Islands of a certain size impose constraints but also opportunities on their inhabitants. Marginal to large landmasses and to the states and empires that occupy them, they can sometimes evade the full effects of colonialism or manipulate them to their own advantage, maintaining a sense of community, autonomy, and difference. In some circumstances, like Hong Kong, they may become wealthy hubs of commerce, while in others, like Antigua, they subside in impoverishment. In the former case they may attract population, while in the latter they are characterized by emigration. These are ideal types. In this chapter I chart the actual experience of residents of Mayotte, a former French colony and an island that has managed to move between these extremes.

When I first conducted fieldwork in Mayotte (Maore) in 1975, the population was around 45,000 in an area some 145 square miles. By 2001 the population had nearly tripled, and according to the 2012 census, it reached 212,645 inhabitants. In this chapter, I focus on the dynamics of expansion, not only population growth within Mayotte, but the sense of the borders of citizenship extending widely beyond its literal shores. My account is ethnographic and also historical, that is, it gives an ethnographic account of a specific period of history, roughly from 1975 to 2002 when I completed the first draft.

According to long-standing cartographic and geographic convention, the territories of islands cannot expand and contract the way those on large landmasses do. Yet the reach of states extends beyond individual landmasses, reconfiguring places and the distances between them. Over the years of my study, the distance between Mayotte and other places has both stretched and shrunk in various ways. Many of the people counted in the 2001 census of Mayotte resided at least part-time in Réunion, 1,056 miles distant and accessible by direct flight. Politically, Mayotte detached itself in 1976 from the Comoro Islands (as they became liberated from France as an independent republic). Mayotte was then demarcated by the French state as a collectivité territoriale, changing status in June 2001 to collectivité départmentale, and in March 2011 a full département d'outre mer.