Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

The earliest known inhabitants of the islands now called Saint Vincent and the Grenadines were Ciboney and later Arawak peoples, who reached the chain from the South American mainland and established fishing and horticultural communities. By around the fourteenth century these earlier groups had been displaced or absorbed by Kalinago (Island Carib) settlers, who called the main island Hairouna or Youloumain and organised it as a network of village chieftaincies. After the early sixteenth century, ships of Spanish and other European powers sighted and named the islands, but Kalinago resistance, combined with the rugged volcanic interior of the main island, kept formal European settlement at bay for nearly two centuries longer than on most neighbouring Caribbean territories.

During the seventeenth century, Africans who had escaped or survived shipwrecks from slaving vessels mixed with the Kalinago population to form a distinct community known as the Garifuna or Black Caribs, who came to dominate the windward side of Saint Vincent. France and Britain both pressed claims over the island, with French planters establishing the earliest permanent estates. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 transferred Saint Vincent to British control, though sovereignty remained contested both with France, which briefly retook it during the American Revolutionary War, and with the Garifuna themselves. Two Carib Wars followed, and after the second ended in 1797 the British colonial authorities deported several thousand Black Caribs to the Bay Islands off Central America, opening the way for a plantation economy built on enslaved African labour and sugar cane.

Slavery was abolished across the British Caribbean in 1834, with full emancipation in 1838, and Saint Vincent's plantation economy entered a long decline that was deepened by hurricanes and by the catastrophic eruption of La Soufriere in 1902. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the colony was administered as part of the British Windward Islands, with limited representative institutions. After universal adult suffrage was introduced in 1951, local political life began to consolidate around competing labour-rooted parties, and the colony joined the short-lived West Indies Federation between 1958 and 1962. Following the federation's collapse, Saint Vincent became an associated state of the United Kingdom in 1969, taking responsibility for its own internal affairs while Britain retained defence and external relations.

Full independence was achieved on 27 October 1979, with Milton Cato of the Saint Vincent Labour Party as the country's first prime minister. The same year a renewed eruption of La Soufriere and, soon after, a brief armed uprising on Union Island in the Grenadines tested the new state, but constitutional government held. Power has since alternated peacefully between the centre-right New Democratic Party, which governed under James Mitchell from 1984 to 2000, and the centre-left Unity Labour Party, which took office in 2001 under Ralph Gonsalves. In 2009 voters narrowly rejected a referendum that would have replaced the British monarch as head of state with a ceremonial president.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines today is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, with the British sovereign represented by a governor-general and executive authority exercised by a prime minister accountable to a unicameral House of Assembly in Kingstown. It is a member of the United Nations, the Caribbean Community, and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, and conducts its external affairs as a small island developing state.