Free City of Philipsburg

The Free City of Philipsburg is the smallest polity of the United Kingdom of America: the former Dutch half of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, about 34 square kilometres, with about 45,000 residents. Its capital is the harbour town of Philipsburg on Great Bay, and it shares the island with Saint-Martin, the French half. It was bought from the Netherlands by the Treaty of The Hague in 1920, and it was admitted as a constituent polity in 1921 under the Free City Charter, sealed by the Crown, which gives it self-government in every matter not reserved to the Realm and no members in either House of Parliament.

The bargain at the centre of the Charter is sometimes summarised as more autonomy, no seats. The Free City pays no federal income tax, sets its own low taxes, and makes its own law on everything from company registration to work permits; in exchange it sends no member to the House of Commons or the House of Lords, its residents cannot vote in the Realm’s general elections while they live there, and it pays the Realm a fixed annual contribution for defence and the other reserved matters. The bargain was approved in December 1920 by a referendum in which only men who met the Dutch colonial property qualification could vote, about a tenth of the adult population, and it was confirmed in 1976, on universal suffrage, by 52 per cent to 48.

The Free City is governed by a Citizens’ Assembly of 21 members, a collegial Senate of five led by a First Senator, and a Lord Warden of the Harbour, the Crown’s representative. Its High Commercial Court is chosen by shipping and insurance parties across the Americas. Its economy rests on cruise tourism, offshore company registration, the court, the free port and the airport, and on a workforce of which about a quarter of adults, seasonal and migrant workers, cannot vote.

In 2017 Hurricane Irma destroyed most of its buildings, and the federal relief that followed came with a condition the Free City regarded as a breach of its Charter. The Seat Movement, founded the next year, became the second party in the Assembly by 2025 and in 2026 petitioned the House of Commons for a seat. In 2027 Parliament passed the Beneficial Ownership Act, which requires a public register of company owners throughout the Realm, and the Free City challenged it in the Supreme Court as a breach of the Charter. The Court has reserved judgment, and the Commons committee considering the petition is waiting for it.

Name

The town of Philipsburg was founded in 1763 by John Philips, a Scottish sea captain in the service of the Dutch West India Company, as the seat of the Dutch half of the island, and took his name. The Free City took the town’s name in 1921, although the Free City covers the whole former Dutch half, and its residents distinguish “town” and “the City” in speech.

The island is Saint Martin in English. Its halves are Sint Maarten, the Dutch name that the Free City’s half used until 1920 and that survives in its old records and on Sint Maarten’s Day, and Saint-Martin, the French half. The island’s earliest known name, used by its Indigenous inhabitants, was Soualiga, usually translated as “land of salt”.

The title Free City was the merchants’ choice in the negotiations of 1920, borrowed from the free cities of the old German and Dutch worlds, and meant to say that the city governed itself. It has no legal meaning beyond the Charter.

History

Soualiga

The island was settled by Arawak-speaking peoples from South America over two thousand years ago, and later by the Kalinago, and its salt ponds, which gave it its name, were worked long before any European arrived. The Indigenous population was gone within a century of European contact, killed by disease, war and enslavement elsewhere in the Caribbean. The archaeological sites at Cay Bay and along the shores of the salt ponds were built over in the 1970s and 1980s, during the tourism boom, with little record made of them, and the Free City’s first museum exhibition on Soualiga opened only in 2013.

The salt and the division of 1648

Christopher Columbus is said to have named the island for Saint Martin in 1493, although he did not land. Its value to Europeans was its salt, which Dutch ships loaded from the Great Salt Pond for the herring fisheries of the Netherlands. The Dutch built Fort Amsterdam on the point at the mouth of Great Bay in 1631. Spain took the island in 1633, fortified it and abandoned it in 1648, and the Dutch and French who returned divided it between them by the Treaty of Concordia of 1648, which gave the south to the Dutch and the north to the French, guaranteed free movement across the line, and has governed the island’s division ever since.

In the eighteenth century the island changed hands repeatedly among the Dutch, the French and the British during the wars of the period, and was restored to the division of 1648 after each. Philipsburg was founded in 1763 on the sandbar between Great Bay and the Great Salt Pond, and Fort Willem was built above it later in the century. The courthouse on Front Street, the town’s oldest public building, dates from 1793.

Slavery and the flight to freedom

The Dutch half’s wealth was built on salt and, for a time, on sugar, and both were worked by enslaved Africans and their descendants, who made up the great majority of the population. The work at the salt ponds, raking salt in standing brine under the sun, was among the hardest in the Caribbean.

France abolished slavery in 1848, and the enslaved people of Saint-Martin were free. The Netherlands did not abolish it until 1 July 1863, fifteen years later. In the years between, the border of 1648, with its guaranteed free movement, ran between slavery and freedom, and several hundred enslaved people on the Dutch side crossed it to freedom. Dutch planters and salt pond owners responded by paying the people they held small wages, to stop them leaving.

When emancipation came in 1863 the Dutch government, as every abolishing government did, compensated the owners and not the enslaved. Among the families that received compensation was the van Heyningen family, merchants on the island since the 1780s, whose members owned enslaved people at the salt ponds. In a debate of the Citizens’ Assembly the leader of the Seat Movement, Josiane Arrindell, has read the record of the family’s compensation aloud.

The Dutch colony

For the rest of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the Dutch half of Saint Martin was a small, poor dependency administered from Curaçao, which its inhabitants resented, governed by a lieutenant-governor and a council elected by a small property franchise. Salt remained its principal export, and emigration was its principal social fact. The island’s harbour master, whose office regulated the salt trade and the port, was among the colony’s most important officials, and the office survived the change of sovereignty in a translated form.

The First Great War and the 1917 company

The Netherlands stayed neutral in the First Great War, but the war cut it off from its Caribbean possessions and ruined the finances of its smaller colonies. Sint Maarten, which had depended on Dutch shipping for its salt trade, was nearly destitute by 1917.

In 1917 about 120 men of Sint Maarten, most of them Black dock workers, crossed to Porto Rico, then a possession of the United Kingdom of America, and enlisted in the Realm’s forces. They served in France, and 31 of them died. Their company is the origin of the Philipsburg Fusiliers, which count their raising from 1917, and a memorial with the 31 names stands on the courthouse steps.

