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...
