Colony of the Bahamas

A colony with poor soil and an excellent position, which made its living from other people's difficulties. Britain settled the islands from Bermuda in 1648 on land emptied of its Lucayan population a century earlier, and the thin limestone would not support plantations at scale. What the archipelago had instead was seven hundred islands, shallow banks and reefs beside a major shipping lane, which suited piracy - Nassau was effectively a pirate republic until Woodes Rogers was sent to suppress it in 1718 under a motto promising to expel them and restore commerce. Wrecking, salvaging cargo from ships lost on the reefs, was a licensed industry for two centuries. American Loyalists arrived after 1783 with enslaved people and attempted cotton, which failed within a generation and left a Black majority on land nobody could farm profitably. Blockade running during the American Civil War and rum running during Prohibition both made fortunes. The Burma Road riot of 1942, over wage discrimination on an American airbase project, began the political movement that ended white minority rule. Majority rule came in 1967 and independence in 1973. Nassau on New Providence was the capital throughout. Only about thirty of the islands were ever inhabited. The colony was governed by a small white merchant elite known as the Bay Street Boys well into the twentieth century. Its proximity to Florida is roughly ninety kilometres at the closest point. Salt raking on the southern islands was an early export, along with sponges and later sisal. The colony had no income tax at any point in its history.

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