The Treaty of The Hague

After the war the Netherlands sold the Dutch half of Saint Martin to the United Kingdom of America and kept Curaçao and Aruba. The Treaty of The Hague, signed in 1920, transferred the territory for about three million American pounds in the money of the day. The Realm wanted a harbour and a customs station in the north-eastern Caribbean; the Netherlands wanted the money and could no longer afford the colony.

About four hundred inhabitants elected to keep Dutch nationality, most of them officials and their families, and left for Curaçao. The same year the Realm and France renewed the Treaty of Concordia by the Protocol of Marigot, keeping free movement across the island’s border.

The referendum and the Charter

The terms on which the territory would be governed were negotiated during 1920 between the Realm’s government and the island’s merchants’ chamber, chaired by Hendrik van Heyningen. The merchants did not want a governor, did not want to be attached to any mainland polity, and did not want federal taxes. The Realm did not want to give a harbour town of a few thousand people members of Parliament of its own. The bargain they reached was the Free City Charter: self-government in everything not reserved to the Realm, no federal income tax, a fixed annual contribution, and no seats in either House.

The bargain was put to a referendum in December 1920. The franchise was the Dutch colonial one, which only men who met a property qualification could vote under, about a tenth of the adults on the island, most of them merchants and their clerks. About 900 men voted, 790 for and 110 against. The majority of the population, most of them the descendants of the enslaved, were not asked.

The Charter was sealed by the Crown on 10 March 1921, Charter Day, and scheduled to the Polity Instruments Act 1889, which records it as a municipal charter that governs a polity. The Free City was admitted to the Union in 1921, following the territorial acquisition of 1920. Hendrik van Heyningen became the first First Senator, and the merchants’ chamber became the Harbour Party. The Charter kept the Dutch property franchise for the Free City’s own elections.

The merchants’ city

The Free City’s first three decades were the merchants’ decades. The Harbour Party governed with the votes of the property-qualified electorate, the salt ponds went on working on low wages, and the Charter’s self-government meant, in practice, the government of the harbour by the people who owned its business. The Realm established a coast and customs patrol base at Pointe Blanche in 1921, and appointed the first Lord Warden of the Harbour, a retired naval officer, on the nomination of the Assembly.

The Free City’s working men went on leaving. Between the 1920s and the 1950s about a third of them emigrated, most of them to the oil refineries of Aruba and Curaçao, which paid wages the salt ponds did not, and many came back. The men who came back had seen a labour movement, and they brought one with them.

The Second Great War and Juliana

The Realm entered the Second Great War at the end of 1941. French submarines operating in the Caribbean sank ships off the island in 1942, and in 1943 the Realm built up the base at Pointe Blanche and turned the airstrip at Simpson Bay into a military airfield.

The Netherlands had been overrun by the French in 1939, and its royal family had taken refuge abroad; Princess Juliana spent part of the war in the United Kingdom of America. In 1944 she visited the Free City for two days, opened the rebuilt airfield, and went to the salt ponds, where she spoke to the workers, the only royal visitor to the island who ever did. The Netherlands had never used the right the Treaty of The Hague gave it to name the airstrip. Its government in exile, grateful for the refuge the Realm had given its princess, used it during her visit, and the airfield has been the Internationale Luchthaven Prinses Juliana-Simpsonbaai since. The name was given in Dutch, as the treaty allowed, and for eighty years it had no official English form. Since an agreement of 2024, both the Dutch name and the English, Princess Juliana-Simpson Bay International Airport, are official, and the airport’s signs, tickets and timetables now carry both. Most residents call it simply Juliana. Proposals to rename it for a figure of the Realm have been made three times since the war and have failed each time, on the argument that the name records a refugee’s visit and the Free City’s welcome of her, not the Dutch.

The strike of 1949

In 1949 the salt pond workers and the dock workers of Philipsburg struck for six weeks, for wages and for the vote. They were led by Albert Romney, a salt worker who had spent ten years at the Aruba refineries and come home. The harbour closed. The merchants’ chamber asked the Lord Warden, Rear-Admiral (retired) Edwin Halloway, to call in the Royal American Navy from Pointe Blanche to reopen it. He refused, in a letter that the Free City’s schools now teach.

The merchants never forgave him. The strike ended when the Citizens’ Assembly, under pressure from a harbour that could not reopen, abolished the property qualification and gave the vote in the Free City’s elections to every adult citizen. At the election that followed, a labour Senate took office, the only government in the Free City’s history not led by the Harbour Party. In its four years, from 1949 to 1953, it made Emancipation Day, 1 July, an official holiday, and raised the salt workers’ wages. The merchants found that the harbour paid better than the salt did at the new wages, and salt production ended the same year. The Great Salt Pond remained, and it became the Free City’s civic symbol.

The resort

The Harbour Party returned to government in 1953 and has led every governing coalition since, always in coalition. The jet airliner and the first cruise ship calls of the 1960s turned the harbour town into a resort. Hotels were built along the beaches of Simpson Bay and Great Bay, the airport was extended, and the population tripled in thirty years, almost all of the growth from migration: from the other islands of the Caribbean, from the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and from India, whose Sindhi merchant families took over the duty-free shops of Front Street.

The Free City redrew its arms in 1959 to add the Border Monument, erected that year at Belvedere where the road crosses the line of 1648. In the 1970s the Realm and France agreed that the two halves of the island would share a desalination plant and a power grid.

The offshore Free City

In the 1970s the Citizens’ Assembly passed a Company Law, drafted for it by Harrowgate Pell, a New York law firm, that allowed companies with no business in the Free City to register there, keep their registers of owners private, and pay a flat fee in place of tax. The High Commercial Court, whose reputation among shipping and insurance lawyers was already established, made the law credible, and within twenty years the Free City was one of the principal offshore company registries of the Americas. It now holds about 60,000 registered companies, more than one for every resident, whose fees provide about a third of the Free City’s public revenue.

