This book is a collaboration between Barbara Bulmer-Thomas, a Belizean-born plant taxonomist, and Victor Bulmer-Thomas, her husband and historian of Latin American economic history. Their main goal is to address the need for a one-volume economic history of Belize from the mid-1600s to the present. The book includes an opening chapter that aims to disprove several myths about the beginnings of British settlement in Belize and a later chapter on the Belize Botanical Station that aims to illuminate its origins in British imperial policy and its effects on economic diversification by the 1930s. These goals are largely but not completely met. Although some economic measures need more explicit definition, the prose style is accessible. This and the book's length make it appropriate for undergraduates and the general public, yet its comparative regional analysis will add to specialists' knowledge. The authors have drawn on a wide range of published scholarship as well as historical and contemporary economic documents, though Norman Ashcraft's Colonialism and Underdevelopment: Processes of Political Economic Change in British Honduras (1973) is an odd omission, while reference to the unsound work of mythmaker Emory King is unfortunate.The book can be placed in dialogue with several other recent works. It is a useful corrective to Mavis C. Campbell's speculation about sixteenth-century British settlement in Belize in Becoming Belize: A History of an Outpost of Empire Searching for Identity, 1528–1823 (2011). It complements those parts of Jennifer L. Anderson's Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (2012) that deal with labor organization and unsustainable cutting of wood for export from Belize. And it balances the political emphasis of Assad Shoman's Belize's Independence and Decolonization in Latin America: Guatemala, Britain, and the UN (2010). Still, it is a work of political economy, periodized by Belize's shifts in political status and focused on those parts of the economy created by and of concern to the powers of the day: imperial and international trade policy, taxation, and the key exports of logwood, mahogany, and their successors. The authors are generally critical of imperial failures to check the power of the forestry elite and to diversify exports, although they do not consider alternatives to export dependency itself.The book's strengths are several. It uses direct evidence and sound inference to dismiss myths of either pirate Peter Wallace (who, it turns out, never existed) or shipwrecked sailors beginning British settlement by 1640 and to show instead that settlement probably began in the 1660s. It clearly links geopolitical conditions, imperial policy, and the local elite's successful lobbying to the shifting fortunes of logwood and mahogany exports, to the lucrative entrepôt trade with Spanish Central America, and to the modest success of the botanical station. Its analysis of the postindependence economy is strong, not only because more data is available for analysis but also because the authors address issues of unemployment and poverty. The concluding chapter offers an excellent summary of long-term trends over 350 years while arguing for better economic planning by the national state.Yet this is not a full or definitive economic history. The export sector is addressed unevenly, with little description or analysis of sugar, citrus, bananas, or tourism (beyond cruise ships), especially of the organization of production in each. Even the organization of production in mahogany and the dominance of slave labor in the industry are not clearly described. Nonexport sectors of the economy are marginal to the analysis, including small farming, artisan production, and the informal economy, such as domestic service. This, together with scant mention of grapefruit processing and textile factories, marginalizes women from the narrative of Belize's economic history, which in turn compounds the book's relative silence about Belizean workers' economic concerns, actions, and ideas. These have demonstrably affected elite and imperial economic behavior. For example, the authors find that “public spending … started to fall on a per capita basis after 1834” (p. 88), which suggests elite reaction to ex-slaves' desire for education and land. While the anticolonial labor militance of the 1930s is relegated to a footnote, it clearly prompted colonial reform efforts that foreshadowed imperial development and welfare investments. Finally, while the authors do mention the skewed distribution of wealth from the beginnings of British settlement, they could do more to qualify their own per capita measures such as export values, domestic exports, and merchandise exports. What could it possibly mean to an enslaved mahogany worker in 1820 that Belize had by far the highest export values per head in the entire Caribbean? The later chapters of the book go somewhat further toward humanizing economic history, but both the exploitation of labor and labor's resilience deserve to be more central to this nonetheless valuable addition to Belizean historiography.
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Dec 31, 2021
Xueqin Li + 1
