Grenada

The earliest inhabitants of Grenada were Arawakan-speaking peoples, often identified with the Igneri, who migrated northward from the South American mainland and established agricultural and fishing settlements on the island during the first millennium of the common era. They were displaced or absorbed by Kalinago (Island Carib) groups who arrived by canoe several centuries before European contact and who called the island Camerhogne. Christopher Columbus sighted Grenada in 1498 during his third voyage and named it Concepción, though the name Granada, after the Spanish city, soon came into use. Sustained European settlement was delayed for more than a century by determined Kalinago resistance, which kept Spanish, English, and early French expeditions from establishing a permanent foothold.

French colonisation began in earnest in 1649, when a party dispatched from Martinique under Jacques du Parquet purchased or claimed the island and built a fortified post at the site of present-day St. George's. Conflict with the Kalinago culminated in 1651 at Le Morne des Sauteurs, where, according to colonial chronicles, the last defenders leapt to their deaths from the cliffs rather than surrender. Grenada then developed as a French plantation colony producing indigo, tobacco, and increasingly sugar, worked by enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic in growing numbers. The island was ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, briefly retaken by France in 1779, and definitively returned to Britain by the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. A major uprising led by the free coloured planter Julien Fédon between 1795 and 1796, inspired by revolutionary France and the situation in Saint-Domingue, was suppressed only after heavy fighting and lasting destruction.

Through the nineteenth century Grenada remained a British Caribbean colony. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation, completed by 1838, transformed the labour system, and indentured workers from India and Madeira were brought in to supplement freed labour on estates that increasingly turned from sugar to cocoa, nutmeg, and mace. Administrative arrangements shifted over time, with Grenada governed as part of the Windward Islands and, briefly, as a member of the West Indies Federation between 1958 and 1962. Internal self-government followed in 1967 under the status of an Associated State, and full independence within the Commonwealth was achieved on 7 February 1974 under Prime Minister Eric Gairy.

In March 1979 the New Jewel Movement led by Maurice Bishop overthrew the Gairy government in a near-bloodless coup and established the People's Revolutionary Government, which aligned closely with Cuba and the Soviet bloc. An internal split in October 1983 led to Bishop's arrest and execution, after which a United States-led intervention, Operation Urgent Fury, removed the new military council and restored constitutional rule. Elections in 1984 returned the country to parliamentary government, and subsequent decades saw peaceful alternations of power between the New National Party and the National Democratic Congress. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan devastated the island, prompting a long reconstruction.

Grenada today is an independent parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, with King Charles III as head of state represented by a Governor-General, a bicameral Parliament seated at St. George's, and a Prime Minister as head of government.