Antigua and Barbuda's history: one sugar island and one that never was

Who lived on the islands before the English came

People reached the islands long before any written record. The Wikipedia history of the country dates the earliest known settlement on Antigua, at Twenty Hill, to perhaps 2900 BC, while its main country article gives carbon dates reaching back to about 3700 BC; the two accounts do not agree and neither is the last word. These first inhabitants were hunter-gatherers of what archaeologists call the Archaic period, and on Barbuda they left blades cut from gastropod shells and water containers made of conch and whelk. Human remains found at Boiling Rocks, near Spanish Point on Barbuda, have been carbon-dated to 3,100 years old.

Arawak-speaking farmers from the lower Orinoco followed, arriving in the Lesser Antilles as early as 775 BC by one estimate. They brought agriculture and a pottery style archaeologists call Saladoid, white designs on red, which turns up across both islands. They grew the Antigua black pineapple, maize, sweet potatoes, cotton and tobacco. Their name for Antigua was Waladli. Later the Kalinago, also called Caribs, used Barbuda as a place to fish and gather, and called it Wa'omoni.

Christopher Columbus sighted Antigua on his second voyage in 1493 and named it for the church of Santa Maria de la Antigua in Seville, according to Britannica. A Spanish attempt at settlement in 1520 did not last. The Wikipedia history attributes the failure of early European attempts to the defence the Kalinago put up; on Barbuda, about 240 Kalinago attacked the twenty English settlers there in 1668 and killed eight of them.

How sugar took over Antigua

The English colony on Antigua dates from 1632. The first settlers grew tobacco for export, and Britannica records that the French raided the island in 1666 without holding it. Britannica dates the turn to sugar to the later seventeenth century. Christopher Codrington set up the first large sugar estate in 1674, and the Smithsonian names Betty's Hope as the island's first sugar plantation; over the following fifty years planters gave up their other crops for cane.

Sugar needed more labour than the English could supply. Indentured servants from England and Ireland came first, and most of them left for the North American colonies as soon as they could. Planters then bought enslaved Africans, carried from West and Central Africa. By 1736 there were 24,400 enslaved people on Antigua, 85% of the population, against about 3,800 whites, according to the Smithsonian's account of that year. The island suited the crop: Mike Dash, writing for Smithsonian, points out that it is only about twelve miles across, has good harbours and sits in steady trade winds that turned the windmills crushing the cane.

The work was cane cutting six days a week and boiling houses where fires ran day and night. Resistance started early. In the seventeenth century escaped people formed maroon communities around the summit of the island's extinct volcano, and when they were recaptured in a round-up ordered in 1687, one man convicted of mutiny was sentenced to be burned. In 1701 fifteen newly arrived captives killed their owner, Samuel Martin, after he refused them Christmas off. In 1729 a plot among slaves of the legislator Nathaniel Crump was betrayed and three of them were burned alive.

English Harbour, on the south coast, was the other thing Antigua was for. UNESCO's description of the naval dockyard there says its installations have been in continuous use since 1725, that the deep and narrow bays gave shelter from hurricanes, and that the dockyard existed to protect the sugar planters' interests while European powers fought for the eastern Caribbean. It was built with the labour of generations of enslaved Africans. Horatio Nelson was the senior naval officer of the Leeward Islands from 1784 to 1787, and made himself unpopular with Antiguan merchants by enforcing the Navigation Act against their trade with the newly independent United States.

What the magistrates said Prince Klaas planned

The best documented episode of Antiguan slavery is also the most disputed. In October 1736 the governor of the Leeward Islands, William Mathew, announced that he had uncovered a plot. According to the case built by the island's magistrates, enslaved people and some free people of colour meant to blow up a ball held in St. John's in honour of George II's coronation with a barrel of gunpowder, then rise on the estates, march on the capital and make their leader king.

That leader appears in the colonial record as Court. Antiguans now call him Prince Klaas and treat him as a national hero; his Akan name may have been Kwaku, and he was sometimes called Tackey. The sources differ on his early life. Enslaved.org, drawing on Natalie Zacek's biography, has him born around 1690 in what is now Ghana and brought to Antigua around 1701; the Smithsonian article says he arrived in 1704 at the age of ten. His owner, Thomas Kerby, was speaker of the island's assembly and let him trade and move freely around St. John's. His alleged partner, Tomboy, was a skilled carpenter born on the island, who was said to have planted the powder while building seats in the ballroom.

On Sunday 3 October 1736 a large crowd gathered in a pasture outside the town, where Klaas danced at the centre of a ring and was, by the magistrates' account, acclaimed king of the Coromantees. The inquiry that followed produced 132 convictions:

Historians have read the same record in opposite ways. David Barry Gaspar, who has written more on the case than anyone, takes the conspiracy as real, and Michael Craton reads the dance as an Akan declaration of war. Kwasi Konadu argues that the ceremony was a customary acclamation of a new leader. Jason Sharples has shown how prisoners could trade information in jail and knew that naming others was their one hope of living; no barrel of powder and no cache of weapons was ever found. The Smithsonian article leaves the verdict open, and so does this one.

Why Barbuda never became a plantation island

Barbuda went a different way from the start. The Crown granted the island to the Codrington family in 1685, and they held it until 1870 as absentee owners represented by resident managers. Britannica records that it was planned as a colony for breeding enslaved people for sale and never became one; the people sent there came to live self-reliantly in their own community, and the island was leased to raise provisions for the family's Antiguan estates. Britannica states that Barbuda was never part of the sugar plantation system, its people having always been fishermen and subsistence farmers.

