The history of Saint Kitts and Nevis

Saint Kitts and Nevis, two volcanic islands separated by a channel only three kilometres wide, form the smallest sovereign state in the Americas. Amerindian peoples lived here for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and the Kalinago held the islands when English and French settlers landed in the 1620s. Saint Kitts became the first English and French colony in the Caribbean, the base from which both powers spread through the Leeward Islands, and the place where in 1626 the settlers massacred the Kalinago. For three centuries the islands were sugar colonies worked by enslaved Africans and then by poorly paid wage labourers, until a labour movement born in the 1930s led them to self-government and, in 1983, independence.

The earliest people on the islands were Archaic hunter-gatherers who arrived perhaps as early as 3000 BCE. They made no pottery and left few durable remains, so little is known about where they came from or how long they stayed. Around 100 BCE farmers of the Saladoid culture arrived from the Orinoco basin in what is now Venezuela, bringing cassava cultivation, settled villages and finely painted pottery. Later Arawak-speaking peoples, often called Igneri, continued this farming way of life from about 800 CE.

Around 1300 the Kalinago, known to Europeans as Island Caribs, settled the islands. They called Saint Kitts Liamuiga, "fertile land", and Nevis Oualie, "land of beautiful waters". The Kalinago lived in villages of large thatched houses, grew cassava, cotton and tobacco, fished from dugout canoes and travelled by sea between the islands of the Lesser Antilles, linked by trade, marriage and warfare. Spanish and later French writers portrayed them as savage cannibals, a picture modern historians treat with deep suspicion, since it was used to justify enslaving and killing them.

Christopher Columbus sighted the islands in November 1493 on his second voyage and named them for Spain, but the Spanish Empire never settled them. Early in 1624 by the modern calendar (1623 in the English reckoning of the time), Thomas Warner landed on Saint Kitts with a small party of settlers, made an agreement with the Kalinago leader Ouboutou Tegremante and founded the first lasting colony of the Kingdom of England in the Caribbean, near Old Road. In 1625 a French privateer, Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, arrived, and the two groups divided the island, the English taking the middle and the French the two ends. For this reason Saint Kitts is often called the mother colony of the West Indies.

As the settlers cleared more land for tobacco, relations with the Kalinago broke down. In 1626, claiming to have learned of a Kalinago plan to drive them out, the English and French joined forces. They attacked a Kalinago village at night, killing over a hundred people including Tegremante, and the next day they trapped a large body of Kalinago at a place since called Bloody Point, where a stream became known as Bloody River. The historian Vincent Hubbard estimated that some 2,000 Kalinago were killed, many while trying to surrender; the settlers also suffered heavy losses. Some historians doubt that the alleged plot ever existed and see the massacre as a planned removal of the island's original owners. Survivors fled to the mountains, and by about 1640 those who had not been enslaved had been driven off the island, many to Dominica. Scholars of genocide now describe the killing as a genocidal massacre, one of several that destroyed Kalinago communities across the Lesser Antilles.

From Saint Kitts the English went on to settle Nevis in 1628 and then Antigua and Montserrat, while the Kingdom of France used it as a springboard to Guadeloupe and Martinique. A Spanish fleet destroyed both colonies in 1629, but the settlers soon returned. Tobacco gave way to sugar in the 1640s, and the islands became plantation societies worked first by indentured servants from Britain and Ireland and then, overwhelmingly, by Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade. By the end of the seventeenth century enslaved people outnumbered Europeans two to one on Saint Kitts, and by the 1770s Saint Kitts had over 23,000 black people to about 1,900 white. Many were worked to death within a few years of arrival, and resistance ranged from flight to the mountains to the armed bands of escaped people who fought off a French raid on Nevis in 1706.

The divided island was a battlefield whenever England and France were at war, in 1666, 1689 and the early 1700s. Nevis, the richer of the two islands in the seventeenth century, was devastated by an earthquake in 1690 that destroyed its capital, Jamestown, and by French raids in 1706 that carried off thousands of enslaved people. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 gave Britain the whole of Saint Kitts, and its capital moved to Basseterre in 1727. During the American Revolution a French army besieged the great fortress on Brimstone Hill and forced its surrender in 1782, but the islands were returned to Britain in 1783. By then Saint Kitts was one of the richest colonies in the British Empire per head of population. Alexander Hamilton, later the first United States Treasury Secretary, was born on Nevis in the 1750s.

Britain ended its slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in 1834, freeing 19,780 people on Saint Kitts and 8,815 on Nevis, but the formerly enslaved were made to work for their old owners as apprentices until 1838, while the owners received compensation from the British government. Because the planters owned almost all the cultivable land on Saint Kitts, freedom left most people as wage labourers on the same estates, with little chance of owning a plot. On Nevis, where eroded soils made sugar less profitable, estates broke up into sharecropping and small farms. Hurricanes, droughts, a cholera epidemic in 1853 and 1854 and falling world sugar prices kept wages low, and many people emigrated in search of work. In 1882 Saint Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla were joined as a single presidency within the Leeward Islands, an arrangement many Nevisians and Anguillians resented.

The collapse of sugar prices in the Great Depression brought the crisis to a head. A Workers' League formed in 1932, and in January 1935 a strike of sugar workers at Buckley's estate, on the edge of Basseterre, turned violent and the Riot Act was read, the start of labour riots that continued into 1936. Out of the unrest grew a trade union and the Saint Kitts-Nevis Labour Party, led from the 1940s by Robert Bradshaw. Universal adult suffrage came in 1951, and Labour dominated politics for three decades. The colony belonged to the short-lived West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962 and became an associated state, governing its own internal affairs, in 1967. Anguilla rebelled against rule from Basseterre that same year and eventually returned to direct British rule. Bradshaw's government took over the sugar estates in 1975 and the sugar factory in 1976. In 1970 the sinking of the Christena, the ferry between the two islands, killed 233 people.

After Bradshaw's death in 1978 the People's Action Movement under Kennedy Simmonds formed a coalition with the Nevis Reformation Party in 1980. They negotiated an independence constitution that gave Nevis its own assembly and premier and the right to secede after a referendum with a two-thirds majority. Saint Kitts and Nevis became independent on 19 September 1983, with the British monarch as head of state, and Simmonds as prime minister.

Simmonds governed until 1995, when Labour returned under Denzil Douglas, who held office for twenty years. Nevisian discontent led to a referendum on secession in 1998, in which about 62 per cent voted to leave, short of the required two-thirds. Hurricane Georges caused heavy damage the same year. The loss-making sugar industry was closed in 2005, and the economy turned to tourism, offshore finance and a citizenship-by-investment programme begun in 1984, one of the oldest in the world. Timothy Harris led a coalition government from 2015, and after a snap election in August 2022 the Labour Party returned to power under Terrance Drew. The federation remains a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, and the relationship between its two islands is still a central question of its politics.