British Guiana
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British Guiana ( English British Guiana ) was the name of a colony of the United Kingdom on the north coast of South America . It has formed the independent state of Guyana since 1966 .
First Dutch branches
The first trading posts were set up by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) between 1616 and 1621. For their protection, the WIC built Fort Kykoveral in 1616 on a river island at the confluence of the Mazaruni and Cuyuní , in today's Cuyuni-Mazaruni region . The first trading post on Berbice was established in 1624. At that time, three attempts to establish English branches here were unsuccessful.
Barter with natives was also carried out on the Pomeroon and Essequibo rivers . From this and from the first plantings, the colonies Essequibo and Berbice emerged . From 1745 the banks of the Demerara , which belonged to Essequibo, were used more intensively for plantation management. During the second half of the 18th century, this area got its own character as Demerara . Together with today's Suriname , this territory on the north coast of South America was also known under the collective name of Dutch Guiana .
From the end of the 18th century, the individual areas changed hands several times between the colonial powers of the Netherlands, Great Britain and France .
The British colony
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After the Napoleonic Wars , the colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice fell definitively to Great Britain through the British-Dutch Treaty of August 13, 1814.
On July 21, 1831, these three colonies were merged to form British Guiana.
The exact definition of the border lines led to disputes with the neighboring states of Venezuela, Brazil and Dutch Guiana. The demarcation with Venezuela was regulated in 1899.
In order to define the border with Brazil in a disputed area in the southwest since 1843, the United Kingdom and Brazil agreed in 1901 that King Vittorio Emanuele III. to call from Italy as referee. In 1904 the king awarded a 10,000 km² area south of the Roraima-Tepui to Brazil (now part of the state of Roraima ) and rejected further Brazilian claims.
In 1953 British forces intervened in British Guiana. Great Britain feared that the married couple Janet and Cheddi Jagan and the People's Progressive Party (PPP) they founded wanted to make Guyana a socialist or communist state.
British Guiana gained independence from Great Britain on May 26, 1966 and was declared a Cooperative Republic of Guyana on February 23, 1970.
population
In 1834 slavery was abolished. After the subsequent four-year obligation to work for the former slaves, which was euphemistically referred to as "apprenticeship" (apprenticeship), and the loss of workers, especially on the plantations, the British "enlisted" contract workers from British India as replacements from 1838 .
Indian contract workers (“indentured laborers”) were imported for the plantations from Asian parts of the Empire until the First World War. The main cultivation and export products were sugar or molasses and rum, rubber (“para rubber”) and coffee. Balata were mainly tapped by the natives in the primeval forests. In the interwar period, a good third of their exports went to Great Britain and a further quarter to the USA and Canada.
As of December 31, 1918, there were 310,972 inhabitants, of which around 14,000 were whites (British and Portuguese), 2,874 Chinese, 134,670 Indians (with 19,167 children), of whom 37,561 were workers with gag contracts, mixed race and negroes 153,051 and an estimated 7,000 natives were developed Districts. The latter lived mainly in the less developed northwest west of the Pomeroon in the border area with Venezuela.
After the First World War, travelers who booked a passage in 2nd or 3rd class had to pay a large deposit to secure their livelihood. This was £ 5 for British subjects of West India and £ 30 for others.
administration
The administrative seat was Georgetown , which was called Starbroek until 1812 .
Berbice had its own administration until 1831. The constitution created afterwards until 1891 created three administrative organs: Governor, Court of Policy and Combined Court. The Combined Court was responsible for taxation. The latter included all members of the Policy Court, the governor and six financial representatives . The first two institutions together formed an executive and legislative branch.
Since 1837 there has been a mayor and a town council in Georgetown and New Amsterdam .
A certain separation of powers took place with the reform of 1891/1892: the Court of Policy remained responsible for all legislation, except for the budget. An Executive Council was created, following the general example of the British colonies of the time . This ex officio included the governor, the “colonial secretary” and the attorney general. There were also up to six (appointed) members.
The combined court retained budgetary rights. In addition to the governor, it consisted of seven officials who were not allowed to vote against the administration, as well as eight members elected for a term of office not exceeding five years. The six financial representatives of the Policy Court were also members.
British Guiana became a crown colony in 1928 . The British Guiana Act brought administrative practice even more in line with the practice of other colonies. Instead of the Combined and Policy Court , there was now a Legislative Council with up to 19 non-civil servants, 14 of whom were elected according to property-based census voting and five were appointed. Women and clergy did not have the right to stand for election.
