The British Virgin Islands' history: a legislature lost and won back

Who lived on the islands before Europeans came

The first recorded settlers were Arawak from South America. Most accounts date their arrival to around 100 BC; the historian Vernon Pickering puts it later, at around AD 200, and suggests the Ciboney may have come before them. Traces of Amerindian presence go back further, perhaps to seasonal fishing camps as early as 1500 BC, though there is little academic support for a permanent settlement on any of the present islands at that date. In the fifteenth century the Arawak were displaced by the Caribs from the Lesser Antilles.

Comparatively little is known about these communities as distinct from the Arawak in general. The largest finds of Arawak pottery come from Belmont and Smuggler's Cove on the north-west of Tortola, with other sites at Soper's Hole, Pockwood Pond, Sage Mountain, Russell Hill (modern Road Town), Josiah's Bay and Cane Garden Bay. The National Parks Trust reports pottery shards from Cam Bay on Great Camanoe carbon-dated to AD 800, and conch mounds left by Arawak settlers still stand at the East End of Anegada. Excavations reported in 2006 suggested the settlement had been larger than earlier thought.

No European visitor reported meeting Amerindians on these islands. Christopher Columbus sighted the group in 1493 on his second voyage and named it after Saint Ursula and her 11,000 virgins, and he is said to have named Virgin Gorda himself. The Spanish claimed the islands by discovery and never settled them.

How the Dutch and the English fought over Tortola

The Dutch privateer Joost van Dyk organised the first permanent settlement, at Soper's Hole on the west end of Tortola, and Spanish records noted it by 1615. The United Nations working paper on the territory dates the first permanent European settlement to 1648, the year the main Wikipedia account also uses, so the two dates mark different readings of when a camp became a colony. By 1625 the Dutch West India Company recognised van Dyk as "Patron" of Tortola. That September the Spanish sacked the island in reprisal for a Dutch raid on San Juan, and van Dyk sheltered on the smaller island that now carries his name.

The company valued Tortola as a staging post halfway between its colony in Suriname and New Amsterdam, and built stone warehouses at Freebottom near Port Purcell. A settlement on Virgin Gorda, later known as Little Dix, followed rumours of copper in 1631. Spanish forces attacked again in 1640, 1646 and 1647, and in the later raids killed every inhabitant of the Road Town settlement. Tortola was sold to Willem Hunthum in the 1650s, and in 1665 the English privateer John Wentworth took 67 enslaved people from the Dutch settlers to Bermuda, the first record of slavery in the territory.

England took control in 1672, at the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, although the UN working paper dates British control to 1666. Whether Tortola had been conquered or merely placed in English keeping became a diplomatic case. The Dutch asked for it back in 1684, and in August 1686 the British agreed to restore it, but most of the Dutch settlers had left and there was nobody with authority to receive the island. A Brandenburg claim followed, resting on a purchase for 3,500 guilders on 21 June 1695, and in February 1698 the governor of the Leeward Islands was told to treat the matter as closed.

Why the colony went a century without a court

Possession did not bring settlers. Spanish raids in 1685 left the territory with a population of two, a Mr Jonathan Turner and his wife, from 1685 to 1690; by 1690 it had fourteen and by 1696 fifty. From 1678 a deputy governor was appointed, with no legislative, executive or judicial power. In 1709 Governor Parke wrote that the settlers "live like wild people without law or Government".

The territory was granted a Legislative Assembly on 27 January 1774, and it took another decade to make it work. George Suckling arrived as Chief Justice in 1778, the Court Bill passed in 1783, and local interests afraid of their creditors still kept him off the bench. He left on 2 May 1788 without ever sitting or being paid. Governor Hugh Elliot described the colony in 1810 as close to anarchy.

Two other strands ran through those years. A Quaker community lived on Tortola from 1727 to 1768, and its opposition to slavery is credited with milder treatment and a large free black population; John C. Lettsome and William Thornton came from it. Between 1760 and 1800 the British built or rebuilt forts at Fort Charlotte, Fort George, Fort Burt and Fort Recovery, mostly on earlier Dutch works.

How sugar and slavery built the plantation colony

Sugar cane became the main crop and the source of foreign trade, and enslaved Africans were brought in to work it. The census counts show how fast the plantation economy grew:

The ruins of the system are still on the ground. Mount Healthy National Park keeps an eighteenth-century windmill that ground cane on a 250-acre plantation where enslaved Africans worked the terraced slopes of Tortola's north shore.

Revolts broke out in 1790 on the estates of Isaac Pickering, and again in 1823, 1827 and 1830, each put down quickly. In 1831 a plot to kill the white men and sail for Haiti caused a panic, and troops were brought in from St Thomas. Revolts grew more frequent after 1822, and the accounts tie this to the slave trade's abolition in 1807: from 1808 the Royal Navy landed hundreds of Africans freed from captured slave ships on Tortola, who became fully free after a fourteen-year apprenticeship while those already enslaved stayed in bondage. They were settled at Kingstown, where St Phillip's Church was built for them in the early nineteenth century.

Freedom also came by other routes. The people of the Nottingham estate at Long Look were freed in 1776, and the territory kept a one-off public holiday on 30 June 2026 for the 250th anniversary.

What emancipation changed for the enslaved

Slavery ended on 1 August 1834, and the first Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of August are still public holidays. Emancipation freed 5,792 people, but it did not end forced labour at once. The freed population entered an apprenticeship of four years for house workers and six for field workers, owing 45 hours of unpaid labour a week; the Council later cut it to four years for everyone to quiet the field workers. The owners received £72,940 from the British government in compensation, a fraction of what the people they had held were valued at.