The referendum of 1976

In 1975 a committee of the House of Commons on the polities, considering the Free City’s absence from Parliament, recommended that it be given a seat in the Commons. The Harbour Party answered by holding a referendum on the Charter as it stood, the first on universal suffrage. A seat was not on the ballot; the Charter was.

The Harbour Party campaigned on the Charter’s self-government and on the federal income tax that a seat would bring, and won by 52 per cent to 48. The Commons dropped the recommendation. The Seat Movement’s argument, forty years later, would be that the referendum had excluded the migrant and seasonal workers who by 1976 were already a large part of the adult population.

Storms

Hurricane Luis struck the island in 1995 and wrecked the harbour, and the Free City rebuilt it under a new building code, the strictest in the Caribbean, which it regards as among its best achievements. In 2016 it opened the causeway across Simpson Bay Lagoon, the largest public work since the airport.

On 6 September 2017 Hurricane Irma, a category 5 storm, crossed the island. In the Free City four people died, most buildings were damaged, the housing of the migrant workers in Sucker Garden and Cul-de-Sac was flattened, and the airport terminal was destroyed and closed for months. The federal government offered relief, on condition that the Auditor-General of the Realm oversee its spending. The Senate declared the condition a breach of the Charter, since an Act extending federal auditors into the Free City’s accounts, a matter not reserved, required the Assembly’s consent. The Free City went three weeks without running water while it argued. The Assembly then gave its consent under protest. The Auditor-General’s report found the relief money spent properly, which embarrassed New Westminster more than it did the Free City.

The Seat Movement

Josiane Arrindell, a history teacher whose great-grandfather had struck in 1949 and whose family had lost their house to Irma, founded the Seat Movement in 2018, on the argument that a city which could be made to accept federal auditors in a disaster was not self-governing, and should at least have a vote in the Parliament that governed it. The movement won three seats in the Assembly in 2021 and seven in 2025, the fastest rise of any party in the Free City’s history.

In 2021 the First Senator resigned over the award of the causeway contract to a contractor linked to the van Heyningen family, and was succeeded by Maurice van Heyningen, Hendrik van Heyningen’s great-grandson, who has led the Harbour Party since. The same year the Charter contribution was cut for five years to pay for the rebuilding, and a federal prosecution of a Simpson Bay yacht broker for moving cocaine through the free port led the Harbour Party to observe that the Realm’s own patrol at Pointe Blanche had missed it for years.

In 2026 the Seat Movement presented a petition signed by about 14,000 citizens to the House of Commons, asking for a seat and a new referendum. The Commons referred it to its committee on the polities. The contribution was restored in full the same year. In 2027 Parliament passed the Beneficial Ownership Act, and the Free City went to the Supreme Court.

Geography

The Free City occupies the southern part of Saint Martin, a hilly island of about 87 square kilometres at the northern end of the Lesser Antilles, about 300 kilometres east of Porto Rico. Its territory of about 34 square kilometres runs from Pointe Blanche in the east, past the harbour of Great Bay and the town of Philipsburg, to the airport, the beaches and the lagoon of Simpson Bay in the west, and it shares the island with French Saint-Martin along a land border of about ten kilometres and across Simpson Bay Lagoon, which the border divides.

Philipsburg stands on a narrow sandbar between Great Bay and the Great Salt Pond. Its two parallel streets, Front Street on the bay and Back Street behind it, hold the courthouse, the duty-free shops and the offices of the registry trade, and flood on the highest spring tides. Fort Amsterdam stands on the point at the western edge of the bay and Fort Willem on the hill above the town. The cruise ships berth at the A. C. Wathey Cruise Facility at Pointe Blanche, beside the patrol base.

Most residents live not in the town but in the districts behind it and along the lagoon: Cay Hill, Cole Bay, Sucker Garden, Cul-de-Sac, Dutch Quarter and Simpson Bay. The airport, the Internationale Luchthaven Prinses Juliana-Simpsonbaai or Princess Juliana-Simpson Bay International Airport, occupies the strip between the lagoon and the sea at Simpson Bay, and its runway ends at the edge of Maho Beach. The hills rise to Sentry Hill, about 340 metres, and are the one part of the Free City on which the building code has allowed nothing to be built.

The climate is tropical, hot and dry for much of the year, cooled by the trade winds, with a hurricane season from June to November. There are no rivers. Fresh water comes from the shared desalination plant.

The Great Salt Pond, the Free City’s civic symbol, is also the site of its rubbish tip, which occupies part of the pond’s northern shore. The tip’s fires send smoke over Philipsburg in every dry season, and the debris of Irma doubled it. A plan to close it and ship the Free City’s rubbish off the island has been approved by the Senate four times and funded never.

Sea level is rising. Front Street floods on high spring tides, and the seawall needed to protect the town, at an estimated cost of about A£400 million, is the largest item in the Resilience and Works budget. The Free City has asked that its cost be deducted from the Charter contribution. The Realm’s government has answered that a Free City which wants no Parliament can build its own wall.

The Charter

The instrument

The Free City Charter was sealed by the Crown on 10 March 1921 and is scheduled to the Polity Instruments Act 1889. Its authentic text is in English and Dutch, the Dutch retained at the merchants’ insistence as the language of the Dutch colonial ordinances the Charter continued. It may be amended only by an Act of Parliament made with the consent of the Citizens’ Assembly, and no Act altering it without that consent has ever been passed.

No seats

The Charter’s central article is the bargain itself.

The article is why the Free City appears in the Realm’s constitutional tables as an exception: it is the only polity that sends no one to the House of Commons and, alone among the polities, returns no polity members to the House of Lords. It has come quietly to regret the second half of that. Twice the Free City has asked to be given the two members every other polity returns, on the argument that representation in a revising chamber costs its autonomy nothing, and twice it has been told that the Charter is the Charter and that a trade cannot be unmade by asking. Its residents are citizens of the Realm and may vote in its general elections only by living elsewhere. The rule has been challenged in the Realm’s courts several times, on the ground that it disenfranchises citizens by residence, and it has never been struck down: the courts have held that the Free City’s residents are represented by their own institutions in everything the Charter leaves to them, and that the rest was consented to.

