Antigua-Barbuda-Montserrat

Antigua-Barbuda-Montserrat was a British colony in the Lesser Antilles created in 1816, when the old British Leeward Islands administration was dissolved after a yellow fever epidemic and a succession of short-lived governors. Antigua, Barbuda and Montserrat had been separate British possessions since the seventeenth century, and the new colony united them under a single governor based at St. John's, the capital on Antigua. George Ramsay arrived as the first governor in the middle of 1816, and the island councils agreed to pay his salary. The economy depended on sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, and the colony's records included a slave registry created after rumours in Britain that free black and coloured people were being held in slavery. In 1831 mass disturbances in Antigua pressed for better rights and conditions, and the experiment in unified government proved brief. In 1833 the islands were reincorporated into the restored British Leeward Islands, and slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834.