Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas, 1880-1960

One of the British Empire’s most isolated and poorest colonies, the Bahamas has never quite seen itself as part of the British West Indies nor vice versa. Although the Bahamas had class tensions similar to those found in other British colonial lands, Gail Saunders shows that racial tensions did not necessarily parallel those across the West Indies so much as they mirrored those occurring in the United States—with political power and money consolidated in the hands of the white minority.

Saunders argues that close proximity to the United States and geographic isolation from the rest of the British colonies created a uniquely Bahamian interaction among racial groups. Focusing on the period from the 1880s to the 1960s, Saunders trains her lens on the nature of relations among groups including whites, people who identified as creole or mixed race, and liberated Africans.