The Bahamas become a British Crown colony in 1718, when the British clamps down on piracy.

The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence.

After the American War of Independence, the Crown resettles thousands of American Loyalists in the Bahamas; they bring their slaves with them and establish plantations on land grants.

Africans constitute the majority of the population from this period.

The slave trade is abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in the Bahamas is abolished in 1834.

The Bahamas become a haven for freed African slaves: the Royal Navy resettles Africans here liberated from illegal slave ships; American slaves and Seminoles escape here from Florida; and the government frees American slaves carried on United States domestic ships that had reach the Bahamas due to weather.