The history of Dominica

Dominica is the most mountainous island of the Lesser Antilles, a steep volcanic island whose forests and ravines shaped almost every chapter of its history. Its rugged interior let the Kalinago hold out against European colonists for two centuries longer than on most neighbouring islands, and later sheltered communities of people who had escaped slavery. France settled it in the early eighteenth century and Britain took it in 1763, building a plantation economy worked by enslaved Africans. After emancipation Dominica briefly had the only Black-majority legislature in the British Caribbean, before London reimposed direct rule. Independent since 1978, it remains the one eastern Caribbean island with a surviving Kalinago community living on its own territory.

People may have reached Dominica in the distant past, but settled village life arrived with Arawak-speaking farmers who came up the island chain from the Orinoco region of South America, carried north by the ocean currents. Some accounts place their arrival around the fifth century CE, while older surveys suggest earlier dates. These communities grew cassava, fished and made pottery in the tradition shared across the Lesser Antilles.

By the time Europeans arrived, the island belonged to the Kalinago, the people Europeans called Island Caribs, who named it Wai'tu kubuli, "tall is her body". The traditional account, recorded by early missionaries, held that the Kalinago were warriors from the South American mainland who had conquered the earlier inhabitants. Modern linguistic and archaeological work has complicated this picture: the Kalinago language was Arawakan, like that of the Taíno of the larger islands, and Kalinago oral traditions speak of earlier and later groups living side by side and intermarrying. Many scholars now see Kalinago society as a blending of long-settled islanders with smaller groups of newcomers from the mainland. The Kalinago lived in villages of extended families, travelled widely between islands in large dugout canoes, and had a reputation among the Spanish, largely unproven, for cannibalism, a charge that Spain used to justify enslaving them.

Christopher Columbus sighted the island on his second voyage, on Sunday 3 November 1493, and named it Dominica after the Latin for that day. The Spanish Empire never settled it. There was no gold, the mountains were hard to penetrate, and the Kalinago fought back fiercely; refugees from islands the Europeans had seized swelled their numbers. For more than a century Dominica was a place where passing Spanish ships stopped for wood and water at their peril.

In the seventeenth century France and England fought over the smaller islands, killing or driving out Kalinago communities elsewhere. The French missionary Raymond Breton lived among the Kalinago of Dominica in the 1640s and recorded their language. In 1660 France and England agreed that Dominica and St Vincent would be left to the Kalinago as neutral territory, while the other islands were opened to colonisation. The arrangement held on paper for a century, but warfare and European diseases cut the Kalinago population sharply, from perhaps 5,000 in the 1640s to around 400 by 1730, according to the Library of Congress country study.

Neutrality did not keep the Europeans out. From around 1690 French woodcutters from Martinique and Guadeloupe set up timber camps, and they brought the first enslaved West Africans to the island. In 1715 a revolt of poor white smallholders on Martinique, known as La Gaoulé, sent settlers to southern Dominica, and in 1727 a French commander arrived and the island formally became a French colony. The French cleared estates for coffee and imported enslaved Africans to work them, and within decades Africans and their descendants made up most of the population. Enslaved people grew food on provision grounds and sold it at Sunday markets, and some bought their freedom, creating a class of free people of colour who themselves sometimes owned land and slaves. French, and the Antillean Creole that grew from it, became the island's everyday speech, as it remains.

British forces captured Dominica in 1761, during the Seven Years' War, and the Treaty of Paris confirmed the transfer in 1763. Britain set up an assembly in which only white colonists sat, sold large tracts of land to absentee owners in Britain, and expanded the plantation economy through the Atlantic slave trade. During the American Revolution France retook the island in 1778 with the help of its French-speaking inhabitants, but the peace of 1783 handed it back. French attacks in 1795, during the era of the Haitian Revolution, and in 1805, when much of Roseau was burned, both failed to hold it.

The mountains offered a refuge to those who escaped the estates. Communities of maroons, people who had fled slavery, built camps in the interior and raided plantations. The best known leader, Jacko, was born in West Africa, brought to Dominica in the 1760s and escaped soon afterwards; for some forty years he led a camp on a plateau above the Layou valley, reached by steps cut into the rock. In 1813 Governor George Ainslie ordered that captured runaways be put to the bayonet, sparing neither age nor sex, and a campaign against the camps followed. Jacko was killed in a raid in July 1814. Hundreds of people were captured, and dozens died in the fighting, in jail or on the gallows; Ainslie's methods were severe enough that London recalled and censured him. A statue of a maroon, the Neg Mawon monument, was raised in Roseau in 2013.

Free people of colour won political rights in 1831, and slavery was abolished across the British Empire on 1 August 1834, though full freedom came only after apprenticeship ended in 1838. Men of African descent entered the assembly, and by 1838 they formed its majority, something no other British West Indian colony saw in the nineteenth century. Many were former free people of colour, smallholders and merchants whose interests clashed with those of the small white planter class. The planters lobbied London, which in 1865 made half the assembly appointed; in 1896 Dominica was reduced to a Crown colony governed without elected members.

In 1903 the British set aside about 3,700 acres on the rugged east coast as a Carib reserve. In September 1930 police raided the reserve at St Cyr to seize goods they called smuggled; in the confrontation two Kalinago men were shot dead, the chief, Jolly John, was imprisoned, and the chieftainship was abolished until 1952. In the twentieth century the Representative Government Association, founded after the First World War, won back elected seats, while thousands of refugees from the Vichy-ruled French islands crossed to Dominica during the Second World War. After the Moyne Commission exposed conditions across the British Caribbean in 1939, British aid brought roads, schools and clinics, and in the 1950s new trade unions and parties gave workers and small farmers a political voice. Dominica joined the short-lived West Indies Federation in 1958, and in 1961 Edward Oliver LeBlanc, a small farmer, led the Dominica Labour Party to power, the first head of government from outside the Roseau elite.

Dominica became an associated state of the United Kingdom in 1967, with control of its internal affairs, and fully independent as a republic on 3 November 1978, with Patrick John as prime minister. Within a year his government fell amid protests, and Hurricane David devastated the island in August 1979. Eugenia Charles of the Dominica Freedom Party won the 1980 election, becoming the Caribbean's first woman prime minister. She survived two coup attempts in 1981, one by members of the island's defence force and one planned by foreign mercenaries with links to American white supremacists, and in 1983 backed the United States invasion of Grenada. The economy rested on bananas, and falling banana prices in the 1990s brought hard times to the farmers of the interior.

Roosevelt Skerrit of the Dominica Labour Party became prime minister in 2004 at the age of 31 and has won every election since; in the snap election of December 2022, boycotted by the main opposition parties over electoral reform, his party took 19 of 21 seats on a turnout of about 32 percent. The island has leaned on a citizenship by investment programme for revenue, especially for rebuilding after Tropical Storm Erika in 2015 and Hurricane Maria, which struck as a Category 5 storm on 18 September 2017 and damaged or destroyed most of the island's buildings. In 2015 Dominica officially replaced the name Carib with Kalinago, and in 2023 parliament elected Sylvanie Burton, from the Kalinago Territory, as the country's first woman and first Indigenous president.