Bahamas: Colonial Period

The Bahamas colonial period began in 1648, when English Puritan settlers known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, fleeing religious intolerance in Bermuda, established the first permanent European colony on the island of Eleuthera. Settlement soon spread to New Providence, whose harbor developed into the town of Nassau. The islands' thin, rocky soils discouraged large-scale plantation agriculture, so the early colonial economy relied instead on wrecking, the salvage of cargo from ships wrecked on the surrounding reefs, and timber harvesting.

Nassau's sheltered harbor and the shallow, reef-strewn waters surrounding the islands made the Bahamas an ideal refuge for pirates during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; notorious figures such as Blackbeard and Calico Jack operated from what became known as the Pirates' Republic. Concerned by the disruption to Atlantic shipping, the British Crown appointed Woodes Rogers as the first royal governor in 1718, charged with suppressing piracy and reestablishing formal colonial administration over the islands.

This Bahamas colonial period was reshaped again after the American Revolution, when several thousand Loyalists fled the newly independent United States for the Bahamas, bringing enslaved people with them and establishing cotton plantations that briefly transformed the islands' economy and demographics. Cotton cultivation declined by the early nineteenth century due to soil exhaustion and insect pests, and slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834; see the Bahamas country profile for broader context, and Britannica's overview of British colonization for further reading.