The history of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is made up of the volcanic island of Saint Vincent and a string of small islands running south towards Grenada. Its Kalinago inhabitants, joined over time by Africans who escaped slavery or shipwreck, kept Europeans from settling for longer than almost anywhere else in the Caribbean. From this union grew the Garifuna, or Black Caribs, who fought two wars against British rule before being defeated in 1797 and deported en masse to Central America. Saint Vincent then became a British sugar colony worked by enslaved Africans, and after emancipation a poor agricultural society, repeatedly struck by eruptions of La Soufrière and by hurricanes. It became independent in 1979.

Saint Vincent was settled from South America, the first link in the island chain north of Trinidad and Tobago. Early hunter-gatherers may have visited long before the Common Era, and around the third century CE Arawak-speaking farmers arrived, growing cassava, making pottery and carving the rock images that survive at several sites on the island. From about the fourteenth century the Kalinago, called Island Caribs by Europeans, came to dominate Saint Vincent, which they called Youloumain. Its rugged, forested interior and steep windward coast made it one of their strongholds. They farmed, fished and travelled by large dugout canoes, keeping contact with Kalinago communities on Dominica, Saint Lucia and Grenada.

Spanish slave raiders struck the southern islands after 1511, when the Spanish crown authorised the enslavement of people it labelled Caribs, but Spain made no attempt to settle Saint Vincent. As Europeans occupied neighbouring islands in the seventeenth century, Kalinago refugees from Martinique, Grenada and elsewhere moved to Saint Vincent, and so did Africans. A long tradition, recorded by a British governor in the 1790s, held that the first were survivors of slave ships wrecked off the island around 1635. Many modern historians argue that most were people who escaped from plantations on Barbados, Saint Lucia and Grenada and crossed by canoe to a free island. They were sheltered, captured or absorbed by the Kalinago, and intermarriage produced a distinct Afro-Indigenous people, called Black Caribs by the Europeans, who called themselves Garinagu and are known today as the Garifuna. Relations between them and the people Europeans called Yellow Caribs were at times violent, but by the eighteenth century the Garifuna were the larger and more powerful group.

England claimed the island in 1627, but neither England nor the Dutch managed to settle it, and Kalinago and Garifuna forces repelled French and British expeditions in 1719 and 1723. French settlers, on terms with the Kalinago, nonetheless established plantations on the leeward coast from around 1719, centred on Barrouallie, growing coffee, tobacco, indigo and sugar with enslaved African labour. In 1748 Britain and France agreed to treat Saint Vincent as neutral, but French settlement continued. During the Seven Years' War Britain seized the island, and the Treaty of Paris of 1763 gave it to Britain, which began surveying land for sale to planters, much of it in Garifuna territory on the windward side.

The Garifuna refused to sell their land. In 1769 they turned back a British survey party, and in 1772 the colonial government launched a military campaign aimed at subduing and removing them. Led by the paramount chief Joseph Chatoyer, they held the mountainous windward lands, and with the campaign stalled and criticised in Parliament in London, a treaty in 1773 left them a reserved territory in the north-east in return for recognising British sovereignty. They sided with France when it captured the island in 1779, but Britain regained it in the peace of 1783.

In March 1795, encouraged by the French revolutionary commissioner Victor Hugues on Guadeloupe, the Garifuna under Chatoyer and his brother Duvallé rose again, and for a time controlled almost all of the island outside Kingstown. Chatoyer was killed in fighting at Dorsetshire Hill on 14 March 1795. The war went on until a large British expedition under Sir Ralph Abercromby forced the Garifuna and their French allies to surrender in 1796. The British authorities then decided to remove the Garifuna from Saint Vincent entirely. Around 5,000 people were rounded up and held on the small, barren island of Baliceaux in the Grenadines, where hunger and epidemic disease killed about half of them. In 1797 the survivors were shipped to Roatán, off the coast of Honduras, where some 2,500 were landed in April. From there the Garifuna spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America to Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua, where their language, music and dance survive today. The smaller group of Kalinago allowed to remain was confined to the north of the island, where their descendants still live. Chatoyer was named Saint Vincent's first national hero in 2002.

With the windward lands cleared of their owners, British planters expanded sugar estates rapidly, and tens of thousands of Africans were brought to Saint Vincent through the Atlantic slave trade. Because the plantation boom came so late, large-scale slavery lasted barely a generation on much of the island before Britain abolished it in 1834. The formerly enslaved were bound to their former owners as apprentices until 1838. Many then left the estates to farm small plots, and planters brought in Portuguese labourers from Madeira from 1845 and indentured workers from India from 1861. Sugar prices fell, estates were abandoned and the island grew poorer. The eruption of La Soufrière in 1812 caused heavy damage, and the far worse eruption of May 1902 killed between 1,500 and 2,000 people and ruined much of the island's farmland.

Saint Vincent was ruled as a crown colony from 1877 and as part of the Windward Islands, governed for much of the time from Barbados or Grenada. Arrowroot, cotton and later bananas replaced sugar. In October 1935 unemployed workers rioted in Kingstown, part of a wave of labour unrest across the British Caribbean during the Great Depression. A legislative council with a few elected members had been created in 1925, universal adult suffrage followed in 1951, and politics came to be led by figures such as Ebenezer Joshua and Milton Cato. The colony joined the West Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962, became an associated state with internal self-government on 27 October 1969, and gained full independence on 27 October 1979, months after another eruption of La Soufrière forced mass evacuations. In December 1979 a brief armed revolt on Union Island was quickly put down.

Milton Cato of the Saint Vincent Labour Party was the first prime minister. James Mitchell of the New Democratic Party governed from 1984 to 2000, and Ralph Gonsalves of the Unity Labour Party from 2001, winning five elections in a row and arguing that European states owe the Caribbean reparations for the slave trade. A 2009 referendum on a new constitution that would have made the country a republic was rejected, winning about 56 per cent of the vote instead of the two-thirds required. La Soufrière erupted again in April 2021, after some 16,000 people were evacuated, and in July 2024 Hurricane Beryl damaged or destroyed most homes on Union Island, Canouan and Mayreau. In the election of 27 November 2025 the New Democratic Party under Godwin Friday won 14 of the 15 seats, ending 24 years of Labour government.