The history of Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda is a two-island nation in the Leeward Islands of the eastern Caribbean, with the uninhabited rock of Redonda as a third member. Indigenous peoples lived on the islands for several thousand years before England founded a colony on Antigua in 1632. For two centuries the islands were a sugar colony worked by enslaved Africans, and Antigua's sheltered harbours made it a key base of the Royal Navy. After emancipation in 1834, a long struggle by workers' unions led to self-government, and the country became independent in 1981 as a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth.

The earliest people on Antigua were Archaic hunter-gatherers, often called the Ciboney, who reached the island by canoe and lived on shellfish, fish and wild plants. Dates for their arrival vary between studies, but the site at Twenty Hill and other camps show that people were there at least four thousand years ago and perhaps as early as the fourth millennium BCE. They worked stone and shell into tools, and Antigua's flint was traded to neighbouring islands.

Around two thousand years ago a new people arrived: Arawak-speaking farmers of the Saladoid culture, who had moved up the island chain from the lower Orinoco in what is now Venezuela. They brought pottery, settled villages and crops including cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, cotton, tobacco and the small, sweet Antigua black pineapple. Their name for the island, remembered as Waladli and in modern form Wadadli, is still used locally. Over later centuries the pottery style changed, which some archaeologists link to the arrival of the Kalinago, or Island Caribs. The Kalinago appear to have used Antigua more as a base for raids and provisions than as a place of large settlement.

Christopher Columbus sighted Antigua in 1493 on his second voyage and named it after the Virgin of La Antigua, an image in the cathedral of Seville. Barbuda, Spanish for "bearded", may have been named after its bearded fig trees. Spain made no lasting settlement. The islands had little fresh water, and Kalinago raids discouraged settlers, while European diseases, slave raiding and warfare devastated the indigenous population of the region during the sixteenth century, as they did across the Caribbean.

In 1632 a party of English settlers from St Kitts, led by Edward Warner, son of the founder of the English colony there, established the first permanent colony on Antigua. The settlers first grew tobacco, indigo and ginger, using English and Irish indentured servants as well as enslaved Africans. France captured the island in 1666, but the Treaty of Breda returned it to England the next year, and it stayed under English, later British, rule until independence.

The colony was transformed by sugar. In 1674 Christopher Codrington, who had come from Barbados, set up the first large sugar estate, and within a few years enslaved Africans made up half the population. Planters cleared most of the island's forest for cane, and Antigua became one of the most profitable colonies in the British Empire. In 1685 the Codrington family leased Barbuda from the Crown, reputedly for one fat pig a year if asked, and used it to raise food, timber, livestock and labour for their Antiguan estates. The lease lasted until 1870, and Barbuda's only town still bears the family name.

The labour of the sugar estates was done by Africans carried across the Atlantic in the Atlantic slave trade, drawn from the Gold Coast, the Bights of Benin and Biafra, Senegambia and other regions of West and Central Africa. Their descendants make up the great majority of the population today. Work in the cane fields and boiling houses was exhausting and dangerous, punishments were brutal, and deaths outnumbered births for much of the eighteenth century, so planters relied on constant new purchases.

Enslaved people resisted in many ways, from running away into the remaining hills to open revolt. There were risings in 1701 and 1729, and in 1736 authorities uncovered a plan for a general uprising led by an Akan-born man known as Prince Klaas, or Court, who had been acclaimed king at a ceremony shortly before. The plot was betrayed, and scores of the accused were executed with great cruelty, many of them burned alive or broken on the wheel. On Barbuda, the enslaved community lived with more autonomy, raising livestock and farming collectively, a tradition that later shaped the island's custom of communal land.

Antigua's deep, sheltered bays made it valuable to the Royal Navy, which built a dockyard at English Harbour in the eighteenth century and made it the main British naval base in the eastern Caribbean. Forts such as Shirley Heights guarded the anchorage. In the 1780s a young captain, Horatio Nelson, served there and made himself unpopular with local merchants by enforcing the Navigation Acts against trade with the newly independent United States after the American Revolution. The restored dockyard, now known as Nelson's Dockyard, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.

When Parliament abolished slavery in the British Empire from 1834, most colonies imposed an apprenticeship that bound former slaves to their plantations for several more years. Antigua chose to free its enslaved people outright in August 1834, largely because planters calculated that paying low wages would cost less than housing and feeding enslaved workers. With almost no spare land and no access to credit, most freed people stayed on the estates for meagre pay, and sugar remained dominant for another century. An earthquake in 1843 and a hurricane in 1847 added to the hardship. Between 1847 and 1852 about 2,500 Portuguese migrants from famine-struck Madeira arrived and became traders and shopkeepers, and Barbuda was formally annexed to Antigua in 1860.

The Great Depression collapsed sugar prices just as drought ruined crops, and the late 1930s brought protests across the British Caribbean. A royal commission under Lord Moyne investigated, and in 1940 the Antigua Trades and Labour Union was founded on the advice of a British trade union leader. Its president from 1943, Vere Cornwall Bird, built a political arm, the Antigua Labour Party, which won its first seats in 1946. Universal adult suffrage followed in 1951, and Bird's party began a long run of election victories.

Antigua was part of the British Leeward Islands colony until 1958, and then of the short-lived West Indies Federation until 1962. Bird became chief minister in 1961 and led talks in London that made Antigua an associated state with full internal self-government on 27 February 1967, with Barbuda and Redonda as dependencies. In the years that followed, tourism replaced a declining sugar industry as the heart of the economy. A rival union and party, George Walter's Progressive Labour Movement, governed from 1971 to 1976, and a movement for secession grew on Barbuda, whose people feared rule from St John's.

After Bird's party won the 1980 election, a conference in London agreed terms for independence, including a guarantee of internal autonomy for Barbuda through its own council. Antigua and Barbuda became independent on 1 November 1981, with Vere Bird as prime minister and Elizabeth II as queen, represented by a governor-general.

Vere Bird governed until 1994 and was succeeded by his son Lester Bird, so that one family led the country, with only the 1971 to 1976 break, from the 1960s to 2004. The Bird governments were credited with stability and with the growth of tourism, but faced repeated accusations of corruption, including a 1990 scandal over weapons shipped through Antigua to Colombian drug traffickers. In 2004 Baldwin Spencer's United Progressive Party won power, and in 2014 the Labour Party returned under Gaston Browne. In 2017 Hurricane Irma damaged or destroyed around 95 percent of Barbuda's buildings, and nearly the whole population was evacuated to Antigua. Government plans during rebuilding to replace Barbuda's communal land tenure with private ownership caused lasting tension between the two islands.

After the death of Elizabeth II in 2022, Browne said he intended to hold a referendum on becoming a republic, though no vote has yet been held and Charles III remains head of state. The Labour Party narrowly kept power with nine of 17 seats in January 2023. Browne then called an early election for 30 April 2026, in which his party won 15 seats with about 61 percent of the vote, giving him a fourth term. Tourism remains the main source of income for the country.