Grenada

Grenada An island state in the eastern Caribbean which came under British sovereignty in 1763. It became the administrative centre for the Windward Islands Colony (including St Lucia, St Vincent, and Dominica) in 1885. Universal adult suffrage was introduced in 1951, and in 1958 Grenada became a member of the Federation of the West Indies. When the latter was dissolved in 1962, it became an independent state ‘associated’ with Britain in 1967, before it became fully independent on 7 February 1974. In 1979 the Labour government was overthrown by Maurice Bishop, who ruled at the head of a People's Revolutionary Government. Following his assassination in 1983, the USA intervened, as President Reagan was concerned about the advance of Communism on the island. Constitutional government was resumed in 1984, first by Herbert Blaize (b. 1918, d. 1989) of the conservative New National Party (NNP) coalition, and then (in 1990) by Nicholas Brathwaite of the National Democratic Congress. In the elections of 20 June 1995, however, the NNP recovered to gain a parliamentary majority under Keith Mitchell, which it extended in the 1999 elections, when it won all the seats in parliament. Grenada continued to be heavily reliant on tourism, with agricultural exports (bananas and a quarter of the world's nutmeg production) being the most important export goods.