Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas.

• Author: Cohen, Theodore
• Position: LATIN AMERICA - Book review

Curry, Christopher. Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017.

Based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Connecticut, Christopher Curry's Freedom and Resistance traces the history of the approximately 80,000 to 100,000 British loyalists of African descent, both free and enslaved, who traveled from what would soon be the United States to the Bahamas during the American Revolution. These Atlantic Creoles, as he defines them, used their knowledge of the British Atlantic to search unsuccessfully for greater legal and economic freedom. Because the Bahamas lacked the large-scale plantation economies that traditionally catch the attention of historians, the history of black loyalists and of the decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in the Bahamas in 1833 has not been told. Curry looks to fill this gap in this social and legal history. He argues that this migration profoundly shaped the demographic, religious, legal, and political evolution of the Bahamas as a British colony.

Placing the Bahamas...