Antigua and Barbuda

Two islands with almost nothing in common except a government. Antigua was settled by the English in 1632 and became a dense sugar island with an unusually complete plantation landscape - over a hundred estates on a small, dry island, with windmills still standing across it. Its deep sheltered harbours made it strategically important out of proportion to its size, and English Harbour, where Nelson served from 1784 to 1787, was the Royal Navy's principal base in the eastern Caribbean. Emancipation here was immediate in 1834 rather than phased through apprenticeship, because planters calculated that people with nowhere else to go on a small island would have to keep working. Barbuda's history is entirely different. The Codrington family leased the whole island from the Crown for two hundred years, using it to raise provisions and livestock rather than sugar, and its people developed a system of communal land holding with no private title that survived into the twenty-first century - a genuine rarity. Legislation after Hurricane Irma flattened the island in 2017 sought to end it, and the dispute continues. The trade union movement under Vere Bird carried the country to independence on 1 November 1981. Tourism now dominates. Barbuda holds about two per cent of the population. Saint John's is the capital. Nelson's Dockyard is a World Heritage site and still a working marina. The islands claim a beach for every day of the year. Antiguan cricketers, Viv Richards among them, gave the country an international profile far beyond its size.

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