The Fortress on the Hill
The first English colony in the Caribbean, the mother colony from which the rest were settled, and the last place in the eastern Caribbean to keep a sugar industry running — until 2005. Plus a federation with a secession clause its smaller half very nearly used in 1998.
Brimstone Hill rises 230 metres out of the west coast of Saint Kitts, and on top of it sits a fortress that took over a century to build. Bastions, a citadel, cisterns, barracks and gun positions cut and laid in volcanic stone, on a hill with sightlines over the whole channel toward Sint Eustatius. It was called the Gibraltar of the West Indies and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The inscription describes it as an exceptional example of European military architecture, and then says the other thing plainly: it was designed by British engineers and built, over a hundred years, by enslaved Africans.
The mother colony
Saint Kitts — properly Saint Christopher — was the first English colony in the Caribbean, settled in 1624, and the first French one a year later, when the two nations agreed to share the island and jointly massacre the Kalinago population that lived on it. The 1626 killings at Bloody Point are recorded in both English and French accounts.
From this island the English and French then colonised much of the rest of the Lesser Antilles, which is why Saint Kitts is called the mother colony of the West Indies. The two powers fought over it repeatedly for the next century and a half; the fortress on Brimstone Hill changed hands after a month-long French siege in 1782 and was returned by treaty the following year.
Sugar arrived early and stayed extraordinarily late. The Saint Kitts sugar industry — nationalised in the 1970s and run by a state corporation — was the last operating sugar industry in the eastern Caribbean, and it did not close until 2005, by which time it was losing money on every tonne and the European preferential price was being dismantled.
What it left is the railway. A narrow-gauge line was built around the island between 1912 and 1926 to carry cane from the estates to the central factory at Basseterre, and rather than lift the track when the industry died, the country turned it into a scenic railway. The Saint Kitts Scenic Railway now runs a loop of the island in double-decker carriages, past the ruins of the estates it was built to serve, which is either poignant or absurd depending on the day.
Two islands and a divorce that nearly happened
The federation is Saint Kitts and Nevis, and the relationship between them is the country’s central political fact.
Nevis is smaller, two miles across a channel, dominated by a single 985-metre volcanic cone that is almost permanently wearing a cloud — which is what gave it its name, from the Spanish for snows. It has its own island assembly and premier under a federal constitution, and it has a long-standing view that it subsidises the larger island and receives less back.
The constitution contains an explicit secession clause, and in August 1998 Nevis used it. A referendum on independence returned a substantial majority in favour — but the constitution requires two-thirds, and the result fell short of the threshold. The federation held by a margin of a few percentage points.
The question has never entirely gone away, and it makes Saint Kitts and Nevis one of very few countries in the world with a functioning constitutional route to its own dissolution written into the founding document.
Two islands, one federation, and a secession clause that was very nearly used. The smaller one is still holding the receipts.
Where the modern money comes from
With sugar gone, the economy rests on tourism, offshore financial services and — significantly — citizenship by investment. Saint Kitts and Nevis established the first such programme in the world in 1984, which makes it the origin of an industry now operated by more than a dozen countries.
The scheme has been reformed repeatedly under international pressure, particularly over due diligence and the visa-free access that makes the passports valuable. Revenue from it has at points constituted a very large share of government income, and it funded a substantial part of the transition after the sugar closure — including a sugar industry diversification fund that paid pensions and retraining for the workers whose industry ended.
That is the honest framing of these programmes, and it applies across the eastern Caribbean: they are how very small states with no other lever have funded adaptation, transition and reconstruction. The criticisms are legitimate; so is the question of what the alternative was supposed to be.
What the sugar closure actually meant
It is worth staying with 2005 for a moment, because the end of the Saint Kitts sugar industry is one of the clearest case studies anywhere of what happens when a monoculture that has run for three and a half centuries finally stops.
The industry had been loss-making for years, propped up by the European preferential price that the WTO banana rulings and subsequent sugar reform were dismantling. In its last seasons the state corporation was losing substantial sums per tonne, and the government took the decision to close rather than continue.
Around fifteen hundred workers lost their jobs at once, in a country whose entire population is roughly fifty thousand — proportionally equivalent to a very large industrial closure in a European state. The response was a diversification fund financed substantially from the citizenship-by-investment revenue: pensions for older workers, retraining, land distribution to former workers, and severance.
It was not painless and it is not held up locally as a triumph. But it was managed, funded and completed, which distinguishes it from a great many industrial closures in much wealthier countries.
The land went to housing, to some agriculture, and largely to regenerating bush. If you climb Mount Liamuiga and look down, the pattern of the old estate boundaries is still legible under the returning forest — which is, in its way, the most complete summary of Caribbean economic history available from a single viewpoint.
The island as it is now
Basseterre is a small working capital with a circus modelled on Piccadilly, a Georgian street grid and a cruise berth that changes the town’s character entirely on ship days.
Brimstone Hill takes a couple of hours and deserves them. The southeast peninsula, opened by a road in the 1990s, holds the good beaches and the resort development, plus a population of vervet monkeys introduced from Africa in the seventeenth century that now outnumber the human residents.
The interior is a central mountain range with Mount Liamuiga, a 1,156-metre dormant volcano climbed in a hard half-day to a crater you can descend into. The rainforest on its slopes is regenerating over the abandoned cane land, which means the island is greener now than in any photograph from the twentieth century.
Nevis, across the channel by a twenty-minute ferry, is the quieter half by an order of magnitude: Charlestown’s stone and shingle, the plantation inns converted from estate great houses, the Nevis Peak climb — steep, muddy, rope-assisted and best not underestimated — and the museum at the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, who left the island at seventeen and did not come back.
Both islands are small enough to drive round in a morning and interesting enough to make that a mistake.
Nino reports from the mountains between the Black and Caspian seas — Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the high valleys in between. She wrote our Caucasus Loop route and argues, credibly, that supra hospitality is a competitive sport.