Bahamian Islanders on the Maritime Highway

Wrecking to Make a Reckoning

Lisa Lawlor Feller

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496863317
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue: Wrecking to Make a Reckoning
• Introduction: “Common Winds” Through The Bahamas
• Chapter 1: Maritime Highway: Finding The Bahamas in the Heteroclitic Archive
• Chapter 2: A Bahamian Historiography Within the Revolutionary and Partially Free Atlantic World: Abolition Was Growing
• Chapter 3: The Bahamas as a “Maritime Highway” by the 1840s: Turbulent Waters and Maritime Legal Systems
• Chapter 4: Entangled Histories of Mobility and Black Maritime Workers Across the Gulf World
• Chapter 5: Lincoln and Emerson’s Commitment to Antislavery: Fugitive Slave Narrative Versus Fugitive Slave Law
• Chapter 6: Confronting the Circumstances of a Partially Free Atlantic World: Designing Opportunity with Lighthouses, Wrecking, and Blockade Running
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author