Reserved matters

The Charter reserves to the Realm defence, foreign affairs, citizenship and naturalisation, the currency, the customs frontier, the American Rights Act, federal crimes, and the Crown. Everything else is the Free City’s. Federal law applies in the reserved matters and nowhere else, unless the Assembly consents.

The Free City therefore makes its own law on companies, taxation, labour, housing, health delivery, schools, the harbour and the airport, and on the residence and work permits of people who are not citizens of the Realm. Naturalisation is federal, and requires ten years’ lawful residence. The Realm’s guarantee of health care through the National Health Service of America applies in the Free City, which delivers it.

The contribution and taxes

The Free City pays no federal income tax. Instead it pays the Realm a fixed annual contribution, set in the Charter and renegotiated every ten years, for defence, foreign affairs and the other reserved matters. It is now about A£60 million a year. New Westminster calls it a bargain; the Free City calls it rent. It was cut for five years in 2021 to pay for the rebuilding after Irma, and restored in 2026.

The Free City levies a flat income tax of ten per cent above a threshold, taxes no company profits earned abroad, and raises the rest of its revenue from harbour and airport levies, tourism charges, and the fees of its registered companies.

Head of state

The Crown

The Crown is sovereign in the Free City as in every polity of the Realm, and the Charter reserves it to the Realm. The King is represented in the Free City by the Lord Warden of the Harbour.

The Lord Warden of the Harbour

The Lord Warden of the Harbour is the Crown’s representative in the Free City. The office descends from the Dutch colonial harbour master, whose authority over the port the Crown inherited in 1920, and its English title was chosen in 1921 as a translation that gave the officer a harbour’s dignity rather than a governor’s. The Lord Warden is appointed by the Crown on the nomination of the Citizens’ Assembly.

The Lord Warden assents to the Assembly’s laws, holds the Crown’s authority in the reserved matters within the Free City, including the patrol base and the Fusiliers’ depot, and coordinates the response to storms. The Lord Warden does not govern the Free City and has no part in the Senate.

The Assembly has nominated retired officers of the Royal American Navy, almost always from Florida, for every vacancy since 1921. The Harbour Party-led majorities that make the nomination have preferred an outsider who owes nothing to any local faction, and the Seat Movement calls the practice the last colonial habit of a city that says it has none. The present Lord Warden is Vice-Admiral (retired) Thomas Ashby, since 2022.

The most remembered Lord Warden is Edwin Halloway, who refused to send for the Navy in 1949. The least popular is Ashby’s predecessor, who delivered the federal government’s audit condition after Irma, and whom the winning calypso of the following Carnival called “the man from Tallahassee”. The song has been sung again since Ashby’s arrival, also from Tallahassee.

Head of government

The Senate

The Free City is governed by the Senate of Philipsburg, a collegial executive of five senators, elected by the Citizens’ Assembly from among its own members by proportional representation, so that every party of any size has a seat in it. The Senate decides by a majority of three. Each senator holds a portfolio.

The arrangement means that the Seat Movement, the Free City’s opposition, holds two of the five senatorships and runs two portfolios, while campaigning against the First Senator on the Charter. Outsiders find it baffling. The Free City finds it normal. It also means that a Seat Movement senator can draft a reform and the Harbour Party’s two senators, with the workers’ senator, can block it three to two, which is what has happened to the reform of work permits, drafted by the Seat Movement’s senator for Justice and the Border and stopped in the Senate since.

The First Senator

The First Senator is elected by a majority of the Citizens’ Assembly and leads the Senate. The office has been held by the Harbour Party in every government but the labour Senate of 1949 to 1953, and its first holder was Hendrik van Heyningen.

The present First Senator is Maurice van Heyningen, since 2021, a shipping agent and Hendrik’s great-grandson, from a merchant family on the island since the 1780s. He has acknowledged once in public that his ancestors owned enslaved people at the salt ponds and were compensated at emancipation, and has not returned to the subject. He governs with the Hospitality Workers’ Union Party on an agreement made after the 2025 election: the minimum hotel wage raised by a fifth over three years, and an end to work permits tied to a single employer, in exchange for the workers’ party’s opposition to the seat petition. The wage rise is happening. The permit reform is not.

The Senate at work

The Senate meets weekly in a room of the courthouse above the Assembly’s chamber, and its decisions are published the same day. Because it is collegial, the First Senator cannot dismiss a senator, and a senator of the opposition may, and does, vote against the First Senator in the Senate and then administer the decision that was carried. Senators are removed only by the Assembly, and none has been since 1974.

The arrangement has survived because the Free City is small enough for it to work and old enough for it to be habit. Its critics, most of them in the Harbour Party, say that it makes reform impossible, since a determined minority in the Senate can stall any portfolio it holds. Its defenders, most of them in the Seat Movement, say that a city which gave up its voice in Parliament should at least not give up its opposition’s voice in government.

Legislature

The Citizens’ Assembly

The Citizens’ Assembly has 21 members, elected every four years by proportional representation across the whole Free City as a single constituency. It is presided over by a Speaker, and it meets in the 1793 courthouse on Front Street. It makes the Free City’s laws in every matter the Charter leaves to it, votes the budget, elects the Senate and the First Senator, nominates the Lord Warden, and gives or withholds the Free City’s consent to Acts of Parliament in matters not reserved.

The franchise

Every adult citizen of the Realm who has lived in the Free City for three years may vote. Non-citizen migrants and seasonal workers may not, whatever their length of residence, and they are about a quarter of the adults in the Free City. Until 1949 the vote was limited by the Dutch property qualification.

Elections

Assembly elections are held every four years, most recently in 2025. Voters cast a single vote for a party list, and the 21 seats are divided among the lists in proportion to the votes. Turnout is high by the standards of the Realm, usually above three-quarters of those registered, and campaigns are conducted door to door, on Soualiga Radio and in the pages of the Daily Herald, at a cost the Realm’s parties would find laughable.

The 2025 election was the Harbour Party’s worst since 1949. It lost two seats, the Seat Movement gained four, and the Harbour Party was able to form a government only by agreement with the Hospitality Workers’ Union Party, whose four seats it had previously governed without.

