Guyana Research Articles

The Wisdom of ‘Modest’ Beginnings: Lord Salisbury, Arbitration, International Law and British Naval Supremacy

ABSTRACT Lord Salisbury, according to the historiography, was notoriously sceptical of international arbitration. Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, Salisbury’s last government entered into an arbitration agreement with Venezuela in relation to its border dispute with British Guiana and a general arbitration agreement with the US. It then took the lead in establishing a permament court of international arbitration at the fist Hague Peace Conference in 1899. This article explains why that change in Salisbury’s outlook occurred, how Salisbury developed a distinctively Conservative approach to arbitration in international relations and how the British contribution to the development of an institutional international rule of law at the end of the nineteenth century was as much a Conservative moment as a liberal one.

Arbitral Award of Oct. 3, 1899 (Guy. v. Venez.) (Preliminary Objections) (I.C.J.)

On March 29, 2018, the Government of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana (hereinafter Guyana) filed in the Registry of the Court an application instituting proceedings against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (hereinafter Venezuela) with respect to a dispute concerning “the legal validity and binding effect of the Award regarding the Boundary between the Colony of British Guiana and the United States of Venezuela, of 3 October 1899” (hereinafter the 1899 Award or the Award).

‘Enslavement, Emotions and Oppositional Insolence in the Slave Society of British Guiana’

ABSTRACT Enslavers utilized various methods of physical and psychological violence to effect emotions of terror and fear in their African captives in order to create and maintain systems of enslavement throughout the Atlantic World. But these methods also produced emotions in the victims which could act against the systems of enslavement. One such emotion was anger and its visible display towards the enslavers was forbidden throughout the Atlantic World. But the extreme domination of enslavement also resulted in challenges to the system. In this article, I will document and analyse visible displays of the emotions of anger and vengeance by the enslaved in the colonies that became British Guiana. The emotion of vengeance in these cases was conducted through open insults which allowed slaves a way to assert themselves and belittle their enslavers. This study is based on documented complaints of the enslaved during the nineteenth century in the colony of British Guiana, housed at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. These documents are unique in the annals of British West Indian slavery as they give voice to the enslaved on a variety of topics.

‘Sterile Citizens’ & ‘Excellent Disbursers’: Opium and the Representations of Indentured Migrant Consumption in British Guiana and Trinidad

ABSTRACT This article examines the representation of Asian indentured migrants as ‘consumers’ in colonial British Guiana and Trinidad. Focusing on the specific case of opium, it explores how attitudes towards the drug fed into broader debates about socio-economic responsibilities of these labouring communities. After first establishing the considerable revenues which colonial authorities derived from the taxation of opium, the article illustrates the growing calls for migrants to ‘pay back’ to the colonies which had shouldered the cost of their introduction. It also explores how stereotypical representations of Chinese and Indian consumption informed debates about the economic viability of continuing to import various forms of migrant labour. The article argues that migrant consumption mattered, and that understanding why it mattered necessitates a broader understanding of how indentured migration shaped the economic and social histories of various British colonies following emancipation.

“At Work, in Hospital, or in Gaol”: Women in British Guiana’s Jails, 1838–1917

This article argues that labour, particularly female labour, was central to the expansion of colonial Guiana’s post-emancipation penal system between 1838 and 1917. It highlights the intersection of coerced labour and colonialism in the post-emancipation period, by centring the lives of incarcerated women to understand the nature of state governance in colonial spaces. It argues the plantocracy leveraged the expansion of prisons not to control crime but to control labour. As the newly constructed prisons filled, colonial and local authorities explained increased incarceration rates as a legitimate response to increased crime, supported by an evangelical rhetoric that promoted incarceration to encourage reform when it was accompanied by religious instruction and education. In practice, authorities used the prison system as a means of labour discipline, labour extraction and as a threat to secure future docility. Female indentured labourers convicted of petty crimes, including breach of contract, were often sentenced to work on plantations; creole women worked on sea defence construction and maintenance. A common refrain in the colony was that free labour could not be obtained. The malleability of prisoners as a labour force was thus attractive to the government, as prisoners could be moved, deployed and disciplined in ways that were not possible for free labour.

