Dominica

Dominica, a small Caribbean island nation in the Lesser Antilles, located between Martinique and Guadeloupe in the chain of islands known as the Windwards. Dominica was sighted and named by Christopher Columbus on 3 November 1493, but the island remained a stronghold of the native Carib peoples until the flow of European settlers to the area increased in the late seventeenth century. The island was one of the many smaller islands that Spain could not or chose not to exclude other European powers from seizing, so in the era of imperial rivalries Dominica became the target of competing French and British claims. After driving the Caribs into the mountains, the French held most of the island until 1761. That year, however, the British seized the island as part of their effort to build an empire in North America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere during the Seven Years' War.

Under the British, Dominica became a classic slave society producing tropical agricultural products for export to Europe. The population of slaves and settlers skyrocketed. With the end of French efforts to claim the island in the first decade of the nineteenth century, coffee production was established as the first in a series of cash crops that would subject Dominica to cycles of economic boom and collapse. Around 1900 coffee and sugar gave way to cocoa, to be replaced by bananas in the middle of the twentieth century.

After the establishment of an elected assembly in 1763, Britain consistently dictated policy for the island, with minor changes in representation, until 3 November 1978, when Dominica gained its independence from Britain. The process toward autonomy had been a gradual one throughout most of the twentieth century, with increasing participation by Dominicans in self-rule and expanding suffrage.

See alsoBanana Industry; Caribs; Coffee Industry; Slavery: Spanish America; Sugar Industry; Windward Islands.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert A. Meyers, Dominica (1987).

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Gimbernat González, Ester.La poesía de mujeres dominicanas a fines del siglo XX. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 2002.

Honychurch, Lennox. The Dominicana Story: A History of the Island. London: Macmillan, 1995.

                                  Todd Little-Siebold