understanding the transition from a potential basket case to an ‘economic miracle’. The experience of Mauritius in particular collapses the pessimism and structural immutability at the heart of economic thinking about SIDS and the idea of ‘peripherality’. However, any understanding of the processes of economic and social transformations experienced by Mauritius requires a careful analysis of the political economy of state and class formation to recognize that what became ‘possible’ was the outcome of social pressures, development imperatives, contingent opportunities, and exploitation at different levels and through shifting policy priorities. This chapter thus explores the way in which Mauritius escaped the constraints of both analytical/empirical categories (SIDS) and conventional theoretical/policy wisdom (the force of structural vulnerabilities) through ‘possibilism’ shaped by politics. The experience of Mauritius analytically warns against the risks of hitching wagons to categories and standard lines, be they SIDS, the global South, ‘good governance’, or industrialization in sequential structural change.