Curacao

Curaçao exists because the Dutch needed a base for privateering and the slave trade—and because the island's natural harbor made it the Caribbean's largest slave market for two centuries. The Dutch West India Company seized the island from Spain in 1634, and between 1660 and 1700, the company transported over 600,000 enslaved Africans through Curaçao to colonies across the Americas. That brutal commerce built the wealth that created Willemstad's pastel-painted warehouses, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Arawak Caquetio people had lived here for millennia before Alonso de Ojeda became the first European to arrive in 1499. By 1515, the Spanish had enslaved nearly all 2,000 Caquetio and removed them to Hispaniola. The Dutch arrival created a different economic model: not plantation agriculture like neighboring islands, but trade—legal and otherwise. When the Netherlands lost Dutch Brazil in 1654, Curaçao's importance grew. The harbor that had sheltered pirates now anchored the Atlantic slave economy.

Resistance emerged from within. In 1795, an enslaved man named Tula Rigaud led a revolt that held out for a month before Dutch authorities crushed it. The Dutch abolished slavery in 1863—decades after the British and French—and the island's economy struggled to find new purpose. The discovery of oil in nearby Venezuela eventually provided it: Royal Dutch Shell opened a refinery in 1918 that would employ thousands and define Curaçao for a century.

Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA took over refinery operations, running the 320,000 barrel-per-day Isla facility until U.S. sanctions and PDVSA's own financial collapse forced closure in December 2019. Roughly 1,000 direct jobs vanished overnight. Restart attempts from 2023-2025 have repeatedly failed amid geopolitical tangles and governance delays.

The island achieved autonomy on October 10, 2010, when the Netherlands Antilles dissolved. Curaçao became a constituent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, alongside Aruba and Sint Maarten—the kingdom handles defense and foreign policy, while Curaçao governs itself. The 2020 'landspakket' reform package imposed by the Netherlands after COVID requires structural changes in exchange for debt relief and favorable financing.

The economy has pivoted entirely to tourism. After contracting during the pandemic, GDP grew 5.4% in 2024 as visitor arrivals reached double digits—outperforming Caribbean peers. But this success creates its own problems: growth is expected to moderate to 1.5% given 'saturation in tourism flows in light of the island's carrying capacity.' The population is declining. Investment and productivity growth remain subpar. Curaçao is becoming a 'one-pillar economy' as the offshore financial services and logistics sectors that once diversified revenue continue to shrink.

What remains is the cultural legacy of the slave trade transmuted into something resilient: Papiamentu, a Creole language blending Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and African languages, spoken nowhere else as a national tongue. The colorful Handelskade waterfront that once warehoused human beings now draws tourists seeking Caribbean charm.

By 2026, Curaçao will likely continue its tourism-dependent trajectory while the refinery remains idle and the population shrinks. The island that was built on transit—of goods, of people, of oil—now hosts visitors in transit from cruise ships, a gentler extraction but an extraction nonetheless.