Grenada: Colonial Period

France established the first permanent European settlement on Grenada in 1649, when an expedition from Martinique under Jacques Dyel du Parquet purchased land from the island's Kalinago inhabitants and founded a colony near what is now St. George's. Conflict with the Kalinago followed, and by the mid-1650s the French had gained full control of the island. Ownership passed through several French proprietors over the following decades, and colonists established plantations that relied increasingly on enslaved African labor to grow sugar, cotton, and indigo. French rule left a lasting imprint on Grenada's parish names, place names, and family surnames.

Britain seized Grenada from France in 1762 during the Seven Years' War, and the colony was formally ceded to the British Crown under the Treaty of Paris in 1763. France briefly recaptured the island in 1779, but it was restored to Britain by the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. British rule brought new waves of English and Scottish planters, and tensions between the established French Catholic population and incoming British administrators contributed to Fedon's Rebellion of 1795, a pro-French uprising that was eventually suppressed.

Grenada's colonial period was defined economically by plantation agriculture worked by enslaved Africans until the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in the 1830s. Sugar dominated production for much of the eighteenth century, but after Sir Joseph Banks introduced nutmeg to the island in 1782, spice cultivation gradually became an important part of Grenada's export economy. Grenada remained a British colony, later administered within the Windward Islands federation, until it achieved associated statehood in 1967 and full independence in 1974.