Antigua and Barbuda – from sugar plantations to independence in 1981
Long before Europeans arrived, Antigua and Barbuda were home to Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, first Archaic fishers and gatherers, later Arawak-speaking farmers and Kalinago (Carib) communities. Christopher Columbus sighted the islands on his second voyage in 1493 and named Antigua after a church in Seville.
English settlers established a colony on Antigua in 1632, and Barbuda was later leased to a planter family. Over the following decades Antigua became a sugar island: forests were cleared for plantations, windmills dotted the landscape, and the economy rested on the labour of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic under brutal conditions. The naval dockyard at English Harbour made the island an important base for the Royal Navy in the Caribbean. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, but poverty and dependence on sugar persisted for generations.
In the twentieth century a labour movement grew out of the hardship of plantation workers and shaped the islands' politics, with V. C. Bird as a leading figure. Antigua and Barbuda gained self-government as an associated state in 1967 and became fully independent on 1 November 1981, remaining a member of the Commonwealth. As sugar declined, tourism became the backbone of the economy.
Today the islands are shaped by their African-Caribbean heritage, their beaches and sailing traditions, and the memory of both slavery and the struggle for freedom.
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