Politics in recent years have been primarily concerned with internal autonomy: most people appear to favour an increase beyond the present level but very few support completely severing the historic link with France, particularly as the island is largely dependent economically on aid from the French government. After the pirate broadcasters' leader, Camille Sudre, was banned from political activity, his wife Marguerite became president of the party.
It has since become a permanent feature of the political landscape. Did you know? The islanders follow French fashion. Normal social courtesies should be observed. Industrial equipment is brought from England and poor whites are evacuated from prime real estate on the flat coast by wealthy cane producers, forced into the mountains where they join the maroons.
The labor-intensive sugarcane industry requires more working hands, so more slaves are brought over and we start to really see a polarization on the island between the rich and the poor.
All these outside visitors also bring with them diseases which the local population is not immune to. So life in the paradise of Ile Bourbon is not so easy…. The Brits stick around for four years and really bring the sugarcane industry into a boom, but the French take back Reunion Island in , with neighboring Seychelles and Mauritius, ceded for good. Sugarcane production brings both wealth and devastation to Reunion Island during this time.
Tens of thousands of new slaves are imported , coffee is uprooted in favor of cane, and forests are slashed and burned to make room for additional arable land and wood to power furnaces burning in over sugar mills. Roads must be built to transport the goods and the labor around the island. Beautiful mansions spring up in Saint-Denis and along the east coast, many of which are still around today.
In , slavery is abolished. This is bad news for many low-class whites on the island. Plantation owners must import foreign labor and now pay for it , bringing to the island an influx of Chinese, Africans, Malagasy, and Indians , many of which are Muslim, This adds more pieces to the mosaic of races on the island and further fuels the creole culture of mixed-race generations.
Many abled locals emigrate to other French Colonies and India and Brazil. Sugarcane is uprooted and geranium is planted instead in many parts of the island. In , vanilla becomes commercial, about 10 years after a year-old slave discovers how to pollinate vanilla on the island he is freed as a reward.
The vanilla industry begins to take off, just as the recession hits hard. In , Reunion Island officially becomes a department of France. In the decades since Reunion Island has witnessed modernization and urbanization. That said, many parts of the island still appear to be off-limits to modern development, which is great news for nature-lovers. These two achievements have not helped to put Reunion Island on the world tourist map. The island thankfully still does not get the influx of tourists some of its neighbors see , mostly visited by French metropols and avid hikers who have heard a thing or two about this gem.
In the late 18th century, there were a number of slave revolts and those who managed to escape made their way to the interior. They organised themselves into villages run by democratically elected chiefs and fought to preserve their independence from colonial authorities. The coffee plantations were destroyed by cyclones very early in the 19th century, and in , during the Napoleonic Wars, Bonaparte lost the island to the British.
Five years later, under the Treaty of Paris, the spoil was returned to the French. The British, however, retained their grip on Rodrigues, Mauritius and the Seychelles. During this period, the Desbassyns brothers rose to success as the island's foremost sugar barons. The vanilla industry, introduced in , also grew rapidly. A great number of white settlers arrived too late to gain access to the land and, excluded from the plantation system, retreated to the highlands, where they constituted a poor white population "Petits blancs" or "Yabs".
The abolition of slavery in led white landowners to recruit indentured laborers for their plantations, particularly Tamils. Their conditions were often no better than the slaves that preceeded them. Most Tamils stayed at the end of their five-year contracts and continued to work for the white landowners.
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