Founding of Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda became independent from the United Kingdom as a two-island state in the eastern Caribbean. Antigua was named by Christopher Columbus in 1493 after a church in Seville, and English settlers established a colony there in 1632. The island became a centre of sugar production worked by enslaved Africans, and its harbour at English Harbour, later known as Nelson's Dockyard, was an important British naval base. Barbuda, much smaller, was long leased by the Codrington family and is still marked by a tradition of communal land ownership. Antigua and Barbuda had been an associated state since 1967 before full independence in 1981. Vere Bird, who had dominated the country's politics for decades, became its first prime minister.

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