The Harbour Party, founded in 1921 from the merchants’ chamber, is the party of the Charter, the registry, the duty-free trade and most of the Free City’s old families, and of the Sindhi merchant community. Its unofficial slogan is “the harbour is the government”. The Seat Movement is the party of the Free City’s Afro-Caribbean majority, the schoolteachers and civil servants, and the families of 1949. The Hospitality Workers’ Union Party is the political arm of the hotel and harbour unions, led by Yokasta Peguero, a Dominican-born housekeeper who became a union organiser, was naturalised after ten years, and is the Free City’s first migrant-born senator, holding Resilience and Works.

Politics

Politics in a city of 45,000 people is personal, and the Free City’s is conducted at close range. Members of the Assembly are known by sight, the Senate’s disagreements are reported by name, and the three parties’ newspapers and broadcasters are owned or run by the parties’ friends: the Daily Herald by cousins of the van Heyningen family, and Soualiga Radio by people who are the Seat Movement in all but name.

The Free City’s political argument has two axes that do not coincide. The first is the Charter: whether the bargain of 1920 should stand. The Harbour Party says yes, the Seat Movement says it should at least be put to a vote of every citizen, and the Hospitality Workers’ Union Party has agreed to oppose the petition in exchange for wages. The second is work: wages, housing and permits for the people who keep the hotels and the harbour running. On that axis the Seat Movement and the workers’ party are closer to each other than either is to the Harbour Party, and the Harbour Party’s government depends on keeping the two axes apart.

The High Commercial Court

The court

The High Commercial Court was founded under the Charter in 1921 from the Dutch colonial court of Sint Maarten. It hears the Free City’s civil and commercial cases and, far more importantly to its reputation, the maritime, shipping and insurance disputes of parties from across the Americas who choose it in their contracts. It is known for speed, for judgments in plain English, and for a clean docket, and a clause choosing “the High Commercial Court at Philipsburg” is standard in Caribbean shipping and insurance contracts.

It has seven judges, led by a Chief Judge. Its judges are appointed by the Senate on the nomination of a commission of judges and lawyers, and are drawn from the bars of the Realm, Great Britain and the West Indies. The present Chief Judge, Dame Hilary Munnings, came from the Bahamian bar of the West Indies Federation, the first Chief Judge from outside the Realm and Britain. Appeals lie to the Supreme Court of the Realm, but only on questions of the Charter; on everything else the High Commercial Court’s judgments are final.

The Netherlands

The Free City’s relationship with the Netherlands, now part of the Benelux Union, is cordial and slight. The Dutch government sends a representative to Charter Day by old custom and to Sint Maarten’s Day by preference. Dutch retirees buy apartments in Simpson Bay, and the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba, where so many of the Free City’s men worked in the refinery years, remain the Free City’s closest family ties outside the Realm. The Netherlands has never expressed regret for the sale, and the Free City has never asked it to.

The Morning Star

The court’s most famous judgment is The Morning Star of 1987, a dispute between the owners and insurers of a tanker lost with its cargo in a hurricane off the Leeward Islands. The judgment set out, in fewer than forty pages, the rule on how a storm clause in a shipping or insurance contract should be read when a vessel sails into a forecast hurricane, and the rule is still written into contracts across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico by reference to the case’s name.

The court and the registry

The court’s reputation made the Free City’s offshore company registry credible, and the registry has at times put the court’s reputation at risk. Several of the court’s judgments on the privacy of company registers have been cited, outside the Free City, as evidence that the Free City protects money that should not be protected. The court’s defenders answer that it applies the Free City’s law and did not write it.

Relationship with the Realm

The shape of the relationship

The Free City’s relationship with the rest of the Realm is governed by the Charter and conducted by the First Senator, the Lord Warden and the Realm’s ministries. The Free City is represented in the Realm’s institutions only where the Charter’s reserved matters bring the Realm into it: the Realm’s courts in Charter questions, the Realm’s patrol at Pointe Blanche, the Realm’s army through the Fusiliers, and the Realm’s broadcaster through ABC Philipsburg.

ABC Philipsburg is the smallest service of the American Broadcasting Corporation, serving a polity that returns no members to the Commons. The corporation has twice proposed folding it into a neighbouring service and been refused, on the Free City’s argument that a polity which gave up its seats did not give up its voice. Its one daily programme in the island’s creole is the most listened-to broadcast on Saint Martin.

Defence

Defence is reserved. The Royal American Navy has kept a coast and customs patrol base at Pointe Blanche since 1921, with two patrol ships, which watches the free port and the yacht traffic and which, as the Harbour Party pointed out after the cocaine prosecution of 2021, did not see what it was watching for. The Philipsburg Fusiliers, the smallest regiment of the Royal American Army, keep a depot of a few dozen soldiers at Fort Willem; the regiment recruits well beyond the Free City and does not discuss where.

The Beneficial Ownership Act

The Beneficial Ownership Act 2027 requires every company registered anywhere in the Realm to record its real owners on a public register. It was passed after a series of investigations into money hidden in offshore registries, several of which named the Free City’s. The Act applies by its terms to the Free City.

The Free City’s position is that company law is not a reserved matter under the Charter, that Article 7 therefore forbids the Act to extend to the Free City without the Citizens’ Assembly’s consent, and that the Assembly has not consented. The Realm’s government argues that the register is a matter of federal crime, which is reserved, since its purpose is to prevent money laundering and tax evasion. The case, The Free City of Philipsburg v. Attorney General, has been argued before the Supreme Court of the Realm, and judgment is reserved.

The case matters beyond the registry. If the Court holds that the Act applies without the Assembly’s consent, the second half of Article 7, the protection the Free City received for giving up its seats, will have been read down, and the Seat Movement argues that the Free City will then have given up its seats for nothing. If the Court holds for the Free City, the Harbour Party keeps the registry and the Free City stays without a voice in the Parliament that tried to regulate it.

