St Martin and Maarten historical timeline

Origins

Arawak and Kalinago people used the island for salt long before Europeans came, and salt is the reason anyone else wanted it. Christopher Columbus sighted it in 1493. The Dutch took it for the salt pans, the Spanish fortified and then abandoned it, and in 1648 France and the Netherlands agreed to share it — an arrangement that has survived, with adjustments, for more than three and a half centuries, making it the smallest inhabited landmass in the world divided between two nations.

Turning points

Sugar and salt worked by enslaved Africans carried the eighteenth century. The Dutch side abolished slavery in 1863 and the French side in 1848, which produced a period when people simply walked across the line. Both halves then declined into poverty for most of the following century, living on salt, fishing and subsistence. Everything changed after the Second World War: Princess Juliana airport opened on the Dutch side with a runway long enough for jets, tourism arrived in the 1960s, and the island went from forgotten to crowded within two decades. In 2007 the French part separated from Guadeloupe to become its own overseas collectivity, and in 2010 Sint Maarten became a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In 2017 Hurricane Irma passed directly over as a category five storm and damaged or destroyed the great majority of buildings on both sides.

Influential people

The negotiators of the 1648 Treaty of Concordia, whose boundary has outlasted most European borders drawn since. Claude Wathey, who dominated Dutch-side politics for four decades and pushed the tourism strategy. And the generations of workers from across the Caribbean — Haiti, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana — who built and staff the resorts, and who make up much of the population.

Cultural evolution

English is what almost everyone actually speaks, on both sides, regardless of whether the official language is French or Dutch. Two currencies, two legal systems, two school systems and no border post: the crossing is marked by a stone and a change in the road surface. Carnival happens twice, in spring on the French side and in April on the Dutch. And the food is a mixture of French technique, Caribbean ingredients and the cooking of everywhere the workforce came from.

Present-day significance

The economy is tourism and almost nothing else, which makes hurricane seasons existential rather than inconvenient. Recovery from Irma has been uneven between the two sides, with different administrations, different insurance regimes and different access to reconstruction funding. The airport approach over Maho beach, where aircraft pass a few metres above the sand, is probably the most photographed thing on the island.