St Helena's present day community has its origins in the East India Company's settlement of 1659.  The majority of the settlers, both men and women, kept plantations in the country, while the island's port, Jamestown, was only busy when there was shipping to be attended.  Other inhabitants were the increasing number of slaves, whom the East India Company had imported since the island's first settlement, initially from West Africa, but primarily from the Indian subcontinent and from Madagascar.  In 1666, a French visitor to the island could report that “the inhabitants numbered fifty English and twenty women, who were provided with biscuits, oils and salt beef at the expense of the East India Company.  Most of the English had houses about the Island, and came in turn to the fort to guard and keep watch.  There were a few negroes for the heavier labour.”

However important a myth in debates on St Helenian identity, there is no truth in the claim that in 1667 the number of settlers was increased by the arrival of thirty emigrants left homeless after the Great Fire of London.  Following the islanders' strategic withdrawal from St Helena in 1673, when the Dutch occupied St Helena for five months, the island was swiftly re-settled by the East India Company in 1673, mainly with new settlers, but also with a number of the old.  More settlers arrived during the 1680s and 1690s, and by 1718 the island's population amounted to 542 whites (including a garrison of 128) and 411 slaves.  The population continued to increase gradually, although the importation of slaves was made illegal in 1792.  A further ethnic group joined the communityin 1810, when due to a severe shortage of labour by the early nineteenth century, the first of many Chinese indentured laboureres were brought to the island.  The census of 1817 records 821 white inhabitants, a garrison of 820 men, 618 Chinese indentured labourers, 500 'free blacks', and 1540 slaves.  Most of the Chinese labourers left the island by the late 1830s, although a small number of them remained as free settlers.

In 1818 it was declared that all children born of slaves after Christmas Day that year were to be born free, and slavery finally came to an end in 1832, when the East India Company began the process of emancipating the island's slaves.  Under the auspices of the Liberated African Department on St Helena (1839 to 1874), the island became home to a large number temporary residents who arrived after having been freed from slaving vessels by the West African Squadron.  While the majority of these Africans were resettled in the West Indies, as well as South and West Africa, a small number found employment locally, primarily as servants.

Immigration to St Helena had largely come to an end by the 1830s, and it is at this time that the members of the crown commission of 1834/5 noted that they “have had occasion to admire the warm attachment, which the Inhabitants appear to entertain for their island; an attachment that has been inherited for some generations, and which in uniting the Community together, by the bond of one common feeling, has created among them, an almost distinctive feature as a separate people.”

This community, however, was to undergo considerable changes, when during the immediate years following the island's transfer to the Crown in 1836, an apparently large number of the 'lower classes' is said to have left the island for South Africa.  Likewise, between the years 1870 and 1875, a time when the island's population peaked at 5838 (in 1871), economic depression on St Helena and demand for labour from South Africa led to the emigration of more than 2000 St Helenians to the Cape and to Natal.  There was also a steady trickle of emigration to the United Kingdom.  In 1901 the number of St Helena's population proper had sunk to 3342, but by 1946 it had risen to 4748, and at the last census in 1987 it was enumerated at 5644.

 Meanwhile, one ever fluctuating part of St Helena's population has been the island's garrison, which increased from 531 in 1839 to 948 in 1861, but fell to 179 by 1891.  The garrison was at it largest at the time of Napoleon's exile on St Helena (1815 to 1821), as well as during the South African war, when the census of 1901 included 1532 troops, who guarded 4655 Boer prisoners of war.  The garrison was withdrawn completely in 1906, although regiments continued to be stationed at St Helena during times of war.  Today there is not even a local militia.

The island's present population is invariably described as mixed; any distinction between descendants of the white settlers and coloured indentured labourers and slaves is impossible to make.  This was already so by 1868, when Governor Charles Elliot remarked that “there can be no position on the face of the earth where it would be more difficult to discriminate between the various strains of blood of which the body of the population is composed than here in St. Helena ... .