Trace and Tell your Family's Empire Stories
Country Histories
The Caribbean island of Dominica is noted for the beauty of its sparsely-populated mountainous interior. Most of its inhabitants are the descendants of West African slaves, but there remains a significant community of native Carib people.
One of the poorest of the Caribbean islands, Dominica's development has been hampered by regular and severe hurricanes. Originally settled by the French, the island absorbed many aspects of French culture in spite of two centuries of British rule.
Many Dominicans emigrated to other parts of the Caribbean and the United Kingdom in search of better opportunities in the 1950s and 1960s. Baroness Patricia Scotland arrived in the UK with her parents and ten siblings in 1958. Britain's first black female QC, she was made a peer in 1997 and has held several distinguished positions in the Blair Government, where she currently serves as Minister for Justice.
Browser by chapterIt is thought that Dominica has been inhabited for around 4000 years. During the first millennium the Carib people began arriving from mainland South America. They called themselves the 'Kalinago' and referred to the island as 'Waitukubuli', meaning 'woman with a tall body', in reference to the volcanic mountains that characterise its geography.
Christopher Columbus sighted the island in 1493 and called it 'Dominica' because he found it on a Sunday. A small number of French settlers arrived in 1632. While the diseases brought by Europeans decimated the aboriginal population in other parts of the Caribbean, contact with Dominica came relatively late. Unusually, there was still a significant aboriginal population at the end of the seventeenth century.
