Dominica officially the Commonwealth of Dominica, is an island country in the Caribbean. It is part of the Windward Islands chain in the Lesser Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. The capital, Roseau, is located on the western side of the island. Dominica's closest neighbours are two constituent territories of the European Union, both overseas departments of France: Guadeloupe to the northwest and Martinique to the south-southeast. Dominica comprises a land area of 750 km2 (290 sq mi), and the highest point is Morne Diablotins, at 1,448 m (4,751 ft) in elevation. The population was 71,293 at the 2011 census.
The island was settled by the Arawak arriving from South America in the fifth century. The Kalinago displaced the Arawak by the 15th century. Christopher Columbus is said to have passed the island on Sunday, 3rd November 1493. It was later colonised by Europeans, predominantly by the French from 1690 to 1763. The French enslaved West Africans and transported them to Dominica to work on coffee plantations. Great Britain took possession in 1763 after the Seven Years' War and continued the legacy of forced labor to gain wealth, and gradually established English as its official language. The island gained independence as a republic in 1978.
Dominica has been nicknamed the "Nature Island of the Caribbean" for its natural environment. It is the youngest island in the Lesser Antilles, and is still being formed by Geothermal-Volcanic activity, as evidenced by the world's second-largest hot spring, called Boiling Lake. The island has lush mountainous rainforests and is the home of many rare plants, animals, and bird species. There are dry shrubland areas in some of the western coastal regions, but heavy rainfall occurs inland. The Sisserou Parrot, also known as the imperial amazon, is critically endangered and found only on Dominica. It is the island's national bird and is featured on the National flag, making Dominica one of the two sovereign nations whose official flag features the color purple. The country is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States and the Non-Aligned Movement.
The Kalinago called the island Wai'tu kubuli, which means "Tall is her body", likely referring to the island personified as a goddess (comparable to Gaia).
Christopher Columbus, sailing for Spain, named the island Dominica, an abbreviation of the Latin dies Dominica (meaning "day of the Lord", that is, Sunday), because he first sighted the landmass on a Sunday in November 1493. In keeping with the Spanish pronunciation of its name, Dominica's name is pronounced with emphasis on the second i.
The similar names and the identical demonym with the Dominican Republic have caused some in Dominica to advocate for a name change to Waitukubuli, which they say would contribute to further establishing the local identity and stop mail from being wrongly sent to the Dominican Republic. Others disagree, arguing that the name change would be too expensive.
Dominica first emerged from the sea during the Oligocene Epoch approximately 26 million years ago, making it the last Caribbean island to be formed by volcanic activity along the Lesser Antilles Volcanic Arc. The island remains volcanically active, with geothermal features reflecting ongoing magmatic processes beneath its surface.
Pre-colonial period and early European contact
Dominica's precolonial Indigenous inhabitants were the Kalinago people, who are thought to have driven out the previous Arawak population. However, this may be a partial misconception as ancestral Kalinago narratives mention the two groups coexisting and intermarrying. The Arawak were not the primary Indigenous group. It is believed that before them were a group of paleo-Indians who arrived towards the end of the late Pleistocene period.
In 1493, Christopher Columbus first spotted the island during his second voyage to the Americas. Because he saw the island on a Sunday (November 3, 1493), Columbus named the island Dominica (Latin for 'Sunday'). Some Spanish colonisers settled there. But, as European explorers and settlers entered the region, Indigenous refugees from surrounding islands settled in Dominica and pushed out the Spanish settlers. The Spanish instead settled other areas that were easier to control.
Spain had little success in colonising Dominica. In 1632, the French Compagnie des Îles de l'Amérique claimed it and other "Petites Antilles" for France, but no physical occupation took place. Between 1642 and 1650, French missionary Raymond Breton became the first regular European visitor to the island.
In 1660, the French and English agreed that Dominica and St. Vincent should not be settled, but instead left to the Carib people as neutral territory. However, its natural resources attracted expeditions of English and French foresters, who began harvesting timber. In 1690, the French established their first permanent settlements. French woodcutters from Martinique and Guadeloupe began to set up timber camps to supply the French islands with wood, and they gradually became permanent settlers. They brought the first enslaved Africans from West Africa to Dominique, as they called it in French.
In 1715, a revolt of impoverished white smallholders in the north of Martinique, known as La Gaoulé, caused settlers to migrate to southern Dominique, where they set up smallholdings. Meanwhile, French families and others from Guadeloupe settled in the north. In 1727, the first French commander, M. Le Grand, took charge of the island with a basic French government. Dominique formally became a colony of France, and the island was divided into districts or "quarters". The French had already developed plantation agriculture on Martinique and Guadeloupe, where they cultivated sugarcane with enslaved African workers. In Dominique they gradually developed coffee plantations. Because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the general population came to consist primarily of black-African slaves.
In 1761, during the Seven Years' War in Europe, a British expedition against Dominica, led by Andrew Rollo, conquered the island and several other Caribbean islands. In 1763, France lost the war and ceded the island to Great Britain in 1763 under the Treaty of Paris. The same year, the British established a legislative assembly, with only European colonists represented. French remained the official language, but Antillean Creole, which had developed from it, was spoken by most of the population.
In 1778 the French, with the active co-operation of the population, began the re-capture of Dominica. This was ended in 1783 by the second Treaty of Paris, which returned the island to British control, but the island population, especially those considered gens de couleur libres (lit. 'free people of colour'), resisted British restrictions. The British retained control throughout French invasions in 1795 and 1805, the first taking place during the period of the Haitian Revolution, which gained the independence of Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue, France's richest Caribbean colony).
Great Britain established a small colony in 1805. It used Dominica as part of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, by which slaves were imported and sold as labour in the islands as part of a trade that included producing and shipping sugar and coffee as commodity crops to Europe. The best documented slave plantation on the island is Hillsborough Estate, which had 71 male and 68 female slaves. The Greg family were notable: Thomas Hodgson, a brother-in-law, owned a slave ship, and Thomas Greg and his brother John Greg were part-owners of sugar plantations in Dominica. In January 1814, 20 slaves escaped from Hillsborough. They were recorded as recaptured and punished with 100 lashes applied to the males and 50 for the females. The slaves reportedly said that one of their people had died in the plantation hospital, and they believed he had been poisoned.