Rajeshwari Dutt. Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán's Caste War, 1847–1901.

Abstract

Belize, a small English-speaking former British colony (British Honduras) nestled between Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean Sea, is a compelling place to explore how a colonial power tried to maintain its borders and govern where identity was fluid, alliances shifting, and conflict frequent. Rajeshwari Dutt takes on this task, focusing on the late 1800s, just as northern Belize became entangled in the Yucatec Caste War. Cleverly titled Empire on Edge, Dutt’s book foregrounds the anxieties British officials experienced as they tried to maintain a colony on the edge of empire. Employing a rich variety of materials, from letters, reports and minute papers to photos, maps, and censuses, Dutt argues that border zones, and especially borders that are also frontiers, are the locus of “imperial anxieties over material, racial, political and ideological control” (20) and that they reveal the “imperial hubris that reality would conform itself to marks and etches...