Upon their discovery by Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, every island in the Caribbean was claimed on behalf of the Spanish Crown who took a risk and financed the discoverer's voyages.  In the early years after the discovery, the Spanish colonists operated from a base in Santo Domingo and by 1511 the new colonies had reached as far North as Florida and as far south as Trinidad.  The monopoly held by Spain in the Caribbean lasted some one hundred thirty years.  Spain's interest in the islands started to dwindle after their conquest of Mexico in 1519 and Perú in 1532 and the discovery of vasts deposits of gold there, it was also affected by Spain's overcommitment and involvement in wars in Europe. 

Shortly after the discovery, the Indian population of the islands began to decline due mainly to unfamiliar epidemic diseases like measles, smallpox, malaria and dysentery introduced by the Spanish settlers.  To help mitigate the labor shortage, in 1518 the first African slaves were introduced in the colonies.

In the 1620s the Dutch were the first to take former Spanish territories peacefully seizing the unoccupied islands of Curaçao, St. Eustatius, St. Martin and Saba.  The English settled Barbados in 1625, Nevis in 1628, Antigua and Montserrat in 1632 and the French settled Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635, then St. Bartholomé, St. Martin, Grenada, St. Lucia and finalized with Haiti which was ceded by Spain in 1697 per the Treaty of Ryswyck.  After a failed attempt to capture Santo Domingo, the first British succesful military invasion of a Spanish territory  was the Invasion of Jamaica in 1655. Trinidad was the only other territory captured by force by the British from Spain in 1797 and formally ceded in 1802 per the Treaty of Amiens.  

The Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands are the main components of the Lesser Antilles.  Until the mid 17th Century, agricultural activity of the Lesser Antilles was limited to small farms producing mainly tobacco, which could not compete in terms of quality and quantity with the larger Spanish colonies of the Greater Antilles.  Economic salvation came from the evolution of the sugar plantation society based on slave labor created by the increased popularity of sugar in Europe.  The sugar revolution first came to some of the smaller islands of the West Indies, by most accounts it was first found in Barbados in the 1640's, Guadeloupe in the 1650's, Martinique in the 1660s and St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat in the 1670s.  By 1700 the French colonies produced just 9,000 m. t. of sugar while the English colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Nevis (St. Kitts production was on-existent due to French  raids) and Montserrat produced about 25,000 m. t. of sugar, more than Brazil's 22,000 m. t.  Sugar production in the West Indies continued to be a major part of world production until the second half of the 18th Century.  Originally, the market for muscovado sugar produced in the West Indies was Europe, where the product was refined in the mother country of each of the colonies.  After 1776 with the formation of the Thirteen Colonies, the US became an important market as well.

The English and French settlers that came to the West Indies were not knowledgeable in the methods for cultivating sugarcane since it is a crop only grown in tropical climate.  Based on their success in Africa and the East Indies in the Dutch-Portuguese War, the Netherlands wanted to take advantage of Portugal possessions in the America's.  In 1624 the Dutch began their invasion of Brazil which they partially occupied until they were expelled in 1654.  The Dutch briefly were able to harvest sugar in Brazil starting in 1635 until 1648 when most of Dutch Brazil revolted. 

With their expulsion from Brazil beginning in 1645, Dutch planters began looking for others places where they could produce sugar.  It was at this time that Dutch sugar men began arriving in the West Indies introducing their knowledge and techniques on how to produce sugar to the Caribbean. The Lesser Antilles changed from small farms to large plantations requiring vasts amount of land and big capital investments to create sugar fields and factories.  The sugar revolution required a large labor supply not available in the islands, thus giving rise to a lucrative transatlantic slave trade.  In all, about ten million slaves were brought to the New World, approximately 17% of them to the British Caribbean before slavery was slowly abolished beginning in the 1830s. 

By 1750 Jamaica was the most important British colony in the Caribbean surpassing Barbados in economic significance.  Plantations and sugar factories in the 18th and 19th Centuries seem small ventures compared to the more modern central sugar mills, but in their time were some of the largest private enterprises operating anywhere in the world in terms of capitalization, output and labor force.

Today there are only six sugar mills in operation in the West Indies; four in Jamaica and one each in Martinique and Barbados. The foregoing is a brief synopsis of how the West Indies, though discovered by Spain, ended up being colonized by the French, Dutch and British. A page is dedicated in the sugar mill and trapiches section herein to the islands where sugar factory ruins from the plantation era can still be found.