The island was occupied by the Arawaks about two thousand years ago, and then by the Caribs. The latter called Guadeloupe (pronounced Gwa-d’loop) Karukera, which means ‘island of lovely waters’. Columbus discovered it on 4 November 1493 and named it after a Spanish monastery, Our Lady of Guadalupa de Estramadura. It was colonised in 1635 by Duplessis d’Ossonville and Lienard d’Olive, Frenchmen from St Christopher, or St Kitts as everyone now calls it. Less well governed than Martinique, Guadeloupe was taken over by the English in 1759.

The first town founded by the French, Basse Terre, had meanwhile prospered. But the English founded a second, Pointe-à-Pitre, which takes its name from a Dutchman called Peter, hence Peter’s Point. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 returned Guadeloupe to the French, only for it to be taken away again by the English in 1794 and then immediately recaptured by the revolutionary commissar of the new Republic, Victor Hugues. In order to enforce the revolutionary government’s decrees and the abolition of slavery, he organised the ‘Terror’ against the planters and aristocrats. In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte re-instituted slavery, which was not finally abolished until 1848. With Bonaparte’s rise to power some of the exiled planters returned to the island, but Guadeloupe’s Creoles never regained their former power. That had an effect on land ownership, whereby the majority of agricultural holdings were bought and consolidated by large companies from metropolitan France.

A department of France since 1946, the economy of Guadeloupe is tightly tied to the metropolitan power, most significantly in terms of the size of the governmental machine and the large number of public sector employees it has created. Guadeloupe’s absorption into France proper as one of the departments sending deputies to the French national assembly has some undoubted economic advantages, but has not resolved all of Guadeloupe’s problems. Agriculture (mainly bananas and sugar) is relatively speaking a declining industry, but even so it remains economically important thanks to international demand and farm support policies. That said, after direct subsidies from France, tourism is now the island’s economic mainstay.