British interest began in 1629 when Charles I granted Robert Heath, attorney general of England, territories in America including “Bahama and all other Isles and Islands lying southerly there or neare upon the foresayd continent.” Heath, however, made no effort to settle the Bahamas. Nevertheless, in the 1640s the religious disputes among English colonists in Bermuda came to involve the Bahamas. In 1647 Capt. William Sayle, who had twice been governor of Bermuda, took the leadership of an enterprise to seek an island upon which dissidents could worship as they pleased. In July of that year the Company of Eleutherian Adventurers was formed in London “for the Plantation of the Islands of Eleutheria, formerly called Buhama in America, and the Adjacent Islands.” Sayle and about 70 prospective settlers, consisting of Bermudan religious Independents and some persons who had come from England, sailed from Bermuda for the Bahamas sometime before October 1648. The place of their landing is uncertain, but the modern belief is that they settled on Eleuthera, then known as Cigatoo. They had envisioned establishing a flourishing plantation colony, but unproductive soil, internal discord, and Spanish interference dashed their hopes. Some of the settlers, including Sayle, returned to Bermuda.

New Providence was first settled about 1666 by a new group of Bermudans. In 1663 South Carolina, on the mainland of North America, had been granted by Charles II to eight of his friends as lords proprietors, and they later appointed Sayle as South Carolina’s first governor. Both Sayle and certain of those who had interested themselves in the settlement of New Providence independently drew the attention of the lords proprietors to the possibilities of the Bahama Islands. In consequence, the duke of Albemarle and five others acquired a grant of the islands from Charles II in 1670, and they accepted nominal responsibility for the civil government. New Providence, with the largest population and a sheltered harbour, became the seat of government.

The proprietors did not take a very active interest in the settlement or development of the islands, which soon became a haven for pirates, whose depredations against Spanish ships provoked frequent and savage retaliatory raids. In 1671 the proprietors appointed John Wentworth as the first governor. Although elaborate instructions for the government of the colony were issued and a parliamentary system of government was instituted, the lot of both governor and settlers was far from easy. New Providence was often overrun by the Spaniards alone or in combination with the French, while any governor attempting to institute a semblance of law and order received short shrift from the settlers, who had found piracy the most lucrative profession. In 1684 Charles II himself intervened and required that a law be passed against the pirates, but apparently it had little effect.

Early in the 18th century, official representations were being made for direct crown control. The lords proprietors surrendered the civil and military government to the king in 1717 and leased the islands to Capt. Woodes Rogers, whom the king commissioned as the first royal governor and charged with the responsibility of exterminating pirates and establishing more stable conditions. When he arrived in 1718, armed with a disciplined troop of soldiers, about 1,000 pirates surrendered and received the king’s pardon, while eight of the unrepentant were hanged. Rogers’s measures were so effective that the colony was able to adopt the motto “Expulsis piratis restituta commercia” (“Pirates repulsed, commerce restored”).

Charles Towne was settled in 1660 and named for Charles II, but its name was changed to Nassau after William III came to the throne; the German region Nassau was a holding of William’s family. With the restoration of order following the establishment of the royal government, the settlers demanded an assembly. In 1729 Rogers, acting under authority from the crown, issued a proclamation summoning a representative assembly, and from then on, apart from brief interruptions caused by foreign invasion, the government of the colony carried on in an orderly manner.

In 1776 the town of Nassau was captured by the U.S. Navy, which was seeking supplies during the American Revolution; they evacuated after a few days. In May 1782 the colony surrendered to Spain. Although it was restored to Britain by the preliminary articles of the Peace of Paris in January 1783, it was nonetheless brilliantly recaptured in April by Col. Andrew Devaux, a loyalist commander, before news of the treaty had been received. On the conclusion of the American Revolution, many loyalists emigrated from the United States to the Bahamas under very favourable terms offered by the crown. Among the newcomers was Lord Dunmore, formerly governor of New York and of Virginia, who served as governor of the Bahamas from 1786 to 1797. The loyalists who fled to the islands brought their slaves with them, increasing the population several-fold. The cotton plantations that they developed, which used slave labour, yielded well for a few years, but the exhaustion of the soil, the depredations of insect pests, and, finally, the abolition of slavery led to their ultimate collapse. In 1787 the lords proprietors surrendered their remaining rights for £12,000.

As in the Caribbean generally, the Bahama Islands experienced a number of slave revolts during the years leading to abolition. Efforts made by the assembly in the early 19th century to thwart the attempts of the executive to ameliorate conditions for the slaves continued until the United Kingdom Abolition Act came into force in the colony on August 1, 1834; full emancipation came in 1838. A legislative council was created by royal letters patent in 1841.

Following emancipation, the general condition of the West Indies was one of poverty and disillusionment. Former slaves and ex-masters struggled to exist. Many took to subsistence farming, and others remained on the land of their former owners and worked on the share system. There was hardly any circulation of money in the Out Islands, and many communities were tied by a system of payment in truck—that is, payment in kind. Considerable wealth poured into the islands as the result of blockade-running during the American Civil War (1861–65) and the handling of liquor during Prohibition in the 1920s in the United States (see prohibition). This activity made no lasting contribution to the islands, however, nor did it establish any firm economic base. Before and after these periods, many attempts were made to grow pineapples, citrus fruits, tobacco, tomatoes, and sisal for export, but, despite initial promise, all failed. Sponge fishing also collapsed in 1938. Finally, after World War II, strenuous efforts to establish tourism as the basis of the economy were strikingly successful, transforming the economic and social structure of the islands.