The enslaved population of Barbuda grew from 172 in 1746 to 503 in 1831, largely by natural increase, and an estimate made in 1977 by Lowenthal and Clark counted 172 people shipped off the island between 1779 and 1834, most of them to Antigua. Barbudans resisted too. In 1741 complaints against the manager Thomas Beach led to animals killed, Codrington property damaged and several escapes, and in 1745 a manager called McNish was killed after mutilating people for stealing sheep and cattle, while the rebels occupied the Codrington castle and its arms. Soldiers came over from Antigua, and two of the rebels were burned alive at the castle gate.

After slavery ended, the single grant that covered the whole island meant there were no separate estates to sell. Barbudans kept on with autonomous cultivation on communal property, as Barbuda's Wikipedia entry puts it, and the custom became the island's claim to its land. In 1860 Barbuda was annexed as a dependency of Antigua under an act passed the year before, and Britannica notes that its administration grew so close to Antigua's that the smaller island came to be treated as part of the larger one.

How Antigua freed its slaves without apprenticeship

Parliament in London passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. It freed about 750,000 people in the British West Indies on 1 August 1834 but bound most of them to their former owners for several more years as apprentices. The UK Parliament's own history of emancipation records that Antigua and Bermuda declined the system and freed everyone at once. On Antigua that meant 32,000 people. The abolitionists James Thome and Horace Kimball, touring the West Indies for the American Anti-Slavery Society, reported that most of the newly free went to church that night.

What freedom was worth on Antigua is the subject of Natasha Lightfoot's study of the period. The historian points out that newly freed people in Jamaica or Trinidad could squat on, rent or buy land away from the estates, and that on Antigua there was almost none to be had. Within months the planters' legislature passed the Contract Act, which required anyone living on an estate to work on it; in modified forms it governed labour on the island until the 1930s or 1940s. Wages fell through the middle of the century. An earthquake in 1843 and a hurricane in 1847 caused further economic problems, in Britannica's phrase.

The Moravian and Methodist churches worked among the enslaved and then the free. The Moravians alone counted nearly 6,000 converts by 1785, and after emancipation the churches offered schooling and soup kitchens and helped people into free villages when estates folded. Between 1847 and 1852 about 2,500 Portuguese arrived from Madeira, fleeing famine, and set up small businesses. In March 1858 a riot lasted four days. Lightfoot's reading of the court records is that the rioters first attacked working people from Barbuda, seen as rivals for scarce jobs in St. John's, and then turned on Portuguese immigrants and the police.

How the labour movement took Antigua to independence

Poor conditions on the estates lasted into the twentieth century. In 1939 a member of a British Crown commission urged workers to organise, and the Antigua Trades and Labour Union followed. Vere Cornwall Bird became its president in 1943. The Antigua Labour Party, formed by Bird and other trade unionists, first fielded candidates in 1946 and won a majority in 1951, in what the Wikipedia country article counts as the first democratic elections.

The colonial frame kept changing around it. Antigua was part of the Leeward Islands colony until that was dissolved in 1956, joined the West Indies Federation in 1958 and was left on its own when the federation collapsed in 1962. Under the West Indies Act of 1967 it became an associated state of the United Kingdom on 27 February 1967, fully self-governing at home, with Britain keeping defence and foreign affairs.

Politics in the 1970s turned on what should come next. George Walter's Progressive Labour Movement governed from 1971 to 1976 and wanted full independence, while Bird, back in office from 1976, favoured some form of regional union. In 1976 the Barbuda Local Government Act created the Barbuda Council. In 1978 the government switched to seeking independence, and the talks were complicated by Barbuda: Britannica records that the smaller island felt economically stifled by the larger and wanted to secede. It did not get its way. Antigua and Barbuda became independent on 1 November 1981, with Vere Bird as its first prime minister, Elizabeth II as queen and the Barbuda Council written into the new constitution.

What changed once the islands were independent

The Bird family and the Antigua Labour Party held government for the first twenty-three years. Vere Bird governed until 1994 and his son Lester Bird until 2004. Both Britannica and Wikipedia record recurring corruption allegations: Vere Bird Jr. left the cabinet in 1990 after he was accused of smuggling Israeli weapons to Colombian drug traffickers, and Britannica notes that the country acquired a reputation as a lax tax haven. The United Progressive Party won the election of 2004 and governed for ten years. In 2009 the American financier Allen Stanford, a large investor on the island, was arrested and charged with fraud, and a Texas court convicted him in 2012 of running a Ponzi scheme from his offshore bank on Antigua. The Labour Party returned to government in 2014.

Barbuda's position was written into law and then contested. The Barbuda Land Act of 2007 declared all land on the island owned in common by the people of Barbuda, with title held by the Crown on their behalf and their consent required for major development, as the Privy Council's case summary sets out. Hurricane Irma crossed the island on 6 September 2017 and damaged or destroyed 95% of its structures, and nearly every resident was evacuated to Antigua. The central government moved to change the land law in the rebuilding that followed. In June 2022 the Privy Council in London rejected a challenge brought by Barbudans against the Paradise Found (Project) Act 2015, which had taken a leased resort site out of the Land Act, and Freedom House recorded the concern this raised on the island.

The British monarchy is still the constitutional frame. Voters rejected a proposal in 2018 to replace the Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice as the final court of appeal. After the death of Elizabeth II in 2022 the government announced that a referendum on becoming a republic could be held within three years, as the Inter-Parliamentary Union recorded. UNESCO inscribed the Antigua Naval Dockyard on the World Heritage List in 2016, a listing that names the enslaved Africans who built it.