St Lucia historical timeline

Origins

Arawak and then Kalinago people settled the island; the Kalinago name for it was Hewanorra, which the international airport still carries. Europeans found it hard to take and harder to keep. Britain and France fought over Saint Lucia so persistently that it changed hands fourteen times before the matter was settled, which earned it the nickname Helen of the West Indies — a beauty men kept going to war over.

Turning points

Sugar arrived with slavery, and the plantations worked on the same model as the rest of the Caribbean. In the 1790s the French republic’s abolition decree reached the island and freed people took up arms to defend it against a British return — the Brigands’ War, fought in the forested interior. Britain held the island from 1814 and abolition came in 1834, followed by indentured labour from India. Sugar gave way to bananas, which carried the economy through most of the twentieth century under preferential access to the British and then the European market. Independence came on 22 February 1979. Then the World Trade Organization struck down those banana preferences, the industry collapsed within a decade, and tourism replaced it out of necessity rather than by plan.

Influential people

Two Nobel laureates from a population under two hundred thousand, which is the highest rate of any country on earth. Sir Arthur Lewis won the prize in economics in 1979 for work on development that came directly out of thinking about economies like this one. Derek Walcott won it for literature in 1992, for poetry rooted in this island and in the Caribbean’s divided inheritance. Sir John Compton led the country to independence and dominated its politics for decades.

Cultural evolution

The island is legally and linguistically bilingual in a way that records its history: English is official, and Kwéyòl, a French-based creole, is what a great many people actually speak. Place names are French, the law is British. Jounen Kwéyòl in October celebrates the language across the whole island. And the flower societies — La Rose and La Marguerite, rival organisations with their own kings, queens, songs and feast days — are a genuine social institution found nowhere else in quite this form.

Present-day significance

Tourism carries the economy, split between cruise arrivals at Castries and longer stays in the south. The Pitons, two volcanic spires rising straight out of the sea, are a UNESCO World Heritage site and the national emblem, and the drive-in volcano and sulphur springs beside them offer geothermal potential the island is actively pursuing. Hurricane exposure and a narrow economic base are the standing risks.