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Paper short abstract

This paper argues for tracing claims to self-governance on Réunion Island to "la habitation", a plantation realm in which political autonomy was historically contingent on economic dependencies, and considers the implications for a postcolonial island lacking a precolonial perspective.

Paper long abstract

Any cross-regional approach to islands must include an analytical perspective of plantations as formative to modernity, this paper argues. It explores the French island of La Réunion through the historical concept of the “habitation,” which I see as a precursor to contemporary tensions of autonomy and dependence in the agricultural sector.

Derived from the French verb “habiter,” meaning to live, the term describes how the inhabitants initially lived on the land before becoming landowners. The habitation served as both a production unit and a social unit, encompassing the plantations, workers, fields for sustenance, the factory, and the landowner’s family home. Embodying all key societal institutions, the habitation was seen as a “colony within the colony”, with the landowners free to govern within its boundaries.

I argue that the dual nature of the habitation, with economic dependencies enmeshed in political imaginations of autonomy, animates contemporary tensions between a plantation sector subsidized by France and the EU and activist farmers pursuing self-sufficiency. While the plantations live on through the state's subsidy regimes, the idea of the habitation as an autonomous political unit has been reclaimed by activists who seek to decolonize the Plantationocene by redefining their place within its historical framework.

Overall, this illustrates how, on plantation islands like Reunion, which has no “pre-colonial” past, contemporary notions of autonomy and dependency are fundamentally linked to colonial frameworks, leaving autonomy claims stuck within those same colonial frames.