Guadeloupe historical timeline

Origins

Arawak and then Kalinago people settled the islands; the Kalinago called the larger one Karukera, the island of beautiful waters. Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493 and named it for a Spanish monastery. Spain never settled it — Kalinago resistance was effective for more than a century — and it was the French who took it in 1635, at considerable cost to the people already there.

Turning points

Sugar made Guadeloupe valuable and slavery made sugar possible; by the eighteenth century the island was worth more to France than Canada, which is roughly what the 1763 treaty settling the Seven Years’ War concluded. The revolutionary convention abolished slavery in 1794, and Napoleon restored it in 1802 — a betrayal met with armed resistance under Louis Delgrès, who blew up his own position at Matouba rather than surrender. Abolition came finally in 1848, largely through Victor Schœlcher’s campaigning. In 1946 Guadeloupe ceased to be a colony and became a French department, with the same laws, currency and social system as the mainland. A general strike in 2009 over the cost of living shut the islands down for forty-four days and forced concessions from Paris.

Influential people

Louis Delgrès and the mulâtresse Solitude, who resisted the restoration of slavery in 1802 and are both national figures now. Victor Schœlcher, the abolitionist. Maryse Condé, whose novels took Guadeloupean and Caribbean history into world literature. And Saint-John Perse, born here, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960.

Cultural evolution

Gwoka — drum, voice and dance, developed by enslaved people and carried through plantation society — is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list and is the island’s clearest surviving line back to West Africa. Guadeloupean Creole is spoken alongside French by most of the population. Carnival runs from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday and is organised by neighbourhood groups rather than by the state. And the cuisine is its own thing: colombo, accras, boudin créole, and a rum tradition taken seriously enough to have its own appellation.

Present-day significance

Guadeloupe is part of France and therefore of the European Union, uses the euro, and votes in French elections, while sitting seven thousand kilometres away in the Caribbean. Unemployment runs far above mainland levels and the cost of living far above it too, which is the persistent grievance. The chlordecone scandal — a pesticide used on banana plantations into the 1990s that has contaminated much of the soil for centuries to come — remains the deepest and least resolved.