Title: Preface (Page 4)The Caribbean region was conquered and exploited by Europeans starting in the 1500s and continuing to the present day. The Spaniards were the first Europeans and they pretty much killed off the the people they found by infecting them with european diseases and overworking them as slaves.
In order to replace the native populations as a source of cheap labor the europeans enslaved Africans and brought them to the Caribbean. All the European countries that had ships got involved in the slave trade and many of them tried to acquire caribbean colonies so that the slaves could be employed on big farms called plantations. This was the practice in Cuba, for instance, from the 1500s to the late 1800s.
Slavery was less fully developed on some islands.
On St. Vincent the Garifuna (people of Carib Indian and African descent) offered such strong resistance to invasion, and so skillfully played the French and British off against one another, that the full weight of the plantation system wasn't felt in St. Vincent until after 1797. Slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1833.
For that reason St. Vincent had 36 years of full slavery instead of 300; and that has been reflected in its post-colonial history as well. You can read more about the history of the region on the history page..
In 2001 the newly elected government instituted a system of recognizing "National Heros", and the first such hero was Chatoyer, the Principal Chief and war-leader of the Garifuna people in their last war against the British. If the British hadn't had surplus troops that had been kicked out of North America by the American Revolutionaries, and hadn't hired mercenary German Mountain troops to track the Garifuna back to their homes, they might never have fully conquered St. Vincent.
The net result of this fierce defense of their independence was that the slaveowners, who like all slaveowners tried to make their slaves feel less than human, didn't succeed as well in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines as they did elsewhere. Their failure produced a lot less racism than one experiences on other islands.
Finally, that history may well have a continuing influence in the world.