The Bahamas

One warning before anything else: the site's border data draws the Bahamas only from 1973, the year of independence. Everything before that — 1492, 1648, 1718, 1834 — falls outside the drawn range, and the entry says so.

At a glance

What are the Bahamas?

An archipelago that was, for most of its history, marginal to every empire that claimed it. The Spanish took the people and left the islands; the English settled them as a private venture, lost them to pirates, recovered them with a naval officer and a commission, and made them a plantation colony that never paid. Its twentieth-century history is the story of how a poor, thinly populated colony became a middle-income state through tourism and financial services — and of the political movement that made the colony a country.

Who were the Lucayans?

The islands' first inhabitants were Taíno-speaking people who migrated north from the Greater Antilles between roughly AD 500 and 800, and whom the Spanish called Lucayans. They lived in villages, fished, farmed cassava and cotton, and left behind the duhos, the ceremonial stools, that are among the few surviving objects of their culture.

Their numbers are disputed — estimates range from 40,000 to 80,000 at contact — and their end was total. The Spanish depopulated the Bahamas in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, taking the Lucayans to Hispaniola to work in the mines and on the plantations; within a generation there were none left. The islands were empty when the English arrived, which is why the English settlement of 1647 was possible at all.

What did Columbus's landfall mean?

It made the Bahamas famous and emptied them. Columbus made landfall on 12 October 1492, and the island he named San Salvador is generally identified with Watling Island, though the identification has been argued for centuries. The Spanish claimed the archipelago, used it for slaves, and then abandoned it; by the end of the sixteenth century the Bahamas were a navigational hazard with a reputation for wrecks.

How were the islands settled by the English?

By a company of religious and political dissenters. In 1647 the Company of Adventurers for Eleutheria issued its Articles and Orders — a remarkable document providing for religious liberty and self-government — and the first settlers arrived in 1649 under William Sayle, a former governor of Bermuda. The settlement at Eleuthera was the first permanent English presence in the islands.

The colony struggled. The soil was thin, the islands were exposed, and the settlers quarrelled; by 1670 the proprietors' rights had been transferred to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, and New Providence became the capital because it had the best harbour. It was a colony of a few hundred families, dependent on wrecking, salt and the sea.

What was piracy's role?

For a decade, piracy was the government. After the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1713, thousands of privateers were thrown out of work, and Nassau became their base: by 1716 the town had a pirate "republic" with its own elected officers, and the Bahamas' governor had no authority outside his house.

Britain's response was a commission. Woodes Rogers was appointed governor, commissioned on 6 February 1718, and arrived at Nassau on 26 July 1718 with a small force and a royal pardon for any pirate who surrendered. He hanged a few, pardoned many, and re-established government; the assembly that followed in 1729 gave the colony a representative institution.

Rogers's second term was ruined by debt and illness, but he had ended the pirate republic, and Nassau's later prosperity as a trading port rested on that.

## What was the wrecking economy?

Salvage, legally and otherwise. The Bahamas sits astride the route where the Gulf Stream meets the reefs, and for two centuries ships ran aground there in numbers that made wrecking a profession: Bahamian crews would row out to a stricken vessel, take off the cargo under a salvage claim, and sell it in Nassau. The law gave the finder a share, and the line between salvage and wrecking — between rescuing a ship and luring it — was thin enough that colonial governors spent decades trying to regulate it.

Wrecking declined as navigation improved, and sponging took its place: the Bahamian sponge fishery boomed from the 1850s and employed thousands until a blight in 1938 destroyed the beds. Both were extractive, seasonal and vulnerable, which is why the colony's economy was poor and why tourism, when it came, changed everything.

What was slavery's role?

Central, and less profitable than the myth. The Bahamas had enslaved people from the earliest English settlement, and the plantation economy grew after 1783, when some 1,600 Loyalists arrived from the United States with about 5,700 enslaved people — the government's vague "6,000" is these two figures combined. Cotton was planted on the islands that could support it, and failed: the soil was exhausted within a generation, and the plantation economy collapsed.

That failure shaped everything afterwards. Because the islands could not support plantation agriculture, the enslaved population became a peasantry — fishermen, wreckers, spongers and small farmers — and the Bahamas developed a large free Black and coloured population earlier and more completely than the sugar islands. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in the 1833 Act, effective 1834, with an apprenticeship system that ended in 1838.

What did the American Civil War do?

It made Nassau rich for four years. The Union blockade of the Confederacy turned the Bahamas into a transhipment point: cotton came in from the southern ports, arms and manufactures went out, and Nassau's merchants, shipowners and warehouses profited from a trade that was legal under British neutrality and highly profitable for everyone involved. The harbour was full of fast steamers, and the town's population and buildings grew.

When the war ended in 1865 the trade collapsed, and the colony returned to wrecking, sponging and poverty. The episode is a small illustration of the islands' condition: their prosperity has always depended on being useful to someone else's conflict or someone else's economy.

