Nassau is the capital and largest city and commercial centre of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. Nassau has a population of 248,948 (2010 census), 70 percent of the total population of The Bahamas (353,658). Lynden Pin Ling International Airport, the largest airport for The Bahamas, is located about 16 km (9.9 mi) west of Nassau city centre, and has daily flights to major cities in the United States, the Caribbean, Canada and the UK. Nassau is located on the island of New Providence, which functions like a business district. Nassau is the place where the House of Assembly and various judicial departments and was considered historically to be a stronghold of pirates.
Nassau modern growth began in the late eighteenth century, with the influx of thousands of American Loyalists and enslaved Africans to the Bahamas after the American Revolutionary War. Many of them settled in Nassau (then and still commerce capital of the Bahamas) and eventually came to outnumber the original inhabitants. As the population of Nassau grew, so did the built-up areas.
Today the city dominates the entire island and its satellite, Paradise Island. But until after the Second World War era, the outer suburbs scarcely existed. Most of New Providence was uncultivated bush until the loyalists came in the 1780s and established several plantations such as Clifton and Tusculum. When the British abolished the international slave trade in 1807, thousands of liberated Africans freed from slave ships by the Royal Navy settled on New Providence (at Adelaide Village and Gambier Village) along with other islands such as, Grand Bahama, Exuma, Abaco and Inagua.
The largest concentration of Africans lived in the “Over-the-Hill” suburbs of Grants Town and Bain Town to the south of the city of Nassau, while most of the inhabitants of European descent living on the island’s northern coastal ridges.