History of Martinique
According to anthropologist Thierry Létang: "Four thousand years before Christ, the Greater Antilles saw the arrival of archaic populations from the Yucatan peninsula. Three thousand years before Christ, other archaic populations arrived in the Lesser Antilles from the coasts of Venezuela. Successive waves of horticulturists and ceramists from the Orinoco basin, speaking a language belonging to the Arawak linguistic group, gradually settled in the Lesser Antilles and then in the Greater Antilles, five hundred years before Christ. Less than a century before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the Lesser Antilles were taken over by Kalina warriors from the coasts of Guyana and Venezuela, who imposed a new worldview and socio-political organization on the local Arawak-speaking population.
When Christopher Columbus landed in the West Indies in 1492, he found the archipelago divided into two major socio-political blocks: the Greater Antilles belonging to the Taïno-Arawak complex, and the Lesser Antilles belonging to the Kalinago group. While the Spanish conquistadores quickly conquered the Greater Antilles, they never managed to conquer the Lesser Antilles islands between Puerto Rico and Trinidad. It wasn't until 1625 that former French and English pirates turned tobacco planters jointly succeeded in colonizing the small island of Saint Kitts (Saint Christophe), from which, ten years later in 1635, the French settled Guadeloupe and Martinique. "
Settlement of the American Indians to the present day
The cohabitation between the new occupants, the French colonists, and the Kalinagos, whom they called the Caribs, was characterized by periods of understanding and others that were much more hostile and bloody. At the end of the 17thcentury , the Caribs, constantly in conflict with the new arrivals, were massacred, and the survivors fled to Dominica, a neutral territory in 1660. Settlers took their place and developed the cultivation of indigo, coffee, tobacco, then sugar cane, based on the triangular trade and thus the slave trade and slavery.
From 1635 onwards, Martinique became a very good source of income for the colonizers, thanks to its quality products - notably the island's coffee and Macouba's particularly renowned tobacco - but above all because it was an important strategic base in the region, and sugar was the equivalent of oil today.
In 1794, Martinique was conquered by the English, then reclaimed by the French following the 1803 Treaty of Amiens. For two centuries, the slave system prevailed. But the enslaved, along with the free people of color who joined forces with the French abolitionists, finally achieved abolition on May 22, 1848, the day of the hard-won liberation of the slaves, a date that has since become memorable, recognized and celebrated throughout the island today.
During the 1914-1918 war, 23,000 West Indians and Guyanese left to fight in Europe. In 1938, Martinique passed a unanimous resolution demanding its assimilation into a French department. It became a French department on March 19, 1946, when a bill was passed after debates in Parliament. In 1982, it became a monodepartmental region. In 2010, after a referendum, the people of Martinique adopted a single local authority, the Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique (CTM), which replaced the Conseil Général and the Conseil Régional on December 18, 2015.
