Colony of Saint Lucia

The Colony of Saint Lucia was a West Indian colony on the volcanic island of that name in the Windward Islands, whose capital was Castries. Saint Lucia was inhabited by the Arawak and Kalinago Caribs before European contact in the early sixteenth century, and from the seventeenth century it was colonized by both the British and the French: the English made failed early attempts, while French settlements took root from the 1650s, with the island organized as a colony from 1660. Because both powers wanted its deep harbours, Saint Lucia changed hands many times — more often than any other West Indian island — alternating between French and British rule through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Britain and France finally settled the matter in 1814, when Saint Lucia was ceded to the British by France for the last time, and it remained a Crown colony thereafter, administered from Castries. Its plantation economy rested on sugar, worked after emancipation by indentured labour from India. In 1958 the colony joined the short-lived West Indies Federation; in 1967 it ceased to be a plain colony and became an associated state of the United Kingdom, and on 22 February 1979 Saint Lucia gained full independence.