When was belize a british colony

In remote Punta Gorda, the colonial headquarters in southern Belize after , the DC effectively served as the sole representative of the Crown. In , the boundaries of the Toledo District were defined and its first magistrate, Francis Orgill, appointed. The first district commissioner, B. Travers, was appointed two years later. Vernon, a Creole man elected chair of the Toledo Legislative Council in There were never any Maya or Garifuna DCs.

Other key colonial institutions in the South were maintained by Europeans, though not typically British. The churches and schools were administered by Jesuits, mainly from Ireland and the US. Indeed the prevailing narrative in the colonial historiography is that southern Belize was empty at the time of the British arrival. Consider Burdon, writing as late as There is no record of any indigenous Indian population and no reason to believe that any such existed except far in the interior.

There are traces of extensive Maya Indian occupation—temples, wells, foundations, cultivation terraces—all over the Colony, wherever the land is suitable for agriculture.

But this occupation was long before British Settlement. The almost complete disappearance of the once teeming Maya population from these regions is one of the problems of Maya Archaeology Burdon Apart from indicating the denial by the colonial state of the existence of the Indigenous peoples, statements like this suggest how the marginalization of the Maya in Belizean historiography works through a discourse in which the Maya are troped as failed civilizers. From the vantage of the present, this is hard to grasp.

How could the British colonial government have no way to see the Maya people in their colony and recognize their indigeneity? One answer is that the British had practically no knowledge of the Maya and their lands—particularly the interior of the southern portion of the colony—before the s.

Data on the Maya communities accumulated after church leaders, state officials, and anthropologists wrote about them, roughly in that order. Apropos the state, consider two lines of evidence. First, there are abundant statements in the archival records to the effect that the interior is largely unknown and unvisited. In , one colonial official wrote, e. The colonial state operated with a skeletal structure, and state officials practically never left Belize City for the interior Anon, Trip to Western Districts.

Moreover, the Maya of Toledo lived in the most remote part of the colony and although Maya people had lived there long before the s, the British state had few engagements with them. Typically, one or two of the largest Maya villages were visited annually by the DC e. The second line of evidence is cartographic.

Consider the maps from and , i. But there were plenty of Indigenous people in southern Belize. And although their population declined due to Spanish reducciones and slave raids, Maya people have lived in the area known today as southern Belize for thousands of years.

But archival evidence suggests that other dynamics were more fundamental. At the end of the US Civil War, some Confederates sought to colonize parts of Latin America, from Mexico to Brazil, in the hope of maintaining their independence and their peculiar institution. Yet they encountered difficulties attracting laborers from the Garifuna community, which after hundreds of years of struggle against slavery and colonialism had secured a measure of autonomy in their coastal settlement.

But without access to labor, the sugar estates would fail and with them their colony. In , the state facilitated the importation of laborers from India Anon. Application for Coolie Labour. They repeatedly turned to the colonial state, asking the governor to deputize one of them as the local magistrate so that they could discipline their laborers with the force of law. The governor sympathized. British policy in the late 19th century encouraged agricultural diversification.

In some parts of the Caribbean, this was driven by declining sugar prices, but in Belize it was to encourage a shift away from forestry, given the long-term decline in the availability of and price received for mahogany Bulmer-Thomas and Bulmer-Thomas In April , the governor forwarded to London a letter written by the settlers at Toledo, appending a letter summarizing the situation and expressing his support for their cause:. Such visits are productive of good will but the presence of a resident Magistrate is necessary if only for cases between masters and servants which can only be dealt with by a paid magistrate… In the vicinity of this part of the Colony, new settlements are being made, considerable acreage has been taken up.

The people from the Bay Islands [i. The memorial was presented to me by a deputation specially sent, who represented that labor is in such demand and wages so high, that the men employed are so independent as to be almost beyond control—that if a dispute arises and cannot be amicably settled, it has to wait for the visit of the District Magistrate, perhaps, for a period of nearly three months or the master has to proceed to the headquarters of the District, procure a summons, return for the hearing of the case, and probably expend a considerable sum in addition to the loss of time….

And when this is done, the servant, if dissatisfied with the result, will probably not return to his work and will evade arrest by proceeding into the boundaries of Spanish Honduras or Guatemala, which can be reached in a few hours Governor, my emphasis. Thus the Confederate colonists who wanted to create sugar plantations spurred the state to create a district magistrate subsequently commissioner at Toledo.

