At the start of the eighteenth century Nevis was, for its size, one of the most profitable islands in the English Caribbean — a sugar colony whose planters’ wealth was built on the labour of thousands of enslaved Africans. In the spring of 1706 that prosperity made it a target. The French raid of that year was the most destructive single event in the island’s colonial history, and Nevis carried its consequences for decades.
The War of the Spanish Succession reaches the Leeward Islands
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) drew Britain and France into yet another global contest, and as in 1666, the Leeward Islands became a theatre of war. Early in 1706 a powerful French expedition swept through the islands, striking the French districts’ old rival positions on St Kitts before turning on Nevis. The commanders most associated with the campaign were Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and the comte de Chavagnac, experienced raiders whose purpose was not conquest but plunder: to cripple a wealthy British colony and carry its movable wealth away.
The raid
The French landed in March–April 1706 and overwhelmed the island’s defences. Plantations were looted and burned, sugar works destroyed, and ransoms demanded of planters and officials. The greatest cruelty of the raid fell on the island’s enslaved people: treated by the raiders as property to be seized, a large part of the enslaved population was taken from the island and transported away — contemporary claims about the numbers vary, and we deliberately avoid repeating unverified figures. Accounts from the period also describe enslaved men and women withdrawing into the island’s rugged interior and resisting the raiders — a detail worth remembering in a story too often told only through planters’ losses.
Counting the cost
Nevis emerged from 1706 in ruins. Estates, mills and stores were destroyed, families were ruined or displaced, and the island’s labour force — in the brutal accounting of the time, its most valuable “asset” — had been forcibly removed in great numbers. The losses were severe enough that the British Parliament later granted financial relief to sufferers on Nevis and St Kitts. The island rebuilt, but its standing among the leading sugar colonies was never quite the same; larger islands such as Jamaica and Barbados pulled decisively ahead in the decades that followed.
Nevis after 1706
Recovery was slow and uneven. Some planters relocated; others rebuilt with borrowed capital and rebuilt slowly. The raid sharpened British attention to the defence of the Leewards, and after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) settled the wider war — placing all of St Kitts under British rule — the two islands entered a more stable, though no less unequal, colonial century. The fuller arc of that century is traced in our colonial history guide and the timeline of key events.
Why 1706 matters
The raid on Nevis shows how completely the fortunes of a small Caribbean island could be overturned by wars declared in Europe — and how the human cost of those wars was borne above all by the enslaved. It marks a turning point in Nevis’s economic history, the moment a famously rich colony began a long relative decline, and it belongs beside 1666 and 1783 in the story of the Anglo-French struggle for these islands.
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