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 of colonial elites and a local press more than willing to serve as their mouthpiece. Barbara and Victor Bulmer-Thomas continue this revisionist tradition of scholarship, but do so in a unique way by drawing on substantive economic data from the settlement's origin to the present day.
The Economic History of Belize demarcates four eras reflecting distinct phases of the colony's insertion into the world economy, and provides fascinating insights into its evolving configurations of class and power over 350 years. The first phase corresponded to the enclave's establishment by British settlers and their African (and possibly Indian) slaves, none of whom had any legal basis to extract resources on Spanish territory. During this time the settlement's fortunes were tied to a single commodity: logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), a source of clothing dye highly desired by the developing textile industries of Europe. As logwood was found only on the Yucatán peninsula, the Spanish naturally viewed English timber-cutters as a profound threat to their global monopoly. Periodically, the ‘Baymen’ and their slaves were displaced by Spanish raids to other areas of English control, only to return when the threat of attack receded. The insecurity of their occupation meant that little was invested in local production and consumption, a pattern that continued well into the twentieth century. As logwood was introduced into other British (and French) colonies, and substitutes became available to textile manufacturers, its price plummeted by more than 90 per cent. Ironically, the trade ceased to be profitable just as Spain granted settlers the legal right to extract logwood under the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
This second phase, which began with Spanish legal recognition, was marked by a shift to mahogany as a primary export. In much demand for use in ships, furniture and railway coaches, mahogany initially commanded a high price on the world market, but this too declined as ship construction shifted to iron and railroad construction levelled off by the mid-nineteenth century. As Spain ceded control to newly independent republics, British superintendents found themselves negotiating new boundaries with Mexico and Guatemala. During this period, as Belize languished in a liminal state just short of formal recognition as a colony, timber companies and merchants openly flaunted British laws that did not suit their interests. Increasingly, they oriented their exports to the United States rather than the United Kingdom, as the Navigation Acts that limited non-imperial trade were deemed inapplicable to the settlement. At the same time, some merchants thrived from a growing entrepôt trade linking Central America and the Caribbean. Seeking to establish some formal control over the territory, England offered to contribute funds for a road linking the settlement to Guatemala in exchange for recognition of British sovereignty. The treaty lapsed when Guatemala failed to ratify it on time and Britain refused to extend the ratification deadline. There ensued more than a century of contestation over the territory and its borders, occasionally reflected in claims by Guatemalan militarists that ‘Belice es nuestro’. As a forestry-based economy consolidated itself well into a third phase of development (following official colonial status in 1862), so too did the impediments to sustained growth associated with an extractive industry. Relying on rivers to float mahogany to the coast, the colony claimed virtually no internal roads until the 1930s; this further impeded agricultural activity and deepened a perilous dependence on imported food. After most accessible mahogany reserves were depleted by the 1920s, the shortfall in exports was compounded by a crash in foreign demand during the Depression. Belizean workers weathered those years in a state of abject misery, even exceeding the poverty of their West Indian counterparts.
It has been something of a cliché among critical scholars that formal independence in the Caribbean did little to alter neo-colonial structures of global exchange and domination. The authors heavily qualify this assumption, pointing out that with independence Belize now qualified for sources of development aid, grants and preferential trading arrangements only available to sovereign states. Yet they also observe that such initiatives have not altered the fundamentally extractive nature of the economy, which has often served to retard investment and innovation just when such processes were most needed. The long-overdue expansion of agriculture (mostly sugar and citrus) in the 1950s occurred at the same time that traditional agricultural exports experienced falling prices on global markets. Thirty years later Belize embraced a growth strategy tied to foreign tourism, just as other Caribbean countries were recognising the vagaries and environmental destruction associated with tourist-based development. Since the advent of modest oil exports in 2006, the country has seen a rise in its GDP per capita, along with growing income inequality, a pattern commonly associated with petroleum exports. In examining this latest development against 350 years of economic history, the authors make a compelling case that the country's unsustainable development strategies seem to ever repeat the cyclical errors of the past. These are reflected in short-term periods of ‘boom’ followed by prolonged ‘busts’ as world markets turn against the narrow range of commodities that form the country's lifeblood. Those interested in the impediments to development in a small, export-oriented economy would be well-advised to heed the lessons of the Economic History of Belize. Scholars of Belize, in particular, will also discover within this text two delightful if somewhat digressive chapters devoted respectively to the origin of the settlement itself and the ill-fated efforts of colonial authorities to promote agricultural diversification through a ‘Botanic Station’ at the end of the nineteenth century.
