Turks and Caicos Islands in the context of "Bahama Banks"

The Lucayan Archipelago, also known as the Bahamian Archipelago, is an island group comprising the sovereign nation of Bahamas and the British Overseas Territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. The archipelago is in the Caribbean region, stretching from south-east of Florida in the mainland United States to northern Hispaniola. There are about 740 islands and 2,400 cays, of which only 38 are inhabited.

The West Indies are an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies in three archipelagos: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Lucayan Archipelago.

The subregion includes all the islands in the Antilles, in addition to The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are in the North Atlantic Ocean. The term is often interchangeable with "Caribbean", although the latter may also include coastal regions of Central and South American mainland nations, including Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname, as well as the Atlantic island nation of Bermuda, all of which are culturally related but geographically distinct from the three main island groups.

The British West Indies (BWI) were the territories in the West Indies under British rule, including Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, British Honduras, British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago.

The Kingdom of England first established colonies in the region during the 17th century. Financed by valuable extractive commodities such as sugar production, the colonies were also at the centre of the Atlantic slave trade, with around 2.3 million slaves being brought to the British West Indies. The colonies also served as bases to project the power of the British Empire through the Royal Navy and Britain's Merchant Marine, and to expand and protect British overseas trade. Before the decolonization of the Americas in the later 1950s and 1960s, the term "British West Indies" was regularly used to include all British colonies in the region as part of the British Empire. Following the independence of most of the territories from the United Kingdom, the term Commonwealth Caribbean is now used.

The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is an island country located within the Lucayan Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. It contains 97 per cent of the archipelago's land area and 88 per cent of its population. It comprises more than 3,000 islands, cays and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, located north of Cuba and north-west of the island of Hispaniola (split between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the US state of Florida and east of the Florida Keys. The capital and largest city is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes the Bahamas' territory as encompassing 470,000 km (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.

The Bahama islands were inhabited by the Arawak and Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, for many centuries. Christopher Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the "New World" in 1492 when he landed on the island of San Salvador. Later, the Kingdom of Spain shipped the native Lucayans to Hispaniola and enslaved them there, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, as nearly all native Bahamians had been forcibly removed for enslavement or had died of European diseases. In 1649 English colonists from Bermuda, known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled on the island of Eleuthera.

Taíno is an Arawakan language formerly spoken widely by the Taíno people of the Caribbean. In a reconstructed form, not in any way the same language, there exist several modern-day pseudo-Taíno language variants including Hiwatahia-Taino and Tainonaiki. At the time of Spanish contact it was the most common language throughout the Caribbean. Classic Taíno (Taíno proper) was the native language of the Taíno tribes living in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, Borikén (now known as Puerto Rico), the Turks and Caicos Islands, most of Ayiti-Kiskeya also known as Hispaniola, and eastern Cuba. The Ciboney dialect is essentially unattested, but colonial sources suggest it was very similar to Classic Taíno, and was spoken in the westernmost areas of Hispaniola, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and most of Cuba.

By the late 15th century, Taíno had displaced earlier languages, except in western Cuba and in pockets in Hispaniola. As the Taíno culture declined during Spanish colonization, the language was replaced by Spanish and other European languages, such as English and French. Although the language declined drastically due to colonization, it continued to be spoken in isolated pockets in the Caribbean until the 19th century. As Spanish, English, and French became the dominant languages, some Taíno words were absorbed into those languages. As the first Indigenous language encountered by Europeans in the Americas, it was a major source of new words borrowed into European languages.

The Antilles is an archipelago within the West Indies in the Caribbean region of the Americas. It is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the south and west, the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest, and the North Atlantic Ocean to the north and east.

The Antillean islands are divided into two smaller archipelagos: the Greater Antilles and the Lesser Antilles. The Greater Antilles include the Cayman Islands and larger islands of Cuba, Hispaniola (subdivided into the nations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Navassa Island, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The Lesser Antilles contains the northerly Leeward Islands and the southeasterly Windward Islands, as well as the Leeward Antilles immediately north of Venezuela. The Lucayan Archipelago, consisting of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, though a part of the West Indies, is generally not included among the Antillean islands.

The British West Indies dollar (BWI$) was the currency of British Guiana and the Eastern Caribbean territories of the British West Indies from 1949 to 1965, when it was largely replaced by the East Caribbean dollar, and was one of the currencies used in Jamaica from 1954 to 1964. The monetary policy of the currency was overseen by the British Caribbean Currency Board (BCCB). It was the official currency used by the West Indies Federation. The British West Indies dollar was never used in British Honduras, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas, or Bermuda.

The West Indies Federation, also known as the West Indies, the Federation of the West Indies or the West Indian Federation, was a short-lived political union that existed from 3 January 1958 to 31 May 1962. Various islands in the Caribbean that were part of the British Empire, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Jamaica, and those on the Leeward and Windward Islands, came together to form the Federation, with its capital in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The expressed intention of the Federation was to create a political unit that would become independent from Britain as a single state – possibly similar to Australia, Canada, or Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Before that could happen, the Federation collapsed due to internal political conflicts over how it would be governed or function viably. The formation of a West Indian Federation was encouraged by the United Kingdom, but also requested by pan-Caribbean nationalists.

The territories that would have become part of the Federation eventually became the nine contemporary sovereign states of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago; with Anguilla, Montserrat, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands becoming British overseas territories. British Guiana and British Honduras held observer status within the West Indies Federation.