Bahamas

An archipelago of some seven hundred islands where European contact with the Americas began and where its consequences were most complete. Columbus made his first landfall here in October 1492 among the Lucayan Taino; within about twenty-five years the entire Lucayan population, perhaps forty thousand people, had been shipped to Hispaniola and Cuba as forced labour and the islands were empty. English settlers from Bermuda arrived in 1648. The soil is thin and the islands were never good sugar country, so the economy ran on wrecking, salt and, for a period around the turn of the eighteenth century, piracy - Nassau was effectively a pirate base until Woodes Rogers took it back for the Crown in 1718. American Loyalists arrived after 1783 with enslaved people and tried cotton, which failed within a generation. What the islands always had was position. Blockade running during the American Civil War, rum running during Prohibition, and later offshore banking and mass tourism all depend on sitting beside Florida. The Burma Road riot of 1942 over wage discrimination began the political movement that ended white minority rule; majority rule came in 1967 and independence on 10 July 1973. Hurricane Dorian devastated Abaco and Grand Bahama in 2019. The country has no income tax. Nassau on New Providence is the capital, and most people live there or on Grand Bahama. Only around thirty of the islands are inhabited. The Bahamian dollar is pegged one to one with the United States dollar. Andros holds the world's largest concentration of blue holes.

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