Wealth comes in many guises, especially when it refers to the public resources of whole countries or territories. Some have oil, some have gold, others have massive snow-capped mountains that they turn into skiing resorts. Anguilla’s most precious natural resources are, without doubt, the many exceptional beaches that garland the island’s coastline. However, for locals Anguilla’s scarce and arid soil has always been far more precious than its powdery sand.
Historically Anguilla never enjoyed the prosperity of some of its neighbors, most notably St. Kitts, Nevis and even St. Eustatius—all of which were immensely rich at some point in the 17th and 18th century. Unlike the Dutch, the British found little purpose for possessions in the Caribbean that could not successfully be turned into single-crop plantations, and despite repeated efforts with tobacco, cotton and eventually also sugar cane Anguilla never did thrive on the back of its produce.
The complete failure of Anguilla’s plantations – most notably the Walblake Plantation, the Hughes Estate in South Hill, and George Leonard’s Estate in present-day George Hill among many others – exposed the shortcomings of a system driven by slave labour. It is often said, incorrectly, that there was no slavery in Anguilla. If this were true Anguillians wouldn’t celebrate with total abandon every year on August Monday. A more accurate interpretation would be to say that hardship was the great social leveller even at a time of masters and slaves.
One thing Anguillians have always excelled at is resourcefulness, so in the face of famine and drought they adapted and infused the inherently perverse slave system with a degree of flexibility it was never meant to sustain: some slave owners allowed their slaves to work in other islands for a fee; others granted them larger swathes of land to work for themselves, sometimes over as much as four days a week. This multiple-crop economy was never going to be productive enough for the island to thrive, but it did provide individual slaves with more produce than they could eat – and what they didn’t consume they sold or traded at a profit.
In time some slaves accrued enough to buy their freedom and be legally qualified to own their land. Others were left in more of a legal limbo until emancipation came in the 1830s – then again, there was no great sense of novelty in that for a people who’d been largely neglected for the best part of 200 years. Whether or not the law allowed it, Anguillians claimed their land, tilled it, lived from it, made it their own. This is what makes dealing with land in Anguilla such a privilege.
Purchasing real estate in Anguilla might seem like a straightforward, if time-consuming, monetary transaction, but the fact is that the loops and hurdles in place are there to ensure that every new owner of however small a piece of The Rock has gone through a process, a rite of passage, as it were, that earns them the right to partake into the legacy of a remarkable people. At GUM/KO International we are humbled and honored to have been embraced by the local community, who for decades have placed their heritage in our hands and trusted us to find appreciative buyers on their behalf.