The first post was even offered to one of the Confederates, James Hutchison, with the understanding that a British DC would be appointed two years later. Thanks to the surplus value produced by their agricultural laborers, by some of the settlers had sufficient capital to expand into exporting mahogany—the mainstay of colonial Belize—which generated sufficient wealth to allow a few to return to the US South with abundant savings.

The account of a geographer, Desmond Holdridge , explains the transition:. The rancor of the settlers toward their homeland [i. This… accounts for the extension of acreage beyond the point where it could be worked by the white settlers and forced the employment of colored labor… and the unfortunate social result already described… By the settlement was well on the way to extinction Holdridge Notwithstanding support from the colonial government, the Toledo settlement was short-lived.

The settlement effectively collapsed around the turn of the century when cane yields declined during an international slump in the price of sugar Camille But by only a few descendants of six Confederate families remained: together they managed twelve consolidated estates, averaging acres; presumably the relatively successful farmers purchased estates from emigrating, failed colonists. That year the remaining families begged the state for money to build a sugar mill and a new road as well as an import tax on sugar.

The state rejected these requests, ending the rich legacy of subsidies, thus sealing the fate of the Toledo settlement Anon, Forwarding Petition; Anon. Deputation from Planters Regarding Factory; Anon. Deputation from Planters Regarding Import Duty. Though short-lived, the Toledo settlement transformed the landscape of southern Belize in several ways.

The estates, drawn up during a period of speculation on timberlands, were subdivided into agricultural estates. Although the crops have changed, the region remains marked by certain landscape features laid down in the s: unusually long, straight property lines, extending due North and South, perpendicular to the road from the sea at Cattle Landing.

The East Indian families who inhabited parts of the formerly Confederate estates could not afford to purchase the land outright were locked into leasing relationships that maintained an outward flow of capital. It is often imagined that the various relations that constitute the state are so tightly integrated that they must come into existence together or not at all. In fact, in Belize as elsewhere, the social and political qualities we associate with states —law, border, state institutions, and so on— need not coincide in time and space.

In southern Belize, they emerge differentially and unevenly. The rule of law was asserted by the Court in Belize for the first time in , through the trial of Prince, a slave, who murdered a Maya woman. State institutions were slow to crystallize, even in rudimentary form. The process begins in the late 19 th century.

In Punta Gorda—at the time one of several Garifuna villages located along the southern coastline—was declared a town and made district capital: henceforth the DC and the Toledo District Board also founded kept offices there. Elementary state institutions followed slowly, each DC requesting resources to expand his capacities.

A rudimentary hospital was established in , followed by telephone contact with Belize City in Hence the DC-of-Toledo position attracted inexperienced candidates. The district was not so much forgotten as avoided. The state institutions that emerged were weak. The political economy of the South in this era exhibited a blend of capitalist and precapitalist social relations. Maya, Garifuna, and East Indian households built their own homes and produced most of their own food through agriculture, fishing, and hunting; to generate money needed to pay land taxes and purchase imported commodities clothing, soap, and foodstuffs they sold surpluses, particularly in the modest quantities of surplus crops and pigs exported to Puerto Barrios or Belize City.

The sale of labor power was informal and occasional, purchased by firms exporting forest products, particularly timber and chicle. The colonial state collected little revenue from the export of these products; what little investment and accumulation occurred in the colony was concentrated in Belize City. Even during periods of economic growth, Belizean colonial state never effectively taxed land and consistently ran deficits.

The local state in southern Belize made no pretense of offering democratic representation or providing services for social welfare. Medical care was largely traditional; education, such as it existed, was organized by the church. An letter to London written by Lt. His report is worth citing at length because it provides the fullest description of southern Belize and its early state institutions from a colonial official in this era. It also gives a sense of the attention given to racial depiction of the relatively little known subjects Harley encountered and employed:.

I paid a visit to the Southern part of the Colony… with the express purpose of visiting the Settlement of Punta Gorda, to which a Magistrate has recently been appointed. This settlement has hitherto not received much attention at the hands of the Government, but it occupies an important position on our boundary…. When they want money they will work on some of the adjacent Estates [i.

I had received reports that the Magistrate was living in a hut which consisted of one room, which had to serve the purposes of living, sleeping, and administering justice. I decided to enquire for myself into the facts of the case.

I found all that had been imparted to me but too true. I took the Colonial Engineer with me, as I had in view not only reporting on the accommodation provided for the Magistrate, but that for the Police and Prisoners.

