Part of the Mascarene Islands , it is located approximately km mi east of the island of Madagascar and km mi southwest of the island of Mauritius. As of January [update] , it had a population of , Its tropical climate led to the development of a plantation economy focused primarily on sugar; slaves from East Africa were imported as fieldworkers, followed by Malays, Vietnamese , Chinese, and Indians as indentured laborers.
Consequently, it is one of the outermost regions of the European Union and part of the eurozone ; [ 3 ] it is, along with the French overseas department of Mayotte , one of the two eurozone areas in the Southern Hemisphere.
Owing to its strategic location, France maintains a large military presence. The French took possession of the island in the 17th century, naming it Isle Bourbon after the House of Bourbon which then ruled France. No document establishes this and the use of the word "meeting" could have been purely symbolic. The island changed its name again in the 19th century: in , under the First Empire , General Decaen named it Isle Bonaparte after Napoleon , though in it became Isle Bourbon again.
This last spelling corresponds to the recommendations of the Commission nationale de toponymie [ 9 ] and appears in the current Constitution of the French Republic in articles and The island has been inhabited since the 17th century, when people from France and Madagascar settled there. Slavery was abolished on 20 December a date celebrated yearly on the island , when the Second Republic abolished slavery in the French colonies. The island became an overseas department of France in The first European discovery of the area was made around by Portuguese explorer Diogo Fernandes Pereira , but the specifics are unclear.
The convicts were returned to France several years later, and in , the island was named Isle Bourbon after the House of Bourbon. Colonisation started in , when the French East India Company sent the first settlers. The French colonists developed a plantation economy founded on the cultivation of coffee and sugar by use of slave labor. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French colonisation, supplemented by importing Africans, Chinese and Indians as workers, contributed to ethnic diversity in the population.
