Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Barbara Bulmer-Thomas and Victor Bulmer-Thomas , The Economic History of Belize from the 17th Century to Post-Independence (Belize : Cubola Books , 2012), pp. 214, $24.00, pb.
Reviews
As a former British colony in Central America, Belize occupies an ambiguous position between its Latin neighbours and the Anglophone Caribbean to which it retains some cultural and political affinity. Until the final years of the colonial period (which only ended in 1981), most historiography drew from a self-satisfied if largely mythical discourse that might be termed 'Belizean exceptionalism'. Older accounts portrayed the colony as a refuge of freedom and British rectitude surrounded by corrupt and autocratic 'Spanish' states. Once regarded as one of the most authoritative historical accounts of the colony, Waddell's British Honduras: A Historical and Contemporary Survey (Oxford University Press, 1961) uncritically upheld the 'benign' nature of slavery in Belize - a claim originating, not surprisingly, from slave owners themselves.
As Belize moved arduously toward independence, a process complicated by Guatemalan claims to its territory, there emerged a more critical historiography revealing profound divisions of class, colour and land tenure that cross-cut colonial society. While differing from their West Indian planter counterparts by employing workers as dispersed, highly mobile timber gangs, the colony's elites were no less grasping in their control of land and labour in the years after slavery. Unlike most of the Caribbean, which saw the emergence of smallholder farming following the 1897 West India Commission, these reforms were adamantly resisted by the Belizean 'forestocracy', which staved off agricultural initiatives until the 1950s to deny employment alternatives to timber workers. The works of Bolland, Shoman, Ashdown and most recently Macpherson rendered obsolete the celebratory 'official' histories of the past, mostly by evoking the voices of subaltern subjects captured in archival records and the more self-incriminating accounts...