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Who colonized Puerto Rico?

Caribbean — the powers that ruled Puerto Rico, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Puerto Rico?

Spain from 1508, then the United States from 1898 — and it remains an unincorporated US territory today, making it one of the world's last formally colonial arrangements.

Puerto Rico is not a historical case. It is a current one: an inhabited territory whose residents hold citizenship without the vote and whose fiscal affairs were placed under an unelected federal board in 2016.

Reference

Who ruled Puerto Rico, and when

before 1508
Taíno
1508–1898
Spain
since 1898
United States

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Spain, United States
Independence
Not independent; US territory since 1898
Representation
3.2 million US citizens with no vote for president or senator
Legal doctrine
'Unincorporated territory' — belonging to but not part of the United States
Sterilisation
By 1965 roughly a third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilised

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1898

    Ceded to the US in the Treaty of Paris.

  2. 1901–22

    Insular Cases: the island belongs to, but is not part of, the US.

  3. 1917

    Jones Act imposes US citizenship without voting representation.

  4. 1937

    Ponce massacre.

  5. 1952

    Commonwealth status; still no vote in Congress.

Context

What the record shows

The Insular Cases that established this status used explicitly racial reasoning and have never been overturned.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Puerto Rico?
Spain from 1508 and the United States from 1898. It remains an unincorporated US territory.
Is Puerto Rico still a colony?
By the standard definition — a territory governed by another state without full political representation — yes. The UN Special Committee on Decolonization has repeatedly said so.
Can Puerto Ricans vote for president?
Residents of the island cannot vote in presidential elections and have only a non-voting delegate in Congress.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Puerto Rico

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.