University Press of Mississippi Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway: Wrecking to Make a Reckoning (Caribbean Studies Series)

Once regarded as a critical maritime highway in the wake of British abolition, the channels of The Bahamas became a crossroads where freedom, commerce, and control collided. As trade relationships shifted and power was renegotiated across the Atlantic world, the archipelago’s porous geography created opportunities for newly emancipated Black people—and, at the same time, for those determined to reassert systems of racial and economic dominance. In Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway: Wrecking to Make a Reckoning, historian Lisa Lawlor Feller weaves together the microhistories of those who crossed these waters, illuminating a transnational Bahamian history often left at the margins. By placing The Bahamas at the intersection of Caribbean and Atlantic frameworks, she reveals the mobility, resilience, and complexity of everyday islanders whose lives shaped the region in lasting ways. Colonial records—ships’ logs, governors’ papers, educational reports—may seem dominated by dry statistics, yet careful reading uncovers the subtle presence of these voices. Set against the unique geographic and political position of The Bahamas, these fragments open new dimensions of understanding. This groundbreaking study calls for a reimagined framework of the “partially free” Atlantic world—one that embraces the fluid, liminal spaces of an archipelago that has long defied simple categorization. Centering Bahamian experience, Lawlor Feller deepens our understanding of the region’s past and affirms the islands’ enduring importance as a site of connection, transition, and cultural insight within Caribbean studies.