Saint Vincent and the Grenadines: Colonial Period

The Kalinago (Carib) population of Saint Vincent resisted European colonization far longer than most of its Caribbean neighbors, delaying permanent settlement until the early eighteenth century. France established the first colony in 1719 at Barrouallie on the island's leeward coast, where planters grew coffee, tobacco, indigo, and sugar using enslaved African labor. Intermarriage between Kalinago inhabitants and escaped or shipwrecked Africans over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a distinct community that became known as the Black Caribs, or Garifuna.

Britain gained formal control of Saint Vincent from France under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, though French forces retook the island between 1779 and 1783 before it was returned to Britain by the Treaty of Versailles. British administrators pushed to expand sugar plantations across the island, a policy the Black Caribs resisted militarily in two conflicts, the First Carib War of 1772-73 and the Second Carib War of 1795-96. Defeat in the second war led to the mass deportation of the Black Carib population to an island off the coast of Honduras.

Saint Vincent remained a British colony through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, governed for periods as part of the Windward Islands administration. It progressed toward self-rule as an associated state before becoming the last of the Windward Islands territories to achieve full independence, on 27 October 1979.