Malliohana

Malliohana belongs to the Leeward Islands of the eastern Caribbean, where low land, reefs and sheltered waters supported Indigenous communities before European colonisation. People cultivated crops, fished and gathered marine foods, using canoes to maintain relationships with neighbouring islands. Freshwater availability and storm seasons influenced settlement and travel. Exchange moved useful materials and cultural knowledge across a maritime world in which individual islands were connected through repeated voyages.

Malliouhana was an Indigenous name for the island later called Anguilla. Traditional accounts place the arrival of English settlers from Saint Kitts in 1650; they cultivated tobacco and some cotton. France briefly occupied the island in 1666, and later attacks damaged it. By 1683 at least a hundred enslaved Africans were present, and plantation labour became part of the island's colonial economy.