Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People. Vol. 2: From the Ending of Slavery to the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In the first volume of their history of the Bahamian people, published in 1992, Michael Craton, professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and Gail Saunders, Archivist of the Bahamas, presented a remarkably rich chronicle of the period “From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery,” which this journal’s reviewer praised as a “work [that] really shines,” and “a model for histories of all former colonies” (HAHR 73: 702–03). With this second volume, the authors bring to a satisfactory conclusion their ambitious project, begun some sixteen years ago, to write “a comprehensive narrative [that] aimed to be the definitive national history of the Bahamas” (p. xiii).The gradualism of what has been characterized as the “slow and extended abolition” of slavery in the Bahamas helped the authors accomplish a seamless transition to the second volume, which is organized into three chronological sections of roughly equal length: “From Slavery to Unfreedom, 1834–1900;” “On the Margins of a Modernizing World, 1900–1973;” and “The Present and Future of the Bahamian Past, 1973–1999.” The particular strengths of the first section derive from the topic’s richer historiography, especially Howard Johnson’s seminal work and Craton and Saunders’ own distinguished oeuvres in slavery and post-slavery scholarship. The authors bring both sensitivity and rare detail to this section’s central focus on the lives of the Bahamas’ black majority, and their struggle against the hegemony of the colony’s racist white establishment.The authors’ thorough archival research and careful analysis more than compensate for the limitations of the secondary literature on twentieth-century Bahamian history, as they painstakingly follow the country’s course from colonial marginality to its precarious position in a postcolonial world dominated by its superpower neighbor, the United States. Craton and Saunders conclude with an eloquent and compelling tribute to “The Bahamian Self and Others”—exquisitely evoked in Brent Malone’s painting, “Celebration,” reproduced on the book’s dust-jacket—that demonstrates “the uniqueness of the Bahamian people” (p. 435) and the vitality of the heritage that can transcend both internal divisions and external pressures.Islanders in the Stream employs an impressive range of resource materials, both primary and secondary, and the resultant narrative is awesomely, almost intimidatingly, rich and detailed. The authors incorporate the voices of Bahamians from all strata of society, and deserve commendation for their judicious use of a range of less conventional sources, especially oral testimony, in crafting what they styled a “people’s history” (p. xiii). The Association of Caribbean Historians awarded its 1999 Elsa Goveia Book Prize to this volume, with the prize committee’s citation lauding it as an “elegantly written” example of “the ‘new’ social history” whose “lively narrative” and “penetrating analysis” derive from “meticulous and wide-ranging research, as well as a skillful synthesis of secondary literature.” There is no doubt that it will continue to receive such encomia, but the book’s most enduring impact will be the inspiration and direction it provides to writers of national histories, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.This is a book of prodigious size—five hundred pages of text in a font size considerably (and for this reader somewhat distressingly) smaller than the first volume’s four hundred pages—complemented by 16 extraordinarily detailed maps, 11 figures, 57 illustrations, and 20 tables. As with volume one, the absence of a bibliography is but a minor frustration in a work that the authors can be proud of. They have provided the Bahamian people with a superb and eminently accessibly account of their past and its legacy, and have set a new standard for scholarship chronicling the history of nations.

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