History of the Bahamas

The island state of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas is located in the North Atlantic , although it is often incorrectly counted as part of the Caribbean . The earliest traces of settlement go back to the 4th century, but some of the more than 700 islands were not settled permanently until the 9th and 10th centuries. After the discovery by Christopher Columbus , English settlers established the first colonies in the middle of the 17th century . Buccaneers used the islands at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century as a shelter, as they were of little importance for the colonial powers due to their lack of raw materials and unsuitable soils. The island state, which gained independence in 1973, has been a tourist destination and tax haven since the middle of the 20th century .

Pre-Columbian period

The first traces of human life in the Bahamas go back to the 4th century. Archaeologists discovered fishing settlements of an unknown people from this time, who probably reached the islands from Cuba . The for Arawakvolk counting stem the Lucayan or "Lukku-cairi" as they called themselves, populated the island kingdom between the 9th and 10th centuries by the Lesser Antilles from. From here they fled from the Caribs , which they had nothing to oppose.

Colonial times

Discovery by Columbus

When Christopher Columbus reached the New World on October 12, 1492 , he set foot on the island of Guanahani, inhabited by the Lucayan . The natives, whom he himself described as peaceful, were named Indians , believing that he had discovered India . So the island and the entire archipelago were given names chosen by him. He baptized the island San Salvador ( Spanish for Holy Savior ) and the archipelago Baja Mar (Spanish for shallow sea ), from which the name Bahamas later developed. Since the Spaniards refrained from colonizing the Bahamas due to the barren soil and the scarcity of raw materials, they enslaved all about 40,000 Lucayans who lived on the islands by 1520 in their mines on Hispaniola , where they died of disease and emaciation and were finally exterminated were.

First settlements

After Spain made no effort to colonize the islands since 1492, King Charles I of England claimed them on October 30, 1629, assigning them to the province of Carolina and appointing Sir Robert Heath as governor of the province. The first settlers called themselves Eleutheran Adventurers , religiously persecuted Puritans from the Bermuda Islands. They founded the first settlement in the Bahamas in 1647 and gave it the name Eleuthera ( Greek for free ), which the island bears today. William Sayle , who led the group, became governor of the island in 1648. The less fertile soil forced the settlers to give up the colony in 1657. They split up, some of the settlers traveled back to Bermuda, the other part founded new settlements on the surrounding islands. So was u. a. 1656 New Providence settled and Charles Town founded.

Pirate era

On November 1, 1670, King Charles II handed over the lands of the Bahama Islands to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina . At the same time, more and more pirates realized that the islands of the Bahamas were an ideal starting point for their raids. Spanish ships in particular use the Florida Strait to transport goods and were therefore the first target of the pirates, but ships that repeatedly ran aground on the countless coral reefs of the Bahama Islands were also easy prey. Pirates like Henry Jennings , Blackbeard , Edward England , Christopher Condent , Benjamin Hornigold , Charles Vane , Jack Rackham alias Calico Jack , Anne Bonny and Stede Bonnet use the islands of the Bahamas as a starting point for their raids.

Spain and France responded to this threat to their merchant ships in 1684 with an invasion fleet that destroyed the colony on New Providence , which was considered a pirate stronghold. Charles Town was rebuilt in 1687 and in Nassau in 1689 , in honor of King William III. from the House of Orange-Nassau , renamed. The pirates had not been driven out, however, they made the colony their own again. The Spanish army destroyed the colony a second time in 1695, trying to finally solve the problem. The pirates continued to resist and rebuilt Nassau in 1697.

Since the raids by the pirates didn't want to end, a Spanish-French fleet destroyed the colony a third time in 1703, again without success. The pirates rebuilt Nassau and even took control of the Bahamas in 1706. They ruled the islands from Nassau, and by 1716 Blackbeard was even named the magistrate of the Pirate Republic. For a long time the Kingdom of Great Britain did nothing against the pirates, they were active in the Caribbean and thus put Spain and France in particular under pressure - less of a problem, more of a benefit for British colonial efforts. In order to finally put a stop to piracy, the Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1717 and Woodes Rogers , a former pirate, was appointed crown governor of the Bahamas. With three warships he reached Nassau on July 26th, 1718, where more than 2000 pirates lived at that time. He granted the pirates royal amnesty if they renounced piracy. Ten captains, including Blackbeard and Charles Vane, refused and fled. Rogers had them all pursued - none escaped.

British Crown Colony

18th century

After Woodes Rogers restored law and order to the Bahamas, the first parliamentary elections took place in 1728 and a year later on September 29, 1729 the first meeting of the House of Assembly - Parliament . The islands' economy had changed little since the first settlements were established. Due to the low-yielding soil, the focus was on self-sufficiency with basic foodstuffs; only a few cultivated cotton for export. Prosperity could not be achieved in this way. Only through the smuggling trade with Spanish and French colonies during the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739–1742) and the Seven Years War (1756–1763) was the Bahamas able to post economic success.

Even during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the smuggling trade with the opponents of the British Empire was a lucrative business, although the Bahamas was occupied from March 3 to 17, 1776 by the American Navy. After Spain entered the war against the British on the side of the United States and France in June 1779, they occupied the Bahamas on May 8, 1782 and only withdrew on April 19, 1783, and then on September 3 in peace Versailles finally surrendered the Bahamas to the British colonial power .

After the war, many loyalists fled with their slaves from the USA to the Bahamas and set up plantations there . One of them was a group of 1000 to 1500 loyalists from New York who settled on the uninhabited Abaco Islands from August to October 1783 . They founded the Carleton Point settlement , named after Sir Guy Carleton , the British commander of New York. In 1799 the Turks and Caicos Islands were placed under the administration of the Bahamas and were represented in the House of Assembly .

