The Bahamas

The Bahamas   / b ə ˈ h ɑː m ə z <span class="IPA" style="font-family:'LucidaSansUnicode','ArialUnicodeMS';" title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)">/ , officially the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is a country consisting of more than 3,000islands, cays and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, north of Cuba and Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), northwest of theTurks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the U.S. state of Florida and east of the Florida Keys. Its capital is Nassau on the island ofNew Providence. Geographically, the Bahamas lie near to Cuba, which is part of the Greater Antilles, along with Hispaniola and Jamaica. The designation of "Bahamas" refers to the country and the geographic chain that it shares with the Turks and Caicos Islands. The three West Indies/Caribbean island groupings are: The Bahamas, The Greater Antilles and The Lesser Antilles. As stated on the mandate/manifesto of The Royal Bahamas Defence Force, The Bahamas territory encompasses 180,000 square miles of ocean space. From the Cay Sal Bank and Cay Lobos (just off of the coast of Cuba) in the west, to San Salvador, The Bahamas is much larger than is recorded in some sources.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;font-family:sans-serif;">Originally inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taino people, the Bahamas were the site of Columbus' first landfall in the New World in 1492. Although the Spanish never colonized the Bahamas, they shipped the native Lucayans to slavery in Hispaniola. The islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, when English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;font-family:sans-serif;">The Bahamas became a British Crown colony in 1718 when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American War of Independence, thousands of American Loyalists and enslaved Africans moved to the Bahamas and set up a plantation economy. The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 and many Africans liberated from slave ships by the Royal Navy were settled in the Bahamas during the 19th century. Slavery itself was abolished in 1834, yet still remains an issue in the Bahamas. The descendants of slaves form the majority of the population today.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;font-family:sans-serif;">In terms of GDP per capita, the Bahamas is one of the richest countries in the Americas (following the United States andCanada).<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-8" style="line-height:1em;">[8]