The Caribbean’s smallest sovereign state was Europe’s “Mother Colony”
Saint Kitts and Nevis packs about 48,000 people into 261 square kilometres—the Western Hemisphere’s smallest country by both area and population. Basseterre on Saint Kitts is capital and cruise port; Nevis lies about three kilometres south across a channel.
Kalinago speakers called Saint Kitts Liamuiga, “fertile land.” British and French footholds here were among the Caribbean’s first, earning the “Mother Colony of the West Indies” tag. Columbus sighted the islands in 1493, and the English habit of calling Christopher “Kit” turned St. Christopher’s Island into Saint Kitts. Nevis takes its name from the Spanish for Our Lady of the Snows, perhaps because clouds ringing Nevis Peak recalled a miraculous summer snowfall in Rome.
Archaic hunter-gatherers from Florida arrived as early as 3000 BCE, Saladoid farmers from the Orinoco around 100 BCE, and the seafaring Kalinago about 1300 CE, who called Nevis Oualie, “land of beautiful waters.” Thomas Warner founded the first English settlement at Old Road Town in 1623, the French followed in 1625, and in 1626 the two joined to massacre the Kalinago at Bloody Point before building slave-worked sugar estates.
France gave up its claim in 1713, and by the late 1700s St Kitts was the richest British Caribbean colony per head. Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis in 1755 or 1757, and emancipation freed 19,780 enslaved people on St Kitts and 8,815 on Nevis. Anguilla once joined the Saint Christopher–Nevis–Anguilla grouping before seceding in 1967 to remain a British territory. Independence came on 19 September 1983, with Kennedy Simmonds as first prime minister.
A 1998 Nevis referendum won 62 percent for secession, short of the two-thirds required, and the long-subsidised sugar industry shut in 2005.
Source: Saint Kitts and Nevis