Why the economy fell apart after emancipation

The decline that followed had several causes, and emancipation was only one. A hurricane in 1837 destroyed 17 of the territory's sugar works, more storms came in 1842, 1852, 1867 and 1871, and drought lasted from 1837 to 1847. The Sugar Duties Act of 1846 equalised duties on colonial sugar and pushed prices down. The same year the firm of Reid, Irving & Co. collapsed; it owned 10 sugar estates, employed 1,150 people, acted as the territory's bank and carried its only direct mail to Britain.

The export figures trace the fall. Sugar exports averaged around £10,000 a year in the decade to 1845, under £3,000 a year in the decade after, and fell below £1,000 in 1852. Cholera in December 1853 killed nearly 15% of the population, and smallpox in 1861 killed 33 more. The historian Isaac Dookhan points to the other side of the collapse: land became cheap enough for the newly free population to buy it, and that laid the base of a peasant farming economy.

How the cattle tax riot burned Road Town

In June 1853 the legislature placed a head tax on cattle, to take effect on 1 August, the anniversary of emancipation. On that day rural labourers came into Road Town to protest; the authorities read the Riot Act and made two arrests, and violence broke out at once. Most of Road Town was burned, plantation houses and cane fields were destroyed, and almost the whole white population fled to St Thomas. President John Chads met a crowd of 1,500 to 2,000 on 2 August, and one protester was shot, the only recorded death of the riot itself. Troops from St Thomas and Antigua ended it. Twenty ringleaders were imprisoned and three executed, and the schools stayed shut for two years.

How the council was dissolved and then won back

The decades after 1853 brought emigration, smuggling disputes and plots in 1887 and 1890, and also schools: there were 10 by 1875. Fredrick Augustus Pickering became the first coloured President in 1884. In 1889 the office was downgraded to Commissioner, and in 1901 the Legislative Council was dissolved and the islands were run through the Governor of the Leeward Islands. Islanders left in large numbers for St Thomas and the Dominican Republic.

The council came back because people demanded it. In 1949 Theodolph Faulkner, a fisherman from Anegada, quarrelled with the medical officer and spoke against the government in the marketplace for several nights. On 24 November 1949 more than 1,500 people, led by Faulkner, Isaac Fonseca and Carlton de Castro, marched on the commissioner's office with a petition whose signers declared themselves "imbued with a desire to decide" their local affairs for themselves and asked to decide how public money was spent. The Legislative Council was reinstated under a new constitution in 1950, and the anniversary is kept as a public holiday in November.

The council used its powers early. The Hotel Aid Act of 1953 was passed to encourage a tourism industry that was only beginning, and the territory had only 12 miles of motorable road until 1958; over the next 12 years a road joined West End to East End and a bridge reached Beef Island, where the airport was built. When the Leeward Islands Federation ended in 1956 the council declined to join the West Indies Federation of 1958. The US dollar became the currency in 1959, the islands became a separate colony in 1960, and the constitution of 1967 brought ministerial government. Lavity Stoutt, first elected to the Legislative Council in 1957, became the first Chief Minister and sat for 38 years until his death in May 1995.

How offshore companies changed the islands

Michael Riegels, a former president of the Financial Services Commission, traced the industry to a call in the 1970s from a New York lawyer who wanted to incorporate a company in the islands under a double taxation treaty with the United States. Hundreds followed, and the United States revoked the treaty in 1981. The territory answered with the International Business Companies Act of 1984, which allowed companies exempt from local tax. Growth was slow until 1991, when business left Panama after the American invasion that removed Manuel Noriega.

The scale came quickly after that. A KPMG report for the British government in 2000 found that a large share of the world's offshore companies had been formed in the territory; Wikipedia's two accounts of the report give it as nearly 41% and nearly 45%. The economy article follows the industry into the present.

Land was the other fight of those years. In the late 1970s the businessman Ken Bates tried to lease much of Anegada for 199 years, and a protest movement led by Noel Lloyd forced the local government to drop the plan. Lloyd is one of the ten people on whom the territory has conferred the title of national hero, with Faulkner, Fonseca, de Castro and Stoutt.

What Hurricane Irma and the inquiry left behind

Hurricane Irma made landfall on Virgin Gorda at 1630 UTC on 6 September 2017 as a category 5 storm with winds the National Hurricane Center estimates at 155 knots. Four people died, buildings and roads across Tortola were destroyed, and the Governor declared a state of emergency under the constitution for the first time. Restoring electricity to the whole territory took nearly six months, and Hurricane Maria passed fourteen days later. In May 2018 the Immigration Department put the population down by about 11% since the storms; a later government review cited by the United Nations gives a 9.1% fall in 2017.

The second crisis was political. In January 2021 the Governor set up a Commission of Inquiry into whether corruption or serious dishonesty had taken place in public office, and its commissioner, Sir Gary Hickinbottom, delivered his report on 4 April 2022. On 28 April 2022 the Premier, Andrew Fahie, was arrested in the United States on charges related to drug trafficking and money laundering, and the report was published the next day. It made 49 recommendations, the first of them a temporary suspension of the parts of the constitution that give areas of government to elected ministers.

London chose a middle course. A Government of National Unity agreed a framework for the other 48 recommendations on 1 June 2022, and on 8 June the Queen in Council made the Virgin Islands Constitution (Interim Amendment) Order 2022, to take effect only if the Governor proclaimed it. It would have dissolved the House of Assembly and vacated every ministerial office. The order was never brought into force. It was revoked on 13 March 2026, and in September 2026 a delegation from the territory held a second round of negotiations in London on modernising the 2007 constitution. The politics article sets out what the 2007 constitution gives and withholds.