Floptropica

Island Republic of Floptropica
Flag
Anthem: Ye Hua Xiang (Scent of the Wildflowers)
Capital	Flop City
Largest	Ciudad Potaxie
Official languages	English, Spanish, Flopa
Vernacular language	Floptropican Creole
Ethnic groups (2020)	49.2% Black 38% Mixed 11.2% White 1.6% other/unspecified
Religion (2020)	79.9% Christianity 48.1% Protestantism 31.6% other Christian 17.1% no religion 3.1% other
Demonym(s)	Floptropican Flop (colloquial)
Government	Federal presidential republic
• President	Deborah Ali-Williams
• Vice President	Jiafei Dai
Legislature	National Parliament
• Upper house	Senate
• Lower house	House of Flops
Independence from the United States
• Cession	June 10, 1980
• Self-government	December 8, 1980
• Recognized	December 18, 1980
Area
• Total	22,058 km2 (8,517 sq mi) (148th)
• Water (%)	2.4%
Population
• 2023 estimate	2,790,000 (139th)
• 2020 census	2,710,382
• Density	318/km2 (823.6/sq mi) (46th)
GDP (PPP)	2024 estimate estimate
• Total	$92.030 billion (103rd)
• Per capita	$34,085 (59th)
GDP (nominal)	2024 estimate estimate
• Total	$64.800 billion (88th)
• Per capita	$24,800 (44th)
Gini (2023)	49.6 high (14th)
HDI (2023)	0.819 very high (59th)
Currency	Floptropican Florin (FFN) United States dollar (USD)`
Time zone	UTC-5 (EST)
• Summer (DST)	UTC-4 (EDT)
Date format	mm/dd/yyyy
Driving side	right
Calling code	+1 244, +1 277
ISO 3166 code	FL
Internet TLD	.fl

Floptropica, officially the Island Republic of Floptropica, is an island country in the eastern end of the Lucayan Archipelago of the Atlantic Ocean. It contains about a half of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and most of its population. The archipelagic country consists of about 10 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, with the largest islands being Flop Island and Tate Island (the latter being the location of the autonomous region of Da Boyz, home to about 700,000 people), and is located north of the Dominican Republic and west of the island of the Turks and Caicos Islands. The capital is Flop City on Flop Island. Floptropica is the fifth-largest country in the Carribean by population, with about 2.7 million people, of which approximately 1 million live in the Greater Ciudad Potaxie area.

The islands were inhabited for centuries by the indigenous Flopa people. The first recorded European sighting of them was in the early 1500s. In subsequent centuries, they were claimed by both Spain and England, with the Spanish eventually gaining control in the 19th century. The British-controlled Tate Island eventually became part of 'Santo Domingo Norte', the Spanish name at the time for Floptropica. In 1898, following the Spanish-American War, Floptropica became an American territory, until independence talks began in 1976 and Floptropica became an independent nation in 1980. In 1987, fighting broke out in the then-province of Da Boyz, after police fatally shot a group of Da Boyzians during a protest, which ultimately led up to the Badussy War, which lasted until a treaty was signed in 2001, ending 14 years of fighting.

Floptropica is the most visited destination in the Carribean, and Ciudad Potaxie Airport handles the second-most passengers yearly in the Carribean, with 9.6 milion travellers passing through the airport in 2023. Resorts, beaches, coral reefs, and rainforests are major attractions. Floptropica is also home to the Carribean's second tallest mountain, Mount Poosay.

Naming and etymology

The name Floptropica is derived from a portmanteau of flopera and tropical , with flopera being a Flopa word, and tropical being borrowed from English settlers on the nearby Turks and Caicos Islands. Tourist guides often state that the name comes from the Potaxie dialect of Flopa, but many linguists argue that this is a folk etymology. Alternatively, Floptropica may have been derived from Flatropia, a local name of unclear meaning.

First attested on the c. 1523 Turin Map, Floptropica originally referred to Flop Island alone but was used inclusively in English by the early 1600s to refer to all nearby islands, including Tate Island.

