1. Bahamas
The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country consisting of more
than 3,000 islands, cays, and islets. It is located in the Atlantic Ocean north of Cuba and
Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), northwest of the Turks and Caicos Islands, and
southeast of the United States (nearest to the state of Florida). Its land area is 13,939 km2
(5,382 sq mi), with a population of 353,658. Its capital is Nassau. Geographically, the Bahamas
lie in the same island chain as Cuba, Hispaniola and the Turks and Caicos Islands; the
designation of Bahamas refers normally to the Commonwealth and not the geographic chain.
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 to 1648, when English colonists from
Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera. The Bahamas became a 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 and the descendants form the majority of the
Bahamas’s population today. In terms of GDP per capita, the Bahamas is one of the richest
countries in the Americas (following the United States and Canada).
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