Bahamas vs Cayman Islands

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The Bahamas ( (listen)), known officially as the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a Nation within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies from the Atlantic.

It takes up 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and is home to 88% of the archipelago's inhabitants. The archipelagic state includes over 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is situated north of Cuba and Hispaniola Island (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), northwest of the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the US state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes The Bahamas' land as encompassing 470,000 km2 (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space. The Bahamas were inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno people, for many centuries. Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the 'New World' in 1492. Later, the Spanish sent the native Lucayans to captivity on Hispaniola, and the Bahama islands were largely abandoned from 1513 until 1648, when English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera. The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. Following the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to The Bahamas; they took their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. African slaves and their descendants constituted the vast majority of the populace from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in The Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, The Bahamas became a haven for freed African American slaves. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, though some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to The Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognise the freedom of slaves carried by the ships of other nations which reached The Bahamas. Today Afro-Bahamians make up 90% of the populace of 332,634. The country gained political independence in 1973 led by Sir Lynden O. Pindling, with Elizabeth II as its queen. Concerning gross domestic product per capita, The Bahamas is one of the wealthiest nations in the Americas (following the USA and Canada), with an economy based on tourism and offshore finance.

Source: Wikipedia

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The Cayman Islands ( or ) is an autonomous British Overseas Territory in the western Caribbean Sea.

The 264-square-kilometre (102-square-mile) land comprises the three islands of Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, which can be located to the south of Cuba and northeast of Honduras, between Jamaica and Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. The capital city is George Town on Grand Cayman, which is the most populous of the three islands. The Cayman Islands is considered to be a portion of the geographic Western Caribbean Zone as well as the Greater Antilles. The land is often considered a significant world offshore financial haven for international businesses and lots of wealthy individuals. It has been placed on the EU's blacklist of foreign tax havens.

Source: Wikipedia