British Honduras
British Honduras was a Crown colony on the east coast of Central America — specifically located on the southern edge of the Yucatán Peninsula from 1783 to 1964, then a self-governing colony — renamed Belize from June 1973 until September 1981, when it gained full independence as Belize. British Honduras was the last continental possession of the United Kingdom in the Americas.
The colony grew out of the Treaty of Versailles between Britain and Spain, which gave the British rights to cut logwood between the Hondo and Belize rivers. The Convention of London expanded this concession to include the area between the Belize and Sibun rivers. In 1862, the Settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras was declared a British colony called British Honduras, and the Crown's representative was elevated to a lieutenant governor, subordinate to the governor of Jamaica.
History
Baymen, enslaved Africans, and Shoremen
In the early seventeenth century, English and Dutch pirate merchants, defying the Spanish who claimed sovereignty over the entire Caribbean coast, engaged in "sporadic but fairly frequent" smuggling from the Bay of Honduras. Large quantities of indigo and logwood were supplied to their home markets. At some point, the English operators began surreptitiously cutting logwood, as opposed to merely seizing Spanish-cut logwood. Although clear primary sources are lacking, the first English logging settlement in the territory is generally attributed to Peter Wallace's 1638 landing at the mouth of Haulover Creek which runs through what is now Belize City.As their interest turned in the 18th century from logwood to mahogany, the growing numbers of "Baymen" employed enslaved Africans, purchased in Jamaica and Bermuda. While they might be left in logging camps, without the whip-wielding drivers ubiquitous on large plantations elsewhere in the Americas, the enslaved were dependent on their owners for rations and supplies. Many of the enslaved maintained African ethnic identifications and cultural practices. Those of Ibo origin and descent were particularly numerous, a section of Belize being known as "Eboe Town."
Following the 1786 Convention of London, the Spanish, who had chased out the Baymen four times between 1717 and 1780, accepted the Baymen as logwood concessionaires on condition that Great Britain evacuate her subjects from the Miskito Coast to the south. London directed the newly appointed superintendent for the Bay area concessions, Colonel Edward Despard, to accommodate these Shoremen. In their petitions to London for his removal, the Baymen noted that Despard did so without "any distinction of age, sex, character, respectability, property or colour": land was distributed by lottery in which "the meanest mulatto or free negro has an equal chance".
To the suggestion from the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, that it was impolitic to put "affluent settlers and persons of a different description, particularly people of colour" on an "equal footing", Despard replied "the laws of England... know no such distinction". He characterised the wealthy cutters among the Baymen as an "arbitrary aristocracy", buttressing his argument with the results of the magistracy election in which he won a resounding majority on an unprecedented turnout. Unimpressed by his democratic mandate, and persuaded by the Baymen's entreaty that under "Despard's constitution" the "negroes in servitude, observing the now exalted status of their brethren of yesterday would be induced to revolt, and the settlement must be ruined", in 1790 Sydney's successor, Lord Grenville, recalled Despard to London.
Despard's colour-blind policies were reversed: by the 1820s the settlement had seven legally distinct castes based on skin colour. Under this colour-bar system, free Creole people were denied full civil rights until, in 1831, the British Colonial Office threatened to dissolve the Baymen's legislative Public Meeting.
London officially ended slavery in the Bay in 1838. But the Baymen continued to control and command the labour of the free slaves for over a century by denying them access to land, and by ensuring their continued dependency through a system of truck wages.
Maya emigration and conflict
As the British consolidated their settlement and pushed deeper into the interior in search of mahogany in the late 18th century, they encountered resistance from the Maya. In the second half of the 19th century, however, a combination of events outside and inside the colony redefined the position of the Maya. During the Caste War of Yucatán, a devastating struggle that halved the population of the area between 1847 and 1855, thousands of refugees fled to British Honduras. The Legislative Assembly had given large landowners in the colony firm titles to their vast estates in 1855 but did not allow the Maya to own land. The Maya could only rent land or live on reservations. Nevertheless, most of the refugees were small farmers, who by 1857 were growing considerable quantities of sugar, rice, corn, and vegetables in the Northern District. In 1857, the town of Corozal, then six years old, had 4,500 inhabitants, second in population only to Belize Town, which had 7,000 inhabitants. Some Maya who had fled the strife in the north, but had no wish to become British subjects, settled in the remote Yalbac Hills, just beyond the woodcutting frontier in the northwest.By 1862, about 1,000 Maya established themselves in 10 villages in this area, with the center in San Pedro. One group of Maya, led by Marcos Canul, attacked a mahogany camp on the Bravo River in 1866, demanding ransom for their prisoners and rent for their land. A detachment of soldiers from the West India Regiments sent to San Pedro was defeated by the Maya later that year. Early in 1867, more than 300 WIR troops marched into the Yalbac Hills and destroyed several Mayan villages, provision stores, and granaries in an attempt to drive them out of the district. The Maya returned, however, and in April 1870, Canul and his men marched into Corozal and occupied the town. Two years later, Canul and 150 men attacked the barracks at Orange Walk. After several hours of fighting, Canul's group retired. Canul, mortally wounded, died on 1 September 1872. That battle was the last serious attack on the colony. In the 1880s and 1890s, Mopán and Kekchí Maya fled from forced labor in Guatemala and came to British Honduras. They settled in several villages in southern British Honduras, mainly around San Antonio in Toledo District. The Maya could use Crown lands set aside as reservations, but they did have rights over the lands.