Relief, walls and patrols

The relationship is tested most sharply by disasters and by money. The audit condition of 2017 is the Free City’s grievance; the Auditor-General’s report that found the relief spent properly is New Westminster’s. The seawall is the next argument, and the Realm’s answer about building its own wall has been quoted in the Assembly more often than anything a federal minister has said about the Free City in decades. The Free City’s residents, for their part, receive the Realm’s pensions, health guarantee and passports, and the Seat Movement’s opponents never tire of pointing out that the Free City’s grievance about representation does not extend to declining any of them.

Storms and resilience

The hurricane city

The Free City lies in the path of the Atlantic hurricanes, and its government is organised around them. Every building of more than one storey built since 1995 has been built to the code adopted after Hurricane Luis, which requires concrete frames, anchored roofs and storm shutters, and is enforced by inspectors of the Resilience and Works portfolio who are among the least popular officials in the Free City and the most respected after every storm. Houses built before the code, and the informal houses of the migrant districts, are not covered, and they are the houses the storms destroy.

The Charter gives the Senate emergency powers during a declared storm emergency: to close the harbour and the airport, requisition buildings as shelters, set prices, and direct the Free City’s services, for up to thirty days, after which the Citizens’ Assembly must renew the declaration or let it lapse. The Lord Warden coordinates the reserved services, the patrol base, the Fusiliers’ depot and the federal agencies, and is the channel for federal relief, which is why the Lord Warden of 2017 became the face of the audit condition.

Irma and after

Irma was the storm the code had been written for, and it was stronger than the code. Buildings built to the 1995 standard mostly survived with their roofs damaged; older buildings and informal housing mostly did not. The harbour reopened within ten days, the airport, operating from tents, within three weeks, and the water, because the desalination plant lost power and the grid was shared with a French side whose own repairs were slower, after three weeks. The Free City revised its code again in 2019, and began planning the seawall.

The recovery is remembered differently by the Free City’s two electorates. The Harbour Party remembers a harbour reopened in ten days and relief money accounted for to the last pound. The Seat Movement remembers three weeks without water while the Senate argued with New Westminster, deportations from flattened houses, and a federal government that could impose conditions on a city it did not let vote.

The season

From June to November the Free City lives by the forecasts. Shutters stay up on the older houses all season; supermarkets keep a storm aisle; the airport and the cruise lines publish their storm plans; and ABC Philipsburg’s forecast in creole is the most closely followed broadcast of the year. When a storm is declared, the harbour empties within a day, the yachts of Simpson Bay run for the lagoon or for the south, and the Free City waits.

Saint-Martin and the Caribbean

The French side

The island’s other half, Saint-Martin, is French, part of the overseas department of Guadeloupe and one of the territories France kept in the Caribbean. Its capital is Marigot. The border has been open since the Treaty of Concordia of 1648, renewed by the Protocol of Marigot in 1920, and the Border Monument at Belvedere, erected in 1959, marks where the road crosses it. People cross daily without a thought, for work, for school, and on Saturdays for the Marigot market and French prices.

The two halves share a desalination plant and a power grid under an agreement of the 1970s. The French side pays its share late. The Free City has never cut anyone off. The halves argue constantly about taxes, since the Free City’s are low and the French side’s are French, and about the lagoon, the airport’s noise, and the policing of a border that nobody polices.

The West Indies Federation

The Free City is not a member of the West Indies Federation, and cannot be, being a polity of the Realm. Its relationship with the Federation runs through compacts on trade and disaster cooperation. The Federation’s financial and shipping interests resent the Free City’s free port, which they say takes the benefit of the regional market without its taxes, and the Free City answers that it takes nothing it does not pay for.

Free City cricketers are eligible by residence for the West Indies team, and several have played for it, which the Realm’s cricket board finds awkward and the Free City does not.

Economy

The shape of it

The Free City’s economy has five parts, and each depends on the Charter. Its GDP of about A£4.3 billion, about A£95,000 per resident, is among the highest per person in the Realm on paper and misleading in fact, because a large share of it is booked by registered companies that do no business on the island. The people who work in the Free City earn far less than the figure suggests, and most of them work in tourism.

Cruise tourism

About 1.5 million cruise passengers land at the A. C. Wathey Cruise Facility each year, more than thirty times the population. Most of them spend a day on Front Street, where the duty-free shops, many of them run by Sindhi merchant families who arrived in the 1950s and have been citizens for generations, sell jewellery, electronics, liquor and watches, and on the beaches. Cruise traffic fell to almost nothing for a year after Irma and has recovered. The Harbour Party regards the cruise lines as the Free City’s most important customers; the Seat Movement regards the cruise industry’s wages as the Free City’s most important problem.

The harbour

Great Bay has been the island’s harbour since the Dutch loaded salt from it, and its business now is cruise ships at Pointe Blanche, inter-island cargo at the commercial pier, fuel and provisions for yachts, and the ferries to the neighbouring islands. The harbour is run by the Harbour and Airport portfolio through a harbour board whose members are appointed by the Senate, and whose chairmen have for a century come from the same half-dozen merchant families, including the van Heyningens. The Harbour Party’s slogan that “the harbour is the government” was originally a boast and is now, in the Seat Movement’s use, an accusation.

The registry

The offshore company registry holds about 60,000 companies, registered under the Company Law of the 1970s by owners who need not be named on any public record, and it provides about a third of the Free City’s public revenue in fees. It is served by the registry trade of Back Street: law firms, trust companies and registered agents, many of them branches of firms in New York and London. It is the part of the economy the Beneficial Ownership Act threatens, and the part of the Free City its critics in the Realm know best.

The court and arbitration

The High Commercial Court and the arbitration practice around it bring shipping, insurance and commercial lawyers to the Free City in numbers far larger than its size would suggest, and support its hotels outside the tourist season.

The free port and transshipment

The harbour of Great Bay operates as a free port, handling cargo for the smaller islands of the north-eastern Caribbean without customs duty on goods passing through. It is the Free City’s oldest business and its least profitable one. It is also, as the prosecution of 2021 showed, a route for cocaine moving north through the yacht traffic of Simpson Bay, which the Harbour Party describes as a failure of the Realm’s patrol in a reserved field and the Realm describes as a consequence of the Free City’s customs regime.

