The United Kingdom says it has reached a "historic" deal to cede the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean to the Republic of Mauritius, thus surrendering the final colony of Britain's once-sprawling African empire.

The deal that’s been announced is a rare win-win moment in international relations, with all the relevant actors able to claim a meaningful victory.

The agreement ends decades of dispute over Britain’s last African colony, from which thousands of people were forcibly evicted, while maintaining a key U.S.-British military base there.

After years of legal wrangling and negotiations, Britain said it would surrender sovereignty of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

UK agrees to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius

Mauritius has long argued it was forced to give up the islands in 1965 in return for independence from Britain

The U.K. has agreed to hand sovereignty of the long-contested Chagos Islands, an archipelago of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, in a deal to secure the future of a strategically important U.

F ew places in the world are quite so remote as the 60 or so islands that make up the Chagos Archipelago. Africa sits 3,000km to the west, Indonesia 3,000km to the east; the nearest large land mass is Sri Lanka,