Under the policy of indirect rule, a system of elected alcaldes, adopted from Spanish local government, linked these Maya to the colonial administration. However, the remoteness of the area of British Honduras in which they settled, combined with their largely subsistence way of life, resulted in the Mopán and Kekchí Maya maintaining more of their traditional way of life and becoming less assimilated into the colony than the Maya of the north. The Mopán and Kekchí Maya maintained their languages and a strong sense of identity. But in the north, the distinction between Maya and Spanish was increasingly blurred, and a Mestizo culture emerged. In different ways and to different degrees, then, the Maya who returned to British Honduras in the 19th century became incorporated into the colony as poor and dispossessed ethnic minorities. By the end of the 19th century, the ethnic pattern that remained largely intact throughout the 20th century was in place: Protestants largely of African descent, who spoke either English or Creole, lived in Belize Town; the Roman Catholic Maya and Mestizos spoke Spanish and lived chiefly in the north and west; and the Roman Catholic Garifuna who spoke English, Spanish, or Garifuna and settled on the southern coast.
Formal establishment of the colony, 1862–1871
The forestry industry's control of land and its influence in colonial decision making hindered the development of agriculture and the diversification of the economy. In many parts of the Caribbean, large numbers of former slaves, some of whom had engaged in the cultivation and marketing of food crops, became landowners. British Honduras had vast areas of sparsely populated, unused land. Nevertheless, land ownership was controlled by a small European monopoly, thwarting the evolution of a Creole landowning class from the former slaves. Rather than the former slaves, it was the Garifuna, Maya and Mestizos who pioneered agriculture in 19th-century British Honduras. These groups either rented land or lived as squatters. However, the domination of the land by forestry interests continued to stifle agriculture and kept much of the population dependent on imported foods.Landownership became even more consolidated during the economic depression of the mid-19th century. Exports of mahogany peaked at over 4 million linear metres in 1846 but fell to about 1.6 million linear meters in 1859 and 8,000 linear meters in 1870, the lowest level since the beginning of the century. Mahogany and logwood continued to account for over 80 percent of the total value of exports, but the price of these goods was so low that the economy was in a state of prolonged depression after the 1850s. Major results of this depression included the decline of the old settler class, the increasing consolidation of capital and the intensification of British landownership. The British Honduras Company emerged as the predominant landowner of the Crown colony. The firm originated in a partnership between one of the old settler families and a London merchant and was registered in 1859 as a limited company. The firm expanded, often at the expense of others who were forced to sell their land.
Largely as a result of the costly military expeditions against the Maya, the expenses of administering the new colony of British Honduras increased, and that at a time of severe depression in the economy. Large landowners and merchants dominated the Legislative Assembly, which controlled the colony's revenues and expenditures. Some of the landowners also had involvement in commerce, but their interest differed from those of the other merchants of Belize Town. The former group resisted the taxation of land and favoured an increase in import duties; the latter preferred the opposite. Moreover, the merchants in the town felt relatively secure from Mayan attacks and reluctant to contribute toward the protection of mahogany camps, whereas the landowners felt that they should not be required to pay taxes on lands given inadequate protection. These conflicting interests produced a stalemate in the Legislative Assembly, which failed to authorise the raising of sufficient revenue. Unable to agree among themselves, the members of the Legislative Assembly surrendered their political privileges and asked for the establishment of direct British rule in return for the greater security of Crown colony status. The new constitution was inaugurated in April 1871 and the Legislative Council became the new legislature.