The history of Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia is a mountainous volcanic island in the Windward chain of the eastern Caribbean, between Martinique and Saint Vincent. Arawak-speaking farmers and later the Kalinago lived here for well over a thousand years, and the Kalinago kept European settlers off the island for most of the seventeenth century. Its deep harbour at Castries made it a prize in the long rivalry between Britain and France, and it changed hands about fourteen times before Britain took it for good in 1814. Plantation slavery shaped its society, and the French creole language and Catholic faith of the French period survived a century and a half of British rule. Saint Lucia gained independence in 1979 and remains a parliamentary democracy within the Commonwealth.

There may have been visitors or small groups of hunter-gatherers on the island in the last millennium BCE, but the evidence is slight. The first well-attested inhabitants were Arawak-speaking farmers and potters who came from northern South America around 200 to 400 CE and left many village sites with fine decorated pottery. They are thought to have called the island Iouanalao, "land of the iguanas". They grew cassava and other root crops, fished the reefs and lived in villages near the coast and river mouths.

Later the Kalinago, the people Europeans called Island Caribs, came to dominate the island. Older accounts place their arrival around 800, others several centuries later; traditional histories say they killed or drove out the Arawak-speaking men and absorbed the women, though modern scholars treat this story, drawn largely from European writers, with caution. The Kalinago called the island Hewanorra, a name kept by the island's international airport. They had hereditary leaders and religious specialists, and their large dugout war canoes allowed them to raid and trade across the southern Caribbean. They were to prove the most stubborn obstacle to European settlement.

Spanish maps of the early sixteenth century show the island, and Christopher Columbus may have sighted it in 1502, but Spain never tried to settle it. In the 1550s the French pirate François Le Clerc, nicknamed Jambe de Bois for his wooden leg, used Pigeon Island as a base for raids on Spanish shipping. In 1605 sixty-seven English colonists blown off course on the way to Guiana tried to settle, but Kalinago attacks left only nineteen alive within weeks and they fled. A larger English attempt, sent by Thomas Warner from Saint Kitts, was driven off in 1640 after weeks of attacks.

The French, based on Martinique, were more persistent. They built a fort near the future Castries in 1650, made a treaty with the Kalinago in 1660 and established permanent settlement. The English repeatedly invaded in the 1660s, once with the help of Kalinago allies, but disease and Kalinago hostility drove them out, and in 1674 Saint Lucia became a French crown colony dependent on Martinique. As settlement spread, the Kalinago lost their land and their numbers fell sharply through disease, warfare and emigration; a census in 1730 counted only 37 Caribs among the island's 463 inhabitants.

Through the eighteenth century the Kingdom of France and Britain disputed the island, at times declaring it neutral and at times seizing it by force. French planters kept arriving all the same, and once sugar plantations took off in the 1760s the island filled with enslaved Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade. By 1779 there were about 16,000 enslaved people among 19,230 inhabitants, working on more than forty sugar estates as well as coffee and cotton plantations. Many enslaved people escaped into the forested interior, and around a thousand maroons lived there by the early 1780s.

Britain occupied the island during the Seven Years' War but returned it in 1763. It seized Saint Lucia again in 1778 during the American Revolution and used it as a naval base against Martinique, building a fort on Pigeon Island, but handed it back to France in 1784. The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed about 800 people.

The French Revolution reached Saint Lucia in 1791, and enslaved people began leaving the estates. When the French First Republic abolished slavery in February 1794, a British force captured the island within weeks to keep the plantations working. Formerly enslaved people, joined by French republican soldiers, took to the hills as the Armée française dans les bois, the French Army in the Woods, and fought back in what the British called the Brigand War. With support from the French commissioner Victor Hugues on Guadeloupe, and fighters such as Flore Bois Gaillard among their leaders, they drove the British out in June 1795. The following months were remembered as the year of freedom. In 1796 a British army under Sir Ralph Abercromby returned, burned Castries and forced the French garrison on Morne Fortune to surrender, but the guerrilla war in the forests went on, and some fighters surrendered only on the promise that they would not be re-enslaved.

The island returned to France under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, when Napoleon restored slavery in the French colonies, and Britain retook it in 1803 during the Napoleonic Wars. France finally ceded Saint Lucia to Britain in 1814.

Saint Lucia became part of the British Empire with a largely French-speaking population living under French civil law. Britain abolished slavery in 1834, but the formerly enslaved were bound to work for their former owners as apprentices until full freedom in 1838. Many then left the estates to farm small plots in the interior. To replace them, planters brought in indentured labourers from India in the second half of the nineteenth century, whose descendants are part of the population today. The island was governed from Barbados and later from Grenada as part of the Windward Islands, and Castries became an important coaling station for steamships. The French creole language, Kwéyòl, remained the everyday speech of most people, and the Catholic Church kept the loyalty of the great majority, even as English became the language of government and school.

A constitution of 1924 introduced the first elected members to the legislative council. During the Second World War a German submarine sank two ships in Castries harbour in March 1942, and the United States built military bases on the island. Universal adult suffrage was introduced in 1951 and ministerial government in 1956. In the 1950s bananas replaced sugar as the main export, bringing a measure of prosperity to small farmers.

Saint Lucia joined the West Indies Federation from 1958 until its collapse in 1962 and became an associated state with full internal self-government in 1967. It became independent on 22 February 1979, under John Compton of the United Workers Party, with the British monarch as head of state. The island produced two Nobel laureates of Caribbean origin in these years: the economist Sir Arthur Lewis in 1979 and the poet and playwright Derek Walcott in 1992. Hurricane Allen caused heavy damage in 1980, and Compton led the country again from 1982 to 1996. From the 1990s, under the Labour Party's Kenny Anthony, the economy shifted from bananas, hurt by the loss of preferential access to European markets, towards tourism. The Pitons, the twin volcanic peaks on the south-west coast, were listed as a World Heritage Site in 2004. Power has alternated between the two main parties: the United Workers Party under Allen Chastanet won in 2016, and the Saint Lucia Labour Party under Philip J. Pierre in 2021. In the election of 1 December 2025 Pierre's party increased its majority in a landslide, ending a run of single-term governments that had lasted since 2001.