History

Pre-Columbian era

The islands of the Caribbean were first settled around 6,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer peoples originating from Central America or northern South America. The Arawakan-speaking ancestors of the Taíno moved into the Caribbean from South America during the 1st millennium BC, reaching Floptropica and the Lucayan archipelago by around 650 CE. These Arawakan peoples engaged in farming, fishing, hunting and gathering, and the widespread production of ceramic goods. The estimates of Floptropica's population in 1492, when Christopher Columbus reached the islands vary widely, ranging from just thousands to about 300,000. By 1492, the island was divided into four distinct chiefdoms. The Flopa name for the entire island was Flopera, a Flopa word with unknown meaning.

16th century

In 1501, the Spanish monarchs first granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves, who began arriving to Floptropica (then a newly captured territory) in 1530. Sugar cane was introduced to Floptropica from nearby Hispanola, and quickly became the islands' most profitable crop. The need for a labor force to meet the growing demands of sugar cane cultivation led to an exponential increase in the importation of slaves over the following decades, with the population of the colony nearly quadrupling. Poorer colonists subsisted by hunting the herds of wild cattle that roamed throughout the island and selling their hides.

The first European colony in Floptropica was founded on June 10, 1527, by a group of settlers led by lieutenants under Columbus, who were greeted by the native Potaxie people (a tribe of the Flopa people). However, Floptropica was mainly governed by leaders in nearby Hispanola. The following year, the colony was abandoned in favor of an islet on the other side of the island, named Jilu (a native Flopa word meaning harbor). In 1531, a second settlement was established on Tate Island, however, it was abandoned shortly. By the 1540s, the islands had developed the name Santo Domingo Norte.

The first major slave revolt in Floptropica occurred in Jilu on December 25, 1551, when enslaved people of the Potaxie tribe led an uprising in a sugar plantation just outside of the city center. Many of these insurgents managed to escape to the mountains where they formed independent maroon communities, but many of the captured escapees were hanged and beheaded in public.

While sugar cane dramatically increased Spain's earnings on the island, large numbers of the newly imported slaves fled into the nearly impassable mountain ranges in the island's interior, joining the growing communities of cimarrónes—literally, 'wild animals'. By the 1560s, cimarrón bands had become so numerous that in rural areas the Spaniards could only safely travel outside their plantations in large armed groups. In the 1570s, the estimated maroon population was about 2,500 people, living mainly in the central mountains near the main road between the north coast (where Jilu was located), and the south coast, where Ciudad Potaxie was located.

In the 1500s, the Caribbean Sea was raided by increasingly numerous French pirates. In response, Spain authorized the construction of Ciudad Potaxie and Jilu's fortified walls, and in 1560 decided to restrict sea travel to well-armed convoys. In another move, which would destroy Floptropica's (as well as several other Spanish colonies around the Carribean) sugar industry, Havana, more strategically located in relation to the Gulf Stream, was selected as the designated stopping point for the merchant ships, which had a royal monopoly on commerce with the Americas. In the 1560s, English privateers joined the French in regularly raiding Spanish shipping in the Americas.

With the conquest of the American mainland, Hispaniola and Floptropica quickly declined. Most Spanish colonists left for the silver-mines of Mexico and Peru, while new immigrants from Spain bypassed the island. Agriculture dwindled, new imports of slaves ceased, and white colonists, free blacks, and slaves alike lived in poverty, weakening the racial hierarchy and aiding intermixing, resulting in a population of predominantly mixed Spaniard, African, and Flopa descent. Except for the city of Ciudad Potaxie, which managed to maintain some legal exports, Floptropican ports were forced to rely on contraband trade, which, along with livestock, became the sole source of livelihood for the island dwellers.

17th century

In 1605, Spain was infuriated that Spanish settlements on the northern and western coasts of the island were carrying out large scale and illegal trade with the Dutch, who were at that time fighting a war of independence against Spain in Europe, and the English, a very recent enemy state, and so decided to forcibly resettle the colony's inhabitants closer to the city of Ciudad Potaxie. This action proved disastrous; more than half of the resettled colonists died of starvation or disease, over 25,000 cattle were abandoned, and many slaves escaped. Five of the existing thirteen settlements on the island were brutally razed by Spanish troops – many of the inhabitants fought, escaped to the jungle, or fled to the safety of passing Dutch ships. The settlements of Skibidi, and La Sigma, on the west and north coasts respectively of modern-day Tate Island were burned, as were the settlements of Puerto Ranvision on the northeastern coast and Cupcakkeville in the southwestern area of the modern-day Flop Island.

