The history of Grenada

Grenada, the southernmost of the Windward Islands, together with Carriacou and Petite Martinique, was home to Indigenous farming peoples for well over a thousand years before French colonists conquered it in the 1650s. France and then Britain turned it into a plantation colony worked by enslaved Africans, and the two powers fought over it until 1783; a great uprising under Julien Fédon in 1795 nearly ended British rule. After emancipation the island became known for nutmeg and cocoa, and in the twentieth century for its labour politics. Independent since 1974, Grenada went through the only Marxist revolution in the English-speaking Caribbean, a violent internal coup and a United States-led invasion in 1983, before settling into stable parliamentary government.

Changes in pollen and charcoal in lake sediments hint that people may have reached Grenada as early as the fourth millennium BCE, though this evidence is disputed, and shell middens at Point Salines date from the first millennium BCE. The first securely dated settlements belong to the Early Ceramic Age: farming villages at Beausejour, Pearls and Sauteurs Bay were founded between about 250 and 450 CE by people who had come up from the South American mainland, bringing cassava, pottery and the Arawakan languages. From around 750 the population grew, probably through further migration, and most of the 87 pre-Columbian sites known on the island were occupied between 750 and 1200. The village at Sauteurs Bay, with a large burial ground, was lived in continuously from around 300 until the French conquest.

When the French arrived in 1649 they found two Indigenous groups, whom they called Caraïbes in the north and Galibis in the south-east. Archaeology suggests a twist: the people the French called Caribs were descendants of the island's long-settled inhabitants, while the Galibis were more recent arrivals from the mainland, after about 1250. Historians now tend to see the people Europeans called Island Caribs, or Kalinago, as a blending of these communities rather than the conquering invaders of the old story.

Christopher Columbus sighted the island in 1498 and named it Concepción, but did not land. By the 1520s Spanish maps called it Granada, after the Andalusian city of Granada, which became La Grenade in French and Grenada in English. Spain never tried to settle it, and Indigenous resistance kept the Windward Islands free of colonies for well over a century. An English party of more than 200 settlers landed in 1609 but abandoned the attempt within months.

On 17 March 1649, Jacques Dyel du Parquet, governor of Martinique, landed with 203 men and built a fort at St George's harbour. He agreed with the chief Kairouane to divide the island, but fighting broke out within months and lasted until 1654, when the last resistance was crushed. At Sauteurs, in the north, a group of Indigenous fighters cornered by a French attack leapt from the cliff to their deaths rather than surrender; the place is still called Leapers' Hill. Survivors fled or were killed, and warriors from St Vincent and Dominica raided the French settlement for years afterwards.

Grenada passed between French proprietors until Louis XIV's government took over the island in the 1660s and 1670s, ruling it as a dependency of Martinique. Its economy rested on sugar and indigo, later cocoa and coffee, worked by Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade. The number of enslaved people grew from about 222 in 1669 to roughly 15,200 by 1763.

British forces took the island without a fight in 1762, during the Seven Years' War, and the Treaty of Paris confirmed the cession in 1763. British buyers acquired many French estates and restrictions on the Catholic Church angered the French-speaking population. During the American Revolution the Comte d'Estaing recaptured Grenada for France in July 1779, but the peace of 1783 restored it to Britain. The plantation system expanded fast: by 1785 there were 23,926 enslaved people on the island, against about 1,000 European settlers and 1,115 free people of colour, and by 1807 British ships had brought some 114,000 enslaved Africans to Grenada.

On the night of 2 March 1795 Julien Fédon, a free man of mixed race who owned the Belvidere estate in the mountainous interior, launched a rising against British rule. Inspired by the French Revolution and the example of the Haitian Revolution, and armed and commissioned by the French revolutionary authorities on Guadeloupe, his forces, joined by thousands of enslaved people, seized most of the island except St George's. Many white colonists were killed, including around 40 hostages executed on Fédon's orders after a failed British assault, among them the lieutenant governor, Ninian Home. British reinforcements under Sir Ralph Abercromby stormed Fédon's mountain camp in June 1796. Rebels were hunted down and many executed, the enslaved often without trial; Fédon himself vanished and his fate is unknown. The island's economy was ruined and French influence broken for good.

Slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1834, with full freedom in 1838. Formerly enslaved people left the estates to farm their own plots where they could, and from 1857 indentured labourers from India were brought in to work the plantations. Nutmeg, introduced in 1843, grew alongside cocoa into the island's main export, giving Grenada the name Spice Isle. Representative government was abolished in 1877 when Grenada became a Crown colony, and from 1885 St George's served as capital of the British Windward Islands.

T. Albert Marryshow founded the Representative Government Association in 1917, and his campaign won a limited elected element in 1925, though only the wealthiest 4 percent of adults could vote. Change came from below in 1950, when Eric Gairy, a union organiser, founded the Grenada United Labour Party. His general strike of 1951, the "sky red" days when estates and buildings were burned, forced concessions, and in October 1951 Grenada held its first elections under universal adult suffrage, which Gairy's party won. Hurricane Janet killed about 500 people in 1955. After the collapse of the West Indies Federation, of which Grenada was part from 1958 to 1962, the island became an associated state in 1967 and independent on 7 February 1974, with Gairy as prime minister and Elizabeth II as queen. Gairy's rule was marked by corruption charges and by intimidation from his private militia, the Mongoose Gang.

On 13 March 1979, while Gairy was abroad, the New Jewel Movement seized power in a nearly bloodless coup. Its leader, Maurice Bishop, became prime minister of a People's Revolutionary Government that suspended the constitution, detained opponents, banned other parties and held no elections, but also launched literacy and community programmes. It drew close to Cuba and the Soviet bloc, and Cuban workers began building a large airport at Point Salines, which Washington saw as a potential military base during the Cold War.

A split inside the party between Bishop and his deputy, Bernard Coard, ended with Bishop under house arrest in October 1983. On 19 October a crowd freed him, but soldiers loyal to the Coard faction recaptured him at Fort Rupert and executed him with seven others, including three cabinet ministers; a military council under General Hudson Austin took power. On 25 October about 7,600 United States troops, with forces from Jamaica, Barbados and other eastern Caribbean states, invaded. The fighting killed 19 Americans, 25 Cubans and 45 Grenadian soldiers, along with at least 24 civilians, 18 of them in the mistaken bombing of a mental hospital. The UN General Assembly condemned the invasion as a flagrant violation of international law, and Britain was not consulted, but many Grenadians welcomed it, and 25 October is now a public holiday. Seventeen people, including Coard, were later convicted over the killings; the last were released in 2009. Bishop's body was never found.

Elections in December 1984 restored parliamentary government. Keith Mitchell of the New National Party dominated the following decades, serving as prime minister from 1995 to 2008 and again from 2013 to 2022, three times winning every seat. The airport at Point Salines opened in 1984 and was renamed after Maurice Bishop in 2009. Hurricane Ivan in September 2004 killed 39 people, damaged around 80 percent of buildings and destroyed most of the nutmeg trees, setting the economy back years. In June 2022 the National Democratic Congress won nine of fifteen seats and Dickon Mitchell, no relation to his predecessor, became prime minister. On 1 July 2024 Hurricane Beryl made landfall on Carriacou as a Category 4 storm, the strongest ever to hit the country, damaging or destroying almost every building on Carriacou and most on Petite Martinique.