A French euro island once cycled through Bourbon names
Réunion, a French overseas department in the Mascarene Islands, sits about 679 kilometres east of Madagascar and 175 southwest of Mauritius. Uninhabited before seventeenth-century settlement, it is now an EU outermost region and—with Mayotte—one of only two eurozone territories in the Southern Hemisphere and Africa.
Arab sailors knew the island as Dina Morgabin, the Western Island, and it may appear on a map drawn by al-Idrisi in 1153; Swahili or Austronesian voyagers heading for Madagascar might also have passed by. The Portuguese sighted it around 1507, possibly with Diogo Fernandes Pereira or the fleet of Pedro Mascarenhas, whose name stuck to the island group. They called it Santa Apolónia, hinting at a sighting on that saint’s feast day, 9 February, but left it essentially alone.
France staked a claim in 1638 and made it official in 1642, when Jacques Pronis shipped a dozen mutineers there from Madagascar. The island took the name Île Bourbon in 1649, and the French East India Company sent the first settlers in 1665. From 1690 most non-Europeans on the island were enslaved, working coffee and sugar plantations.
The name then followed French politics. On 23 March 1793 the National Convention chose La Réunion, dropping royal associations; Decaen made it Isle Bonaparte in 1806, Bourbon came back in 1810, and the Provisional Government restored La Réunion on 7 March 1848. Modern style capitalises the article, as recommended by the national toponymy commission and written into the French Constitution.
Slavery ended on 20 December 1848, a date still marked each year, but indentured labour from Malaya, Vietnam, China and India kept the plantations running and deepened the island’s ethnic mix. Since 1946 it has had the same status as mainland departments, and today it belongs to the European Union as an outermost region using the euro.
Source: Réunion