English buccaneers took advantage of Spain's retreat into a corner of Hispaniola to settle Tate Island, off the eastern coast of Floptropica. England established direct control in 1659, reorganizing it into an official colony and expanding to the north coast of Floptropica itself, although they retreated back to Tate Island by 1665.

In 1655, Oliver Cromwell of England dispatched a fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir William Penn, to capture Ciudad Potaxie. After meeting heavy resistance, the English retreated. Despite the fact that the English were defeated in their attempt to capture the island, they nevertheless captured the nearby Spanish colony of Jamaica, and other foreign strongholds subsequently began to be established throughout the West Indies. Madrid sought to contest such encroachments on its own imperial control by using Ciudad Potaxie (as well as Santo Domingo) as a forward military base, but Spanish power was by now too depleted to recapture lost colonies. The city itself was furthermore subjected to a smallpox epidemic, cacao blight, and hurricane in 1666; another storm two years later; a second epidemic in 1669; major flooding in September 1672; plus a small tsunami in May 1673 that killed six residents.

18th century

The House of Bourbon replaced the House of Habsburg in Spain in 1700 and introduced economic reforms that gradually began to revive trade in Ciudad Potaxie. The crown progressively relaxed the rigid controls and restrictions on commerce between Spain and the colonies. By the middle of the century, the population was bolstered by emigration from the Canary Islands and Hispanola, resettling the rest of the colony and importation of slaves was renewed. The population of the Ciudad Potaxie area grew from about 1,500 in 1737 to approximately 32,000 in 1790. Of this number, about 10,000 were white landowners, about 7,000 were mulatto freedmen, and some 15,000 were slaves.

When the War of Jenkins' Ear broke out in 1739, Spanish privateers, including those from Floptropica, began to patrol the Caribbean Sea, a development that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. During this period, Spanish privateers from Floptropica sailed into enemy ports looking for ships to plunder, thus disrupting commerce between Spain's enemies in the Atlantic. As a result of these developments, Spanish privateers frequently sailed back into Floptropica with their holds filled with captured plunder which were sold in the colony's ports, with profits accruing to individual sea raiders. The revenue acquired in these acts of piracy was invested in the economic expansion of the colony and led to repopulation from Europe.

In 1741, the British Governor of Tate Island, Andrew Tate and Peter Griffin constructed Fort Andrews (later renamed Andrews Town). Additionally, the Governor also reported a privateering boom in the Thirteen Colonies in North America. He also reported that over 4500 sumptuous houses were built. In 1768 the governor had mosquito-breeding swamps filled in and extended Andrews Town.

Floptropican privateers captured British, Dutch, French and Danish ships throughout the eighteenth century. Floptropicans constituted one of the many diverse units which fought alongside Spanish forces under Bernardo de Gálvez during the conquest of British West Florida (1779–1781).

During the American War of Independence, the northeastern coast and Tate Island was attacked by American and allied forces on several occasions. In 1776, American forces launched an amphibious assault against Nassau and Andrews Town, resulting in its two-week occupation. A British-American Loyalist expedition led by Colonel Andrew Tate Jr. recaptured the island in 1783. After the American Revolution, the British issued land grants to American Loyalists who had gone into exile from the newly established United States. The sparse population of Tate Island doubled within a few years. The Loyalists developed cotton as a commodity crop, but it dwindled from insect damage and soil exhaustion. In addition to slaves they brought with them, the planters' descendants imported more African slaves for labour. Most of the current inhabitants on the island are descended from the slaves brought to work on the Loyalist plantations. In addition, thousands of captive Africans, who were liberated from foreign slave ships by the British navy after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, were resettled as free persons in Tate Island and the Bahamas.

As restrictions on colonial trade were relaxed, the colonial elites of the French St. Dominigue offered the principal market for Floptropica's exports of beef, hides, mahogany, and tobacco. With the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, the rich urban families linked to the colonial bureaucracy fled the island, while most of the rural hateros (cattle ranchers) remained, even though they lost their principal market. Spain saw in the unrest an opportunity to seize all, or part, of the western third of the island in an alliance of convenience with the rebellious slaves. But after the slaves and French reconciled, the Spanish suffered a setback, and in 1795, France gained control of the whole colony (as well as Hispanola) under the Treaty of Basel.