History of Reunion

Uninhabited Island

Réunion was uninhabited when Portuguese navigator Pedro de Mascarenhas first documented it around 1513, naming the Mascarene archipelago. The island lay untouched for over a century, visited occasionally by passing European mariners as a waypoint on Indian Ocean trade routes but never permanently settled.

Early French Colony

1642 – 1715

French colonists established a permanent presence on the island, then named Bourbon, in the 1640s under the direction of the French East India Company. Enslaved Malagasy and mainland Africans were brought to cultivate coffee plantations, laying the foundation for the island's hierarchical colonial society and its multiethnic demographic character.

Plantation Era

1715 – 1815

Bourbon became a prosperous node on the East Indies trade route, its economy driven by coffee and later other plantation crops worked by an expanding enslaved population. A brief British occupation during the Napoleonic Wars (1810–1815) introduced sugar cane cultivation, which would reshape the island's economy for generations. The island was returned to France by the Treaty of Paris in 1815.

Colonial Maturity

1815 – 1946

Renamed Réunion after the Revolution and then Bourbon again under the Restoration, the island settled into its identity as a French colonial sugar economy. The abolition of slavery in 1848 prompted the importation of indentured laborers from India, China, and Southeast Asia, deepening the island's ethnic diversity. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 diminished Réunion's strategic value as a trade-route stopover, causing prolonged economic decline.

French Département

1946 – 2000

In 1946 Réunion was transformed from a colony into a full overseas département of France, granting its inhabitants French citizenship and access to metropolitan social programs. Significant investment modernized infrastructure, but structural unemployment and a stark wealth gap fueled persistent social tensions, culminating in violent anti-government riots in 1991 that left ten people dead. Independence movements remained marginal, with most Réunionnais preferring continued integration with France.

Modern Overseas Region

2000 – present

Réunion holds the status of both a French overseas département and an outermost region of the European Union, anchoring it firmly within European governance and economic frameworks. Tourism centered on the island's volcanic landscapes, cirques, and biodiversity supplements an economy still reliant on sugar exports and substantial transfers from metropolitan France. High youth unemployment and cyclical tropical storms remain central challenges, while the hyperactive Piton de la Fournaise volcano continues to shape daily life and global scientific interest.