Nothing could be worse… I have made arrangement also for the suitable lodgment of the Magistrate and his Court close to the Police Station, in premises for sale in a short time, which the Colonial Engineer reports as being very suitable, and which will cost considerably less than having to build a house Anon. Punta Gorda, the next village of any size, lies at almost the Southern limit of the Colony—it has a population of about nearly all of whom are Caribs.

Remarkably, the state buildings called for were not completed until The Court House, Offices, and other official buildings connected there-with at Punta Gorda were completed [in ], with the exception of fencing the land upon which they stand, this will I understand be erected at an early date. Annual Report for the Year At Independence in , there were still no public buildings south of Dangriga worth mention.

The former DC headquarters in Punta Gorda was razed in after decades of decay and disrepair; the old post office and courthouse were badly damaged by fire in later partially repaired. There were no campaigns to resurrect these colonial buildings as historical monuments and their degradation produced no discernable expressions of nostalgia. They comprise, after all, the ruins of an unmemorable state. The first is that the state was organized from the outset around class and race relations.

One anthropologist writes that Toledo appears as if:. They shook themselves, these creatures who had no other residence…and decided to make the best of things Staiana-Ross 7.

The metaphor is too clever. For if anything played the part of God in this story, it was the British Empire. The British claimed the territory principally for commercial advantage in timber exports.

An implicit racial hierarchy—Europeans on top with the British in charge , Creoles in the middle, the East Indians, Garifuna, and Maya on bottom—was inscribed into and reproduced by the state. The second conclusion is that the fundamental, problematic characteristics of the post-colonial state in southern Belize were present from the late-nineteenth century.

The palpable weakness of state institutions of contemporary southern Belize was in evidence more than a century ago. And yet this small state, backed by the authority of the British Empire, organized through authoritarian institutions, was sufficient to secure a new social order and facilitate the extraction and export of primary commodities. In sum, the history of early state formation in southern Belize is a story of the consolidation of a marginal colony with a capitalist economy under British hegemony.

Hence it was not necessary to save the old colonial buildings. Their legacy is embedded in the social relations living out around them. Orgill, Magistrate for the Toledo District. Ashcraft, Norman. Bolland, O. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, Caribbean Quarterly 44 , Benque, Belize: Cubola, Nigel, and Assad Shoman.

Land in Belize Benque: Cubola, Burdon, John. John Burdon. Camille, Michael. Cockburn, Samuel. Kingston, Jamaica: C. Campbell, Collet, Wilfred. British Honduras and Its Resources. Craib, Raymond. Decker, Ken. Belize: Belize Kriol Project, Enriquez, Jerry. Gabbert, Wolfgang. Becoming Maya. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona, Gibbs, Archibald. London: Sampson, British Honduras. London: HMSO, Grant, Cedric. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Hoffman, Odile.

Holdridge, Desmond. Jessop, Bob. State Theory. The Future of the Capitalist State. London: Polity, Johnson, Melissa. Jones, Grant. Jones, N. Cambridge: Cambridge University, Judd, Karen. Elite reproduction and ethnic identity in Belize. Macpherson, Anne. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels.

Moscow: Progress Publishers, [], Medina, Laurie Kroshus. Tuscan, AZ: University of Arizona, Morris, Daniel. London: Edward Stanford, Nowottny, Mark. Palacio, J. Poulantzas, Nicos.

Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. Belize's attractions include wildlife, Mayan ruins and one of the longest barrier reefs in the world. Belize has a problem with violent crime, largely drug-related, and the trafficking of narcotics to the US, however. In Belize was added to a US blacklist of countries considered to be major producers or transit routes for illegal drugs. Head of state: Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state, represented by a governor general.

Prime minister: Dean Barrow. Dean Barrow was re-elected for an unprecedented third, five-year term in office in November He led the party in opposition until its victory at the polls in , unseating the People's United Party PUP government of Said Musa, which had been in power for 10 years.

Mr Barrow, a lawyer, has invested much of the aid money Belize received from Venezuela in an ambitious infrastructure programme. Belize is heavily dependent on aid from Venezuela, which also offers it oil at discounted prices. One of Mr Barrow's challenges has been grappling with the country's much larger neighbour, Guatemala, whose president, Jimmy Morales, said he would pursue with renewed vigour his country's claims over more than half of Belize.

Belize compares favourably for media freedom with neighbouring countries. There are no daily newspapers. Radio and TV outlets are privately-owned. Internet use is limited by a lack of infrastructure and high prices. Some key dates in the history of Belize:. In , the country changes its name from British Honduras to Belize.

About 1, British troops remain to defend the country against Guatemalan territorial claims.