Music, archives, and colonial encounter in the Cold War: a case study from British Guiana

ABSTRACT How did musical activity intersect with imperialism and colonialism in the Cold War period (1948–89)? While musicologists have started to explore this question, most current research has focused on the role of the U.S.A. rather than declining European powers, and has frequently foregrounded those efforts at engagement and exchange that Christina Klein has termed ‘Cold War Orientalism’. With reference to the archival records of one Cold War colonial encounter in British Guiana, this article reveals a more disturbing strain of postwar cultural relations, one in which efforts at rapprochement were obstructed by imperial powers, and in which colonial cultural voices were denied or dismissed. At the same time, the article considers the surprising case of a British communist musician – Alan Bush – who, in spite of these barriers to encounter, was able to attempt a form of cultural hybridity in his opera The Sugar Reapers (1962–1965). Ultimately, this article demonstrates the importance of interpreting cultural artefacts like Bush’s opera as musical embodiments of complex colonial connections, and of exploring more deeply those Cold War encounters in which the imperial past was painfully present.

Slave Registers and British Guiana: Life and Resistance on Slave Plantations

ABSTRACT Slave registers are a major source for the study of British colonial slavery in its final two decades, yet they have been little used by historians. The article employs two case studies to show how these records allow us to reconstruct a collective profile of the enslaved and to sketch fuller portraits of individual persons. The first is James Blair’s Blairmont estate in Berbice, where slave registration records provide valuable insight into family structures. The second case study considers John Gladstone’s Success estate on neighbouring Demerara, epicentre of a major slave revolt in 1823. Here registers, correlated with other sources, yield a fuller picture of the insurgents and enable us to place them in the foreground of the story. We conclude that slave registration records can be used for purposes for which they were never intended, to write richer histories of people and place in the British Caribbean.

TWO NEW SPECIES OF GELECHIID MOTHS OF THE GENUS <i>HELCYSTOGRAMMA</i> ZELLER 1877 (LEPIDOPTERA, GELECHIIDAE) FROM PANAMA

Two new species of the gelechiid moth genus Helcystogramma are described from Panama: H. jeffi sp. n. and H. almi sp. n. Based on male genitalia, they are assigned to the perelegans and trijunctum groups, respectively, both identified for the regional fauna of China. Helcystogramma effi sp. n. is morphologically similar to H. amethystias (Meyrick), from the Indo-Malay Region, and H. perelegans (N. Omelko et M. Omelko), from East Asia, but it differs by the uncus of the male genitalia bearing rounded lobes distally. Helcystogramma almi sp. n. in showing a variegate coloration of the wings is similar to H. carycastis (Meyrick), a species from Brazil and British Guiana, but in male genitalic structure it is closer to H. imagitrijunctum Li et Zhen and H. albilepidotum Li et Zhen, both from China.

Artistic Responses to Crossing the Kālā Pānī

Between 1838 and 1917, a British system of indentured servitude replaced the enslavement of African peoples with Indian labor in the Americas and the Caribbean. Almost a quarter of a million indentured Indian laborers came to British Guiana and would form the foundation of the majority of the Indian population in present-day Guyana. These men and women would spend nearly eight decades toiling on sugar plantations and rice fields before the brutal system of labor was abolished. This curatorial essay explores the work of three key contemporary artists of Guyanese heritage—Maya Mackrandilal, Michael Lam, and Suchitra Mattai—who underscore St. Vincent-born poet Derek Walcott’s seminal words “the sea is history” with an exploration of the sea as a weapon of rupture. Collectively, their artworks return us to a British past to offer a visceral reminder of the perilous kālā pānī crossing [Hindi for “black waters”], marking the sea the place where ancestral histories, trauma, and survival all share space. Grounding us in the present and pointing us to a future, I illustrate how these artworks also function as contemporary tools of remembrance and repair.

The Guyana Maroons, 1796–1834: Persistent and Resilient until the End of Slavery

ABSTRACT In 1814, an enslaved woman named Antoinette was abducted in Berbice and lived for eleven years in a Maroon camp in Demerara (both parts of what became British Guiana, now Guyana). The camp was well established by the early 1800s and probably continued until emancipation in 1834. The persistence and strength of Maroon settlements throughout Guyana led the colonists to resort not only to force but also to negotiations and amnesties in order to mitigate the threat they posed. The Maroon’s weakness lay in being constrained by alliances between the Amerindians and the white authorities which restricted them geographically to a generally marshy hinterland behind the coastal plantations. Despite a continuing war of attrition with the white colonists, Maroons in Guyana developed complex systems of forest agriculture, trade, and social systems which may reflect some aspects of Akan (and presumably other) cultures. The experience of Antoinette, in as far as it can be recovered, is a reminder that life as a Maroon was difficult and that, for many, other ways of surviving slavery might have had greater appeal.

Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana

My grandfather, Charles Eric Wilkinson, was a black architect-builder involved in major government-sponsored building and infrastructure projects in British Guiana from the 1930s to the 1970s. I place Wilkinson’s built work and its surviving archive of bookkeeping ledgers, letters, photographs, and architectural drawings in conversation with material from national archives in Guyana and England, adding oral histories from family members. White architects stationed in British Guiana and the Caribbean reported back to England about the “skilled craftsmen” (carpenters and building contractors) that they observed. Based on family lore and archives, I question the interactions between the supposed foreign “expert” architects and the local builders, seeking to document this period more accurately through architectural work that has remained in the shadows. The backdrop to my research is the rise of foreign-aided, self-help building schemes in British Guiana in 1954, the same year that Wilkinson endeavored to build a concrete house for his family. British and US architects were involved in British Guiana’s planning and housing development work. Howard Mackey, a Black American professor at Howard University, was on a team contributing to the self-help project. This period of Britain transitioning its so-called dependencies to self-sufficiencies provides an important context for understanding the role that black builders would play in shaping the built environment of the (independent) nation to come.

Evidence on tuberculosis in migrants at Brazil's international borders: A scoping review

Objectiveto map scientific evidence on the extent of tuberculosis in migrants from the international borders between Brazil and the countries of South America. DesignScoping review of quantitative, qualitative and mixed studies. The research was conducted between February and April 2021. The terms “migrants”, “tuberculosis”, “Brazil”, “Uruguay”, “Paraguay”, “Bolivia”, “Peru”, “British Guiana” “English Guiana”, “French Guiana”, “Suriname”, “Venezuela”, “Argentina”, “Colombia” combined with Boolean operators “AND” and “OR” to identified relevant documents. Studies addressing tuberculosis on migrants from international borders of Brazil were included. Pubmed Central (PMC), LILACS (Scientific and technical literature of Latin America and the Caribbean/BVS), Scopus (Elsevier), Scielo (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and gray literature CAPES thesis database were searched. The study was carried out in three stages where the data was selected and extracted by two independent reviewers for full reading. ResultsA total of 705 articles were extracted from the databases chosen for the search, 04 master's dissertations and 01 doctoral thesis. Of these 456 were excluded because they did not meet at least one of the eligibility criteria for this SR and 4 were further excluded because they were duplicates who had not been previously identified. A total of 58 documents were, thus, selected for assessment of the full text. Of these, 40 were further excluded for not meeting at least one of the eligibility criteria. A total of 18 studies were included for data collection: 15 articles, 2 master's dissertations and 1 doctoral thesis, produced between 2002 and 2021. ConclusionThis scoping review mapped the existing evidence on tuberculosis at the international borders of Brazil and on access of immigrants with tuberculosis to health services in Brazil. Descriptorstuberculosis; immigrants; public health surveillance; epidemiological surveillance; sanitary control of borders; health services accessibility.

Of Rights and Riots: Indenture and (Mis)Rule in the Late Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean

Abstract This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples. Although this is largely a microhistorical account, I hope to provide some useful avenues of analysis by which indenture (primarily approached until now through the lens of social history) can be more broadly engaged as an institution that catalysed a new relationship between the state and labour management, that fostered new (or, at least, revised) discourses of the role of violence in colonialism, and that generated new patterns of response and resistance among subalterns.

Returning a maverick creole to the fold: the Berbice Dutch enigma revisited

AbstractBerbice Dutch was a creole language spoken in the Republic of Guyana in South America, a country first under Dutch, and later under British colonial rule. Owing mainly to Silvia Kouwenberg (A grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole, De Gruyter Mouton, 1994), we were blessed with a detailed synchronic documentation of Berbice Dutch before its demise. However, the formation of the language remains clouded in mystery: its grammar and (basic) lexicon display a seemingly unique mixture of Dutch (Creole) and Eastern Ijo, as a result of which the language is often portrayed as a challenge to existing contact-linguistic theory. In this paper, a scenario is proposed that, rather than challenging the said theory, is fully grounded in it: it will be argued that the language was a case of serial glottogenesis: a first stage of creolisation was later followed by language mixing. The paper furthermore presents hitherto unknown historical data pertaining to the arrival of Ijo speakers in Berbice.

