Bahamas – from Lucayan islands to an independent island nation
Long before Europeans arrived, the Lucayan people, a branch of the Taíno, lived across the Bahamian islands, fishing and farming in small villages. In 1492 Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas on one of these islands. Within a few decades the Lucayans had been almost entirely wiped out by enslavement, deportation and disease – one of the earliest tragedies of the colonial era.
In the seventeenth century English settlers, among them the Eleutheran Adventurers seeking religious freedom, founded new communities, and the islands became a British colony. Nassau gained a reputation as a haven for pirates until royal governors restored control in the early eighteenth century. After the American Revolution, Loyalists arrived with enslaved Africans and tried to establish plantations, which largely failed on the thin soils. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in the 1830s, and the descendants of the enslaved became the majority of the population.
The twentieth century brought new sources of income: smuggling during American Prohibition, then tourism and banking. The movement for majority rule gained strength after the Second World War, and in 1973 the Bahamas became an independent state within the Commonwealth.
Today the Bahamas are shaped by tourism, financial services and a vibrant Afro-Caribbean culture, from Junkanoo parades to seafaring traditions of the Out Islands.
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