Race and class in the colonial Bahamas : 1880-1960 / Gail Saunders ; foreword by Bridget Brereton.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 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.

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CHOICE Review

Exceptional or similar? Saunders (College of the Bahamas) asserts the former in comparing the Bahamas to the West Indies. With poor soils and larger percentages of Europeans, the Bahamas was not a typical plantation society. Burgeoning involvement with US business enterprises and tourists brought Jim Crow-style segregation, despite its extralegality. The Prohibition era provided unequal benefits as Bahamians and Americans evaded US law and exploited the liquor trade; "wet" tourism supplemented the long-established sponge fishing industry. Broad similarities exist with other British colonies: the underdevelopment of the Out Islands contrasted with Nassau on New Providence, the Great Depression's hardships, transformative effects of WW II mobilization, postwar government development initiatives, and rising political consciousness and struggles for self-government. In the 1950s, nonwhite Bahamians successfully challenged dominant European elites in the House of Assembly, on the economy, and in society. This historical trajectory resembled decolonization elsewhere. The book sometimes conveys a colonial-backwater aura, which the Bahamas was, in some respects, but Saunders resoundingly affirms the relevance of island history. Scholars will appreciate the detail and insights, and vacationers get substantive beach reading, especially on Bahamian beaches. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels, academic and larger public libraries. --Thomas Pyke Johnson, University of Massachusetts, Boston