Martinique historical timeline

Origins

Arawak and then Kalinago people settled the island, which they called Madinina. Christopher Columbus sighted it in 1502 but Spain left it alone; the French claimed it in 1635 and fought the Kalinago off it over the following decades. Sugar followed almost immediately, and with it the enslavement of Africans on a scale that reshaped the population permanently.

Turning points

Martinique was valuable enough that Britain occupied it repeatedly and France always wanted it back. The revolutionary abolition of 1794 never took effect here — the planters handed the island to Britain to avoid it — and slavery ran until 1848, when it was finally abolished under pressure led by Victor Schœlcher. Indentured workers from India followed. Then, on the morning of 8 May 1902, Mont Pelée erupted and destroyed Saint-Pierre, the island’s capital and cultural centre, in a matter of minutes; around thirty thousand people died and there were two or three survivors. The capital moved to Fort-de-France and never went back. In 1946 Martinique stopped being a colony and became a French department, with the same laws and currency as the mainland.

Influential people

Aimé Césaire, poet and mayor of Fort-de-France for over fifty years, who coined négritude and made this island a centre of anti-colonial thought. Frantz Fanon, his student, whose The Wretched of the Earth shaped liberation movements on three continents. Édouard Glissant, who argued for creolisation as a way of understanding the world rather than a local curiosity. And Empress Joséphine, born here on a sugar estate, whose statue in Fort-de-France was beheaded and eventually removed.

Cultural evolution

Martinican Creole is spoken alongside French across the island. Bélé drumming and dance descend directly from the plantations, and chouval bwa carnival music from the fairground carousel. Carnival runs to Ash Wednesday and ends with the burning of Vaval. And the island takes rum seriously enough to be the only place in the world where rhum agricole — distilled from fresh cane juice rather than molasses — carries a French appellation of controlled origin.

Present-day significance

Martinique is part of France and of the European Union, seven thousand kilometres from Paris. The cost of living runs well above the mainland and unemployment well above it too, which has produced repeated general strikes. The chlordecone scandal — a pesticide used on banana plantations until the 1990s that has contaminated a large share of the soil and is detectable in most of the population — is the defining grievance, and the contamination will outlast everyone now living.