Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán’s Caste War, 1847-1901, by Rajeshwari Dutt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán's Caste War, 1847–1901 by Rajeshwari Dutt Marisa Palacios Knox (bio) Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán's Caste War, 1847–1901, by Rajeshwari Dutt; pp. xiii + 185. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $99.99, $80.00 ebook. The title of Rajeshwari Dutt's Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán's Caste War, 1847–1901 and its fundamental issue of how "Empire operates in frontiers and borderlands during times of conflict" imply a totalizing narrative that the rest of this tightly focused book complicates (4). First, there is the question of whether the region known since 1973 as Belize (formerly British Honduras) could be said, even synecdochally, to represent Empire with a capital "E." When the Caste War began, Belize was still a settlement; British Honduras formally became a colony in 1862, a Crown Colony in 1870, and only installed a governor directly reporting to the Colonial Office in 1884. The Caste War, a prolonged series of conflicts between the government of Mexico and various Indigenous Maya populations concentrated in the state of Yucatán adjoining northern Belize, coincided with and at least partially influenced these successive transitions in Belize's colonial status and relationship with the British metropole. Second, the fundamental "dissonance" in that relationship between the interests of local officials and the aims of the imperial government is a major theme throughout Dutt's book (161). While Superintendent Frederick Seymour described British Honduras in 1857 as "an experiment to see what can be made of the Spanish Americas" (51), Empire on Edge illustrates the neglect of that experiment by a government perpetually unwilling to provide military and financial resources to "distant objects or purposes of secondary importance," in the withering words of Jamaica's governor Charles Grey (38). Dutt thus emphasizes the struggle (and, rarely, the success) of the local authorities' attempts to establish order at Belize's northern borders. Drawing on official documents in the Belize Archives and Records Service (including correspondence, maps, and census records), the book highlights the "tensions, anxiety, and even ludicrousness" of those attempts (14), which Dutt explicitly attributes to "imperial hubris" but portrays more frequently as colonial haplessness and desperation (69). Empire on Edge finely delineates the internal complexity of Belizean society and the particularly "fluid, threatening and constantly shifting space" of the northern frontier as an interethnic contact zone involving Belizean businessmen of various nationalities, rival Maya groups on both sides of the Caste War, and Hispanic (Spanish-descended) immigrants from Mexico, with whom the precise parameters of the border remained in dispute throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century (19). The Yucatecan refugees from the Caste War would ultimately help Belize transform its economy from its dependence on the declining timber trade and justify its transformation from settlement to colony by initiating the cultivation of sugar and other crops. Nevertheless, Dutt's book demonstrates the Belizean government's pattern of suspecting Hispanic immigrants of disloyalty and even complicity with Maya insurgents. While they alternately attempted to dismiss, appease, or ally with the Maya themselves, officials such as Seymour continually regarded these Hispanic residents and even naturalized citizens as "more intelligent enemies" who insidiously manipulated the hostilities of supposedly savage but ductile Maya peoples (54). [End Page 329] In six chronological chapters, Dutt untangles the material and political reasons for the local British officials' fluctuating attitudes toward various Maya groups and the Hispanic refugees (who in fact were not so categorically distinguishable, since non-Indigenous and mestizo Yucatecans were also among the rebels). At the beginning of the Caste War, Belizean merchants, who traded ammunition and arms to the Maya and relied on them for access to logwood and mahogany in the borderlands, lobbied the government on their behalf. Though Belize maintained an official position of neutrality in the Caste War, it also remained wary of Mexico due to Britain's old imperial hostility toward Spain. When the regime of Emperor Maximilian claimed Belizean territory for Mexico, it justified raids on Belize's border towns...