Antigua and Barbuda

The earliest known inhabitants of the islands now called Antigua and Barbuda were Amerindian peoples who reached the Lesser Antilles from the South American mainland in successive waves. Archaeological sites indicate a pre-ceramic Archaic presence on Antigua from roughly 3100 BCE, followed by Saladoid horticulturalists associated with Arawak speech communities from about the second century CE. By the time of European contact these populations had been substantially displaced or absorbed by Kalinago (Island Carib) groups who dominated much of the eastern Caribbean. Christopher Columbus sighted the larger island during his second voyage in 1493 and named it Santa Maria la Antigua after a church in Seville; Barbuda, lying to the north, retained a name of less certain etymology. Spanish and early French interest in the islands proved brief, deterred by limited fresh water and resistance from Kalinago raiders.

Sustained European settlement began with the arrival of English colonists from Saint Kitts in 1632, who established tobacco and later sugar plantations on Antigua. The Codrington family obtained a lease over Barbuda in 1685 and developed it as a provisioning estate that supplied livestock, food, and enslaved labour to neighbouring sugar islands. Antigua became a major sugar producer through the eighteenth century, worked by large numbers of enslaved Africans whose descendants form the majority of the present population. English Harbour, on Antigua's southern coast, served as an important Royal Navy station during the long Atlantic wars with France and Spain, and was associated for a period with Horatio Nelson. Slavery was abolished throughout the British Caribbean in 1834, and Antigua, unusually, dispensed with the apprenticeship system and emancipated its enslaved population immediately.

The islands remained a British colony through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, administered for various periods within the Leeward Islands federation and, from 1958 to 1962, as part of the short-lived West Indies Federation. The rise of organised labour, in particular the Antigua Trades and Labour Union founded in 1939, produced the territory's dominant political movement under Vere Cornwall Bird, who became chief minister in 1960. Antigua and Barbuda achieved associated statehood in 1967, with internal self-government, and proceeded to full independence within the Commonwealth on 1 November 1981.

Independence-era politics were shaped for two decades by Bird and the Antigua Labour Party, with Lester Bird succeeding his father as prime minister in 1994. A peaceful transfer of power followed the 2004 elections, which brought Baldwin Spencer and the United Progressive Party to office, and subsequent elections have alternated between the two main parties. Throughout this period Barbudan representatives pressed grievances over land tenure, autonomy, and reconstruction, concerns sharpened by the near total destruction of Barbuda by Hurricane Irma in September 2017. The country has otherwise pursued a foreign policy oriented around the Caribbean Community, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, and tourism-led economic development.

Antigua and Barbuda today is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy and Commonwealth realm, with the British monarch as head of state represented locally by a governor-general, a bicameral legislature comprising an elected House of Representatives and an appointed Senate, and a prime minister drawn from the majority in the lower house.