The airport

The Internationale Luchthaven Prinses Juliana-Simpsonbaai, in English the Princess Juliana-Simpson Bay International Airport, both names official since 2024, is the busiest airport in the north-eastern Caribbean and the hub from which small aircraft serve the neighbouring islands. Its terminal was destroyed by Irma and rebuilt over the following years. Its runway ends at Maho Beach, where tourists stand under the landing jets for photographs and in the blast of departing ones, and in 2017, a few weeks before Irma, a tourist was killed there by a jet’s blast. The Citizens’ Assembly has refused to fence off the beach, on the ground that the spectacle is one of the Free City’s attractions and that the warning signs are clear.

Labour

The Free City’s economy runs on the labour of people who cannot vote in it. Hotel staff, cleaners, construction workers, shop assistants and dock workers are drawn in large numbers from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Guyana and the other islands, on work permits tied to a single employer, and several thousand come each season and go home at its end. Their wages have risen since the agreement of 2025, and their permits have not changed.

Demographics

Population

The Free City has about 45,000 residents and, in the tourist season, several thousand seasonal workers who have no residence rights. About a third of residents were born in the Free City, a third elsewhere in the Caribbean, a sixth in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and the rest in the Realm, India, the Netherlands and elsewhere. The population tripled between the 1960s and the 1990s and has grown slowly since.

The Free City’s Afro-Caribbean majority descends from the people enslaved at its salt ponds and plantations and from the migrants of the twentieth century. Its merchant class is small, old and mixed: families of Dutch, Realm and Sephardic Jewish descent, the Sindhi families of Front Street, and the professionals of the registry trade. A few hundred Dutch families chose to stay in 1920, and their descendants have been joined by Dutch retirees.

Languages

English is the language of the Free City’s government, courts and schools, and a Caribbean English creole is the language of its streets. Dutch survives in the Charter’s authentic text, in the High Commercial Court’s old records, in a few family names and street signs, and at Sint Maarten’s Day, 11 November, which the Free City still keeps. Spanish and Haitian Creole are widely spoken, and French is heard constantly because of the border.

Religion

The largest churches are Methodist and Catholic, followed by the Seventh-day Adventists and the Pentecostal churches, which have grown fastest since the migration of the 1960s. The Sindhi community is largely Hindu. A small Jewish congregation of old Dutch families survives.

Migrants and permits

About a quarter of the adults in the Free City cannot vote in it: non-citizen migrants, whatever their length of residence, and the seasonal workers. Residence and work permits are the Free City’s own under the Charter, and they are tied to a single employer, so that a worker who loses a job loses the right to stay. Naturalisation as a citizen of the Realm requires ten years’ lawful residence.

After Irma, workers whose employers’ hotels had been destroyed lost their permits and were deported, while the houses they had lived in, in Sucker Garden and Cul-de-Sac, lay flattened. The houses were rebuilt in the same places and of the same materials, because workers whose permits bound them to one employer had no choice but to rent the housing that employer provided.

Education and health

The Free City’s schools teach in English. The Harbour College, founded in 1985 and affiliated with a university in Florida, teaches law, hospitality and maritime studies, and most students who want a full degree go to Florida, from which many do not come back. The Harbour Medical Centre in Cay Hill, rebuilt after Irma, is the Free City’s hospital, and serious cases are flown to Florida.

Policing and public services

Policing is the Free City’s own, except in federal crimes, which are reserved. The Free City Constabulary of about two hundred officers polices the streets, the harbour front and the border, and federal agencies investigate drugs, money laundering and the registry. The division has been the subject of complaint from both directions: the Constabulary says federal investigators arrive without warning, and federal investigators say the Constabulary warns the people they are investigating.

The Free City’s public services are small and close. There is one hospital, a handful of clinics, twelve public schools and the Harbour College, a public housing programme that built about six hundred homes after Irma and has a waiting list of several thousand families, and a bus service of privately owned minibuses licensed by the Senate. Everybody who uses them knows somebody who runs them, which the Free City regards as accountability and its critics regard as the reason nothing changes.

Housing

The Free City has little land, rising seas, a tourist economy that bids up rents, and a workforce of people who cannot vote. Its housing reflects all four. Residents who own their homes, most of them citizens of long residence, live in Cay Hill, Dutch Quarter and the hills above Cole Bay. Hotel and construction workers rent in Sucker Garden, Cul-de-Sac and the back streets of Philipsburg, often from their employers, in wooden and block houses built before the code. Short-term holiday rentals have taken much of Simpson Bay’s housing since the 2010s. The Seat Movement and the workers’ party both want rent controls; the Harbour Party has agreed to study them.

The Dutch inheritance

A century after the Netherlands left, the Free City’s Dutch inheritance is mostly legal and architectural. The Charter’s authentic Dutch text, the High Commercial Court’s procedure, which descends from the Dutch colonial court’s, the registry’s habits of record, and the old ordinances the Charter continued are Dutch in origin. So are the courthouse, the forts, a few gabled houses on Front Street, the family names of some of the old merchant families, and Sint Maarten’s Day on 11 November, when the Free City’s schoolchildren carry lanterns through Philipsburg as Dutch children do. Most residents speak no Dutch, and the Seat Movement regards the orange stripe on the flag as the only Dutch thing about the Free City that anyone still defends.

The Sindhi community

The Sindhi families who arrived in the 1950s from India, by way of the trading communities of Curaçao and Panama, built the duty-free trade of Front Street, and they have been citizens for two and three generations. They are largely Hindu, keep a temple in Cole Bay, and celebrate Diwali on Front Street with the shops lit. They vote for the Harbour Party, whose defence of low taxes and the free port is their livelihood, and they are the community the Seat Movement has found hardest to reach.

Culture

Carnival and the calypso

Carnival, held in April, is the largest on the island, with a village of food stalls, parades of troupes, and a calypso king competition whose songs attack whoever governs, the Lord Warden included. The winning song after Irma called the Lord Warden “the man from Tallahassee”, and it is still sung.

