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After the Caribbean was first colonised by Spain in the 15th century, a system of sugar planting and enslavement evolved. David Lambert explores how this system changed the region, and how enslaved people continued to resist colonial rule.
Along with a number of colonies in North America, the Caribbean formed the heart of England’s first overseas empire. The region was also known as the ‘West Indies’ because when the explorer Christopher Columbus first arrived there in 1492, he believed that he had sailed to the ‘Indies’, as Asia was then known. At the time, Europeans did not realise that this was a completely new part of the world that we now call the Americas. It is also for this reason that people who lived in this part of the world before the Europeans arrived have been called ‘Indians’.
Columbus claimed many of the Caribbean islands for Spain. For much of the 16th century, Spain had things pretty much its own way in the region. From the early 17th century, however, people from other European powers, including France and England, settled in the region too. (Strictly speaking, it is not correct to talk about ‘Britain’ until after 1707, when England and Scotland formed a union.) The English settled St Kitts in 1624, Barbados, Montserrat and Antigua in 1627 and Nevis in 1628. Around the same time, France established colonies in Martinique and Guadeloupe. In this way, the Caribbean came under the control of a number of competing European countries, joining Spain, which had established its first colonies in the region more than a hundred years before.