How did the colony make a living?

By the sea, and by other people's misfortunes. Wrecking — salvaging ships that ran aground on the reefs — was a major industry in the nineteenth century, and so was sponging, which boomed from the 1850s until a blight in 1938 destroyed it. Salt was raked in the Turks Islands; pine was cut in Abaco and Andros; and Nassau was a coaling station and a port of call.

The colony was poor, and its politics were the politics of a small merchant elite in Nassau and a scattered population of fishermen and farmers in the Out Islands. The twentieth century brought tourism — first the winter trade of the 1920s and 1930s, then the American boom after 1945 — and with it the beginning of modern Bahamian politics.

What happened in the twentieth century?

Tourism, war and labour politics. The winter tourist trade began in the 1920s, with Nassau hotels and American steamers; the Second World War brought a British garrison, an American base and the 1942 riot in Nassau over wages and conditions, which the colonial report records as a turning point in race relations. After 1945 the tourist economy grew rapidly, and with it the demand for labour organisation and political rights.

The 1940s also produced the country's first mass politics. The labour movement and the Progressive Liberal Party drew on the Black majority's exclusion from the merchant elite, and the general strike of January 1958 — sixteen days, troops from Jamaica — made the point that the old order could not hold. The 1959 suffrage Act and the 1964 constitution were the concessions; the 1967 election was the transfer of power.

How did majority rule come?

Through a labour movement and a strike. The 1940s and 1950s saw the growth of trade unions and the emergence of a Black middle class demanding political rights; the general strike of January 1958 — sixteen days, with troops brought in from Jamaica — was the turning point, not the "1953 strike" that some accounts give, which confuses it with a small stevedores' dispute in November 1953.

The 1959 suffrage Act widened the franchise; the 1963 Constitution Order gave the colony internal self-government from 7 January 1964; and the election of 1967 brought Lynden Pindling and the Progressive Liberal Party to power, ending the rule of the Nassau merchant elite — "majority rule", in the phrase of the time. The PLP governed for twenty-five years, and Pindling became the father of the country.

How was independence achieved?

By negotiation, and without much drama. The Bahamas had been self-governing since 1964, and the independence conference in London in 1972 settled the terms; the Bahamas Independence Order 1973 contains the constitution, and independence came on 10 July 1973. The country remained a Commonwealth realm, with the British monarch as head of state represented by a governor general — an arrangement it has kept ever since.

How does the constitution work?

As a parliamentary democracy and a Commonwealth realm. The governor general represents the Crown and appoints the prime minister, who commands a majority in the House of Assembly; there is an appointed Senate of twenty-one members; the judiciary is independent. Elections are held at least every five years, and the two-party system — the PLP and the Free National Movement — has been stable since the 1970s.

The constitution of 1973 is in the schedule to the Bahamas Independence Order, and it is a standard Westminster export: fundamental rights, a governor general, a cabinet, a bicameral parliament and an independent judiciary. It has been amended since, but its structure has not changed, and the monarchy question — whether to replace the Crown with a Bahamian head of state — has been raised and not resolved.

What is the modern Bahamas?

A tourist economy with a financial sector attached. Tourism accounts for roughly half of the economy and most employment, concentrated in Nassau and Freeport; offshore banking, trusts and shipping registration provide the rest. The country is a middle-income state with a small population, a dependence on American visitors, and a vulnerability to hurricanes that has shaped its history.

The Pindling years ended in 1992 amid allegations of corruption and drug money, and the 1980s brought a drugs commission and a serious reputational crisis; subsequent governments have alternated between the PLP and the Free National Movement. Hurricane Dorian, in September 2019, was the worst natural disaster in the country's history: the death toll is given as 74 officially, more than 200 by the health minister at the time, and 245 missing — three figures that cannot be reconciled, which is itself a measure of the disaster. The COVID collapse of tourism followed, and the country has since rebuilt.The country's central problems now are structural: a narrow economy exposed to hurricanes and to American recessions, a reliance on work permits and foreign labour, and a cost of living that makes the outer islands depopulated while Nassau grows. Climate change is not a future risk there but a present one — Dorian showed what a category five storm does to a low-lying archipelago, and the country's own reporting treats adaptation as a matter of survival.

Why does the map start in 1973?

Because the border data draws the Bahamas only as the independent Commonwealth, from 1973. Before that, the islands are not represented as a polity of their own in the dataset, and the entry's history — Lucayan, Spanish, English, Loyalist, colonial — sits outside the drawn range.

It is the same limitation as Canada's 1932 start and the French colonial empire's 1805 polygon: the map is a representation of sovereign units, and a colony is not one. The entry says so rather than pretending that Bahamian history began at independence.

Common myths about The Bahamas

Timeline of The Bahamas

What the map shows next

At 1973 on the map the Bahamas becomes independent, and Canada has been drawn for forty-one years.

At 1983 on the map the country is a Commonwealth realm, and the United States is its largest market and closest neighbour.