Emancipation Day and Charter Day

Emancipation Day, 1 July, marks the abolition of slavery in 1863. It has been an official holiday since the labour Senate of 1949, and it is the Free City’s largest public day, larger than Charter Day, with a procession to the Border Monument, where a bronze figure of a person crossing a line in the road, erected in 2013, commemorates the enslaved who crossed to freedom. The statue was paid for by public subscription, after the Harbour Party-led Senate declined to fund it. Albert Romney and the strikers of 1949 are remembered on the same day.

Charter Day, 10 March, marks the sealing of the Charter in 1921. The Lord Warden reads Article 7 aloud from the courthouse steps to the Assembly, the Senate, the Court and the merchants, and on the other side of Front Street, at the same hour, the Seat Movement reads its petition.

Food and drink

The Free City’s food is the food of the north-eastern Caribbean: johnny cakes, saltfish, conch and dumplings, and the lolos, open-air barbecue stalls where most residents eat. Its drink is guavaberry liqueur, made from a wild berry of the hills, which the Free City claims as its own and the French side disputes. For special occasions residents cross to the French side’s restaurants.

Sport

Cricket is the Free City’s sport, and its players are eligible for the West Indies. Football is growing, driven by the Dominican and Haitian communities.

Media

The Free City’s media are small and partisan and read by everyone. The Daily Herald, owned by cousins of the van Heyningen family, is the newspaper of record and of the Harbour Party. Soualiga Radio, founded in the 1990s and run by people who founded the Seat Movement, is the Free City’s most listened-to private station, and its morning call-in programme is where the Free City’s politics are argued before they reach the Assembly. ABC Philipsburg is the public service, and its daily programme in creole is the most listened-to broadcast on the island. The French side’s radio stations are heard across the border and listened to for the music.

The Free City in the Realm’s imagination

Most people in the Realm know the Free City for three things: Maho Beach, whose photographs of jets landing over sunbathers circulate constantly; the registry, which the Realm’s newspapers mention whenever a fortune is found to have been hidden; and the fact, learned in civics lessons, that there is one polity that has no members of Parliament. Few know why, and fewer know that the bargain was made by a tenth of its people. The Seat Movement’s petition was the first time in fifty years that the Free City’s representation was reported in the Realm’s national press for more than a day.

Remembrance

The 1917 memorial on the courthouse steps carries the names of the 31 men of the volunteer company who died in France, and the Philipsburg Fusiliers send a party to it each November.

Symbols

The flag

The flag of the Free City has a grey band at the hoist, a narrow orange stripe, and a blue field on which stand two gold towers, Fort Amsterdam and Fort Willem, on either side of the harbour mouth, joined by a gateway and crowned by a gold arch, above a white wave. The blue is the harbour, the gold the Charter, the white the salt and the grey the storm. The orange is the House of Orange, kept in 1921 as the Charter’s courtesy to the Netherlands, and it is the stripe the Seat Movement would remove first.

The arms and motto

The arms of the Free City date from the Dutch colony and were kept in 1921: the 1793 courthouse, a salt pond with a flowering sage, and a rising sun. They were redrawn in 1959 to add the Border Monument. The motto, Semper Pro Grege, “always for the people”, is the colony’s, and the Seat Movement prints it on its banners with a question mark.

The seat question

The petition

The Seat Movement’s petition, presented to the House of Commons in 2026 with about 14,000 signatures, asks for one member.

The Commons referred the petition to its committee on the polities, which has said that it will not report until the Supreme Court has given judgment on the Beneficial Ownership Act.

The arguments

The Seat Movement’s case is that the bargain of 1920 was made by a tenth of the adults for the rest, that the referendum of 1976 excluded the migrants and seasonal workers who were already a large share of the city, that fifty years and a hurricane have changed the city, and that a polity which can be made to accept federal auditors and federal registers has already lost the autonomy it gave its seats for.

The Harbour Party’s case is that the Free City has confirmed the Charter on universal suffrage, that a seat would bring federal income tax and the end of the registry, that one member in a Commons of 460 would be a voice nobody listened to, and that the petition asks for a seat in the Commons and says nothing about the Lords, which the Harbour Party calls half a grievance.

What a seat would require

A seat would require an amendment to the Charter, which needs the Citizens’ Assembly’s consent, and an Act of Parliament. The Assembly’s present majority opposes it. The Seat Movement’s route is therefore the next Assembly election, a new referendum, or a Supreme Court judgment that makes the Charter’s protection worth less than the seat it cost.

Failings

The migrant and seasonal workers

The Free City’s worst failure is its treatment of the people who build it and cannot vote in it. About a quarter of its adults have no vote in the Free City and no vote in the Realm. They hold permits tied to a single employer, which make them unable to leave a bad job without leaving the island. After Irma, those whose hotels were destroyed were deported while their homes lay flattened, and the homes were rebuilt as they had been. A reform of the permits has been drafted and blocked in the Senate, and it was promised in a coalition agreement that has delivered its wage rise and not its permit reform. The Free City’s constitutional argument is conducted, on both sides, among the three-quarters who can vote, about the representation of a city whose other quarter nobody proposes to represent.

The neglect of the past

Until 2013 the Free City had no public memorial to the enslaved who crossed the border to freedom, and no museum account of Soualiga and its first peoples. The archaeological sites at Cay Bay and the salt ponds were built over in the 1970s and 1980s with little record. The van Heyningen family’s compensation at emancipation has been read into the Assembly’s record by the leader of the opposition, and acknowledged once by the First Senator. When the freedom monument was proposed, the Senate declined to pay for it.

The bargain of 1920

The Charter itself was approved by about 790 men, a tenth of the adults of the island, most of them merchants, on behalf of a population most of whom were the descendants of the enslaved and had no vote. The bargain has since been confirmed on universal suffrage, narrowly, and the Free City’s defenders are entitled to cite that. It remains true that the Free City’s founding decision, to give up the representation of its people in Parliament, was made by the people least in need of it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• United Kingdom of America
• Daily Life in Philipsburg
• West Indies Federation
• Royal American Army
• American Peerage
• Polity Instruments Act 1889
• American Broadcasting Corporation
• Kingdom of Hawaii
• Benelux Union