Immigration, Intoxication, Insanity, and Incarceration in British Guiana

ABSTRACT The transition from slavery to freedom in British Guiana was a gradual process, taking place through a period of apprenticeship for the formerly enslaved which came into effect in 1834. Emancipation produced a series of rapid challenges for the colonial state as it attempted to retain dominance over ex-slaves without the extensive coercive powers that had been allowed under slavery. The introduction of indentured labourers from 1835 further added to these complexities as workers from India, China, Portugal, and Africa generated significant flows of migrants to the region. In this post-emancipation period, the colonial state expanded its powers through the establishment of new laws and institutions of confinement to consolidate its control over an ethnically diverse population. This article interrogates the ways in which punishment and coercive techniques were part of both larger imperial calculations and broader political, economic, and cultural shifts in the colony.

A ‘Mudbank’ or ‘the Most Dangerous Area in the World’? Decolonising British Guiana, Czechoslovakia, and the Making of a Cold War Hot Spot in Latin America

ABSTRACT The Cold War relationship between British Guiana’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and Czechoslovakia is a case study of how decolonising Third World national liberation movements tried to break free from the Western orbit with the help of the Eastern Bloc. PPP co-founder Cheddi Jagan was the unique elected anti-colonial nationalist leader who secretly worked to assist and join the Eastern Bloc. This article highlights cooperation between British Guiana’s leaders and Czechoslovakia aimed at achieving liberation, industrialisation, and scientific socialism. It also demonstrates Czechoslovak and Soviet plans to use British Guiana as a base for South American intelligence operations and to begin bringing postcolonial Guyana into the Eastern Bloc’s orbit.

"Keep[ing] the Outward Figure Away from the Fact": Reading Harold Skimpole as a Person of Color in Bleak House

Despite Charles Dickens's 1859 protestations in "Leigh Hunt: A Remonstrance" (1859), scholars argue that he parodied Hunt as the indolent, selfish Harold Skimpole due to irritation with Hunt's financial issues, uneasy recollections of John Dickens's financial woes, or capitalist idealization. Although Bleak House (1853) contains multiple allusions to African missions and philanthropy, Skimpole has never been critiqued in relation to Hunt's reputed African ancestry, an open secret in literary circles. In a parody intended for mutual literary friends, Dickens may have concealed Hunt's racial heritage in "Phiz's" illustrations of Skimpole, while textual allusions suggest Hunt's moral (and hereditary) similarity to the "idle Black man" of the 1848–1849 British Guiana labor strike denounced by Thomas Carlyle in "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849, 1853) and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850).

The Caribbean War Front in World War II: The Untold Story of U-boats, Spies, and Economic Warfare

The Caribbean War Front in World War II: The Untold Story of U-boats, Spies, and Economic Warfare

Dutch spirits, East Indians, and Hindu deities in Guyana: Contests over land

AbstractIn modern‐day Guyana (formerly British Guiana) residents of the coastal region of the country are susceptible to other‐than‐human powers: the spirits of Dutch colonizers, who claim ownership over the land, especially in areas where sugar plantations once operated. Regarded as the “masters of the land,” or “boundary masters,” Dutch spirits demand offerings and the recognition of land rights from their human co‐habitants. Through a description of rituals towards the land performed by members of a heterodox Hindu sect, the worship of the goddess Kali, this article addresses territorial sovereignty through the lens of lived and embodied practices of co‐habitation between East Indians and Dutch spirits, giving special attention to the processes of establishing proprietary rights over the land through such acts as planting trees.

British-American Coordination to Overthrow Cheddi Jagan Government in British Guiana1961-1964

The research studies the coordination of efforts between the United States and Britain towards the government of President Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana, specifically for the years (1961-1964), as it witnessed clear efforts to thwart and get rid of it by obstructing its efforts with economic reform, and working to delay the realization of its aspirations to obtain independence from British.By not giving them loans or foreign aid to help Guyana's weak economy, or inciting and financing internal strikes, such as trade unions, and among the US-British efforts to bring down the,work to change the electoral system .