19th century

On March 25, 1807, the Slave Trade Act came into force in Great Britain , banning the slave trade . Until that time, the Bahamas was considered an important hub for human trafficking . When all slaves were released in 1838 after the Slavery Abolition Act came into force on August 1, 1834, the plantation-oriented economy in the Bahamas finally collapsed. Many whites sold or gave away their land to their former slaves and some left the islands to return to England. This further increased the proportion of the black majority of the population.

The inhabitants of the Turks and Caicos Islands achieved in 1848 that they were recognized as a separate British colony and placed under the Protectorate of Jamaica and thus no longer counted among the Bahamas. During the American Civil War (1861–1865) the Bahamas experienced a new economic boom when Nassau served as a port of call for the smuggling trade with the Confederate States - the USA had set up a sea blockade against the ports of the CSA. From here the Confederates were supplied with weapons and ammunition, but consumer goods were also traded. With the end of the war, the economic upturn also ended for the time being.

20th century

It was not until 1919, with the beginning of prohibition in the USA, that the economic upturn began to pick up again. The Bahamas and in particular Nassau served as the starting point for alcohol smuggling, the so-called rum runners , into the USA. The slowly entwickelndem tourism which paid Pan American World Airways in 1929 tribute by the first air link to the Bahamas - built - to Nassau. With the end of prohibition in the USA in 1932, alcohol smuggling also ended. The renewed economic collapse was sealed at the end of the 1930s, with the end of the sponge fishery , ruined by pest infestations , in which around a third of all workers were working at the beginning of the century. Tourism, which initially consisted mainly of the US money nobility, gained increasing economic importance in the mid-1950s.

The Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) was the first party to be founded in 1953 . She stood up for the rights of blacks, workers and women. The increasing success of the PLP prompted the white minority to found the United Bahamian Party (UBP) in 1958 in order to secure their rights. In 1959, male suffrage was introduced under British administration. Those who met certain property requirements received a second vote. Women were given the right to vote in February 1961 , and in 1964 all property restrictions were removed. With independence in 1973 the right to vote was confirmed.

After the August 6, 1962 Jamaica the independence gained, which were Turks and Caicos asked again under the administration of the Bahamas. In a constitutional reform, Great Britain granted the Bahamas internal self-government on January 7, 1964, and Sir Roland Symonette was elected first Prime Minister in the subsequent elections . In 1967 the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) won the election. Since the 1967 elections to the House of Assembly , the principles of universal, equal, secret and direct suffrage have been applied. Lynden O. Pindling emerged from these elections as the new Prime Minister and remained so until 1992. In 1969, Pindling negotiated a new constitution with Great Britain, which gave the Bahamas the designation "Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands". From parts of the UBP and the PLP formed on 18./19. November 1970 the right-wing Free National Movement (FNM) party.

independence

Great Britain finally granted independence to the Bahamas on July 10, 1973, but they remained in the Commonwealth of Nations . The Turks and Caicos Islands were then separated again from the Bahamas and converted into a British crown colony. Due to the continuously high unemployment figures and the rumors of corruption in government circles, the PLP lost its government majority on August 19, 1992 to the FNM, which thus appointed the Prime Minister for the first time and was re-elected on March 14, 1997.

The OECD blacklisted the Bahamas in 2000 because the island nation's tax policy was endangering free competition. In the same year the government of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas passed a package of laws to improve financial supervision, after which they were removed from the list in 2001. On May 2, 2002, the PLP succeeded in winning the parliamentary elections after ten years of abstinence, whereby Perry Christie was elected as the new Prime Minister. The Prime Minister from 1992-2002 Hubert Ingraham (FNM) held the office again from 2007 to 2012, after which he was replaced by Christie. Hubert Minnis (FNM) has been Prime Minister of the Bahamas since May 11, 2017 .

In early September 2019, Category 5 Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas, devastating the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama . Around 76,000 people were affected by the effects of the hurricane, and numerous deaths were reported. Around 5,500 people were evacuated to New Providence .

literature

• Michael Craton: A History of the Bahamas . Collins, London 1962.
• Michael Craton, Gail Saunders: Islanders in the stream. A History of the Bahamian People .
  • Vol. 1: From aboriginal times to the end of slavery . University of Georgia Press, Athens 1992, ISBN 0-8203-1382-3 .
  • Vol. 2: From the ending of slavery to the twenty-first century . University of Georgia Press, Athens 1998, ISBN 0-8203-1926-0 .
• Louis Diston Powles: The Land of the Pink Pearl or Recollections of Life in the Bahamas . Media Publishing, Nassau 1996, ISBN 0-9643786-3-9 (reprint of the first edition published in London in 1888) and other reprints.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Sir Robert Heath's Patent 5 - Charles I. October 30, 1629, accessed December 28, 2018 . 
2. ^ Thelma Peters: The American Loyalists and the Plantation Period in the Bahama Islands . Dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville 1960.
3. ^ Paul Daniel Shirley: Migration, freedom and enslavement in the revolutionary Atlantic. The Bahamas, 1783 – c.1800 . Dissertation, University College London, London 2012, p. 81.
4. ↑ - New Parline: the IPU's Open Data Platform (beta). In: data.ipu.org. Retrieved September 29, 2018 . 
5. ↑ Bernd Hillebrands: Bahamas. In: Dieter Nohlen (Ed.): Handbook of the election data of Latin America and the Caribbean. = Dieter, Nohlen (ed.): Political organizations and representations in America. , Volume 1, Leske + Budrich Opladen, 1993, pp. 77-84, p. 79.
6. ^ Hurricane Dorian: Situation Report No. 13. World Health Organization . In: reliefweb.int . September 13, 2019, accessed on September 15, 2019 (PDF; 5.21 MB; English).

Web links

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