Saint Kitts and Nevis: Colonial Period

Christopher Columbus sighted the island in 1493 during his second voyage and named it for his patron saint, but permanent European settlement did not begin until 1623, when an English expedition led by Sir Thomas Warner established a colony at Old Road on the island's west coast. French settlers arrived nearby in 1625 under Pierre Bélain, sieur d'Esnambuc, and the two groups agreed to divide the island between them, an arrangement that produced decades of intermittent conflict as England and France vied for control of the wider Caribbean. Nevis, just offshore, was settled separately by the English in 1628.

Sugar transformed both islands' economies during the seventeenth century, with cultivation beginning on St. Kitts in 1643 and on Nevis in 1648. The crop's profitability depended on enslaved African labor brought in growing numbers to work the plantations, and by the close of the 1700s St. Kitts had become one of the wealthiest British colonies per capita in the Caribbean, while Nevis had earlier reached similar prominence in the mid-seventeenth century.

Control of St. Kitts changed hands repeatedly amid the broader Anglo-French rivalry, until the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht formally ceded the island to Britain. French forces briefly seized the fortress at Brimstone Hill in 1782, but British authority was restored the following year, and both St. Kitts and Nevis remained under British administration for the rest of the colonial period.