Nobody agrees where the word mahogany came from, Bahamas or West Africa
Mahogany became Georgian Britain's luxury furniture wood, with imports soaring from 525 tons in 1740 to over 30,000 by 1788. Yet the name is a puzzle. One scholar traced it to a Bahamian word for wood; another argued enslaved Yoruba and Igbo people in Jamaica gave their name for a similar African tree to the American one.
True mahogany comes from three American species of Swietenia in the chinaberry family. Big-leaf or Honduran mahogany, ranging from Mexico's Yucatán to Peru, Bolivia and western Brazil, is the most widespread and the only one grown commercially on a large scale. West Indian mahogany grows in the Caribbean, the Bahamas and southern Florida, and Pacific Coast mahogany is a smaller, often twisted tree of dry Central American forests. The reddish-brown wood deepens with age, polishes to a warm sheen and works beautifully, which earned it the nickname premier cabinetwood of the world. Woods sold in the United States as African or Philippine mahogany must carry those qualifiers because they come from unrelated or only distantly related trees.
The word first appeared as Mohogeney in John Ogilby's America around 1670 to 1671, describing a rich wood from Jamaica. Kemp Malone proposed in 1940 that it came from the Bahamas; F. Bruce Lamb countered with the Yoruba oganwo, a term for tall Khaya trees, and each rejected the other's reasoning. French colonists said acajou and Spaniards caoba.
Spain used it early: Philip II fitted interiors at El Escorial with it from 1584, and Havana made it a royal shipbuilding monopoly in 1622. After Britain took Jamaica in 1655, and especially once the Naval Stores Act of 1721 scrapped import duties on colonial timber, mahogany flooded into British workshops. Jamaican supplies were largely exhausted by the 1790s, loggers pushed into Central and South America, and Britain imported over 80,000 tons in 1875. From the 1880s African mahogany took over the trade.
Scarcity brought protection. The three species joined CITES Appendix II in 1975, 1992 and 2003, the last being the first high-volume tropical timber so listed. Illegal logging persists: an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Peruvian mahogany sent to the United States is thought to be illegally cut. Meanwhile plantings in India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Hawaii have gone wild, and in the Philippines the tree is now considered an ecological problem.
Source: Mahogany
