On 3 September 1783, the treaties signed at Paris and Versailles brought the American Revolutionary War to its formal close. Most of the world remembers that peace for confirming the independence of the United States. In St Kitts and Nevis it is remembered for something else: it ended, at last, the 160-year contest between Britain and France over who would rule these islands.
The American Revolution comes to the Caribbean
When France entered the American war on the colonists’ side in 1778, the conflict spread immediately to the Caribbean, where the sugar islands were among the most valuable prizes either empire possessed. Fleets and armies criss-crossed the Lesser Antilles, and islands changed hands repeatedly. For St Kitts and Nevis — British since the Treaty of Utrecht settled the older Anglo-French struggle — the danger arrived in earnest in the first weeks of 1782.
1782: the Siege of Brimstone Hill
In January 1782 a French force landed on St Kitts and laid siege to the great fortress on Brimstone Hill, while the British and French fleets fought the Battle of Frigate Bay offshore. After holding out for about a month, the heavily outnumbered garrison surrendered with the honours of war, and St Kitts — with Nevis — passed into French hands for the final time. The episode, and the fortress at its centre, are explored further in our colonial history guide.
The peace of 1783
The wider war, however, was decided elsewhere, and at the peace table the islands came home. Under the 1783 settlement — the Treaty of Paris between Britain and the United States, signed alongside the Anglo-French treaty concluded at Versailles the same day — St Kitts and Nevis were restored to Britain, while France recovered other territories elsewhere in the region. French ambitions to hold St Kitts and Nevis ended there. From 1783 until independence two centuries later, the islands’ flag would not change again.
Stability without freedom
It matters to say plainly what the treaty did and did not do. It stabilised colonial rule and secured the islands’ place in Britain’s sugar empire — but it brought no freedom to the enslaved majority who made that empire profitable. Slavery continued on St Kitts and Nevis for another half-century, until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, emancipation in 1834 and full freedom in 1838. For most of the islands’ people, 1783 settled which empire ruled them — not whether they were free.
Legacy
The 1783 peace closed the age of conquest and counter-conquest that had shaped the islands since 1623. Brimstone Hill — “the Gibraltar of the West Indies” — never faced another siege, and today the fortress is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the islands’ most powerful monument to this era. The longer road from colonial stability to nationhood is traced in The Path to Independence and the timeline of key events.
Continue the series: Significant Historical Events · Timeline of Key Events · History & Culture hub