The civil law of the Dutch, based on Roman law , remained in force until January 1, 1917. This was followed by adaptation to British common law practice , which also applied to criminal law. The first instance was the Magistrate′s Courts (local courts). The second instance was the Supreme Court with a “chief justice” and another judge. The third jurisdiction for British Guiana was the West Indian Court of Appeal from 1919, when this appeals court was created, until the West Indian Federation was established in 1958 .
From 1876 denominational schools for general education were supported by the state. Government College in Georgetown corresponded to the level of an English grammar school. A reformatory for boys (“industrial school”) was set up in Onderneeming in 1907 .
Public health after 1900 focused on reducing the most common tropical diseases. Typhus became notifiable, water reservoirs were treated against malaria and quinine was sold cheaply in post offices. The medical department was also responsible for the prison administration. There was a state leprosy colony and a madhouse (“lunatic asylum”).
The colony's currency of account was the dollar, the value of which was 4 ' 2d. was fixed. The notes of the Royal Bank of Canada circulated on banknotes until the government started producing its own money. Initially, from 1916 onwards, these were only notes of 1 and 2 dollars, only with the series from 1938 did higher values follow. The postal administration also maintained the only savings bank.
Economy and Transport
In addition to the above-mentioned export fruits, rice, limes and coconuts were mainly grown for their own use. The latter for fat production. Cattle were raised for meat export on the coast and even more so in locations over 500 feet in the Rupununi savannah .
The Forestry Department, established in 1925 , is responsible for 200,000 km² of forest area, licensed plantation use and the felling of indigenous hardwood, especially Chlorocardium rodiei.
In the Konawaruk River in particular, gold was machine washed. Diamonds were extracted from alluvial soils. The mining of bauxite began in 1914. It was first mined by the Demerara Bauxite Company, a subsidiary of Alcoa , which is still active at Suralco, and, from the 1920s, the British and Colonial Bauxite Company .
The three rivers are navigable as far as the waterfalls, which are located far inward. Commercial ferry and boat traffic was naturally significant. Roads connecting the important places were built before the First World War. There was an electric tram in Georgetown since 1878.
The first railway on the South American continent was the eight-kilometer coastal line from Georgetown to Plaisance from 1848, which was later extended to almost 100 km to the west bank of the Berbice near Rosignol .
Another route started in Vreed en Hoop and ran 30 km to Parika .
Research trips
In 1841 the German explorer Robert Hermann Schomburgk was commissioned by the British government to fix the east and west borders of British Guiana. After three years of work, he had established the border with Venezuela and Dutch Guiana , today's Suriname , known today as the “Schomburgk Line” .
In addition, the British geologist and topographer Charles B. Brown toured the mostly unexplored hinterland of the region between Suriname and Venezuela from 1868 to 1871 on behalf of the colonial administration. Brown was entrusted with the exact measurement of the rivers and geological investigations. Thanks to his 40-month research trips in the tropical jungle, numerous local settlements , deposits of mineral resources and topographical features in the interior of the country were documented.
See also
literature
- English Guiana . In: Illustrirte Zeitung . No. 15 . J. J. Weber, Leipzig October 7, 1843, p. 227-229 ( books.google.de ).
- Clementi, Cecil [Government Secretary from 1913, later Governor]; Chinese in British Guiana ; Georgetown 1915 (Argosy)
- Federation of British Industries; Anglo-South American handbook; 1921; Pp. 169-90
- Jagan, Cheddi [Prime Minister 1957-64]; Forbidden freedom: the story of British Guiana; London 1989 (Hansib Publ.)
- Foreman, John; [Geography of British Guiana];
- Rayner, Thomas Crossley [eds.]; Laws of British Guiana; London 1905 (Waterlow & Sons), 5 vols.
- Raven, stepen; US Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story; 2005 (University of North Carolina Press); ISBN 080782979X ; [History 1953-69.]
- Rodway, James; Hand-book of British Guiana ; Georgetown 1893 (Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana)
- Smith, Raymond Thomas; British Guiana; London 1962 (Oxford Univ. Pr.)
- South American handbook; Bath 1935 (Trade & Travel Publ.), Pp. 194-205
Individual evidence
- ↑ Anna-Katharina Kraemer: Acquisition as a territorial acquisition title in international law Univ.-Diss., Osnabrück 2016, p. 165 f.
- ↑ Everard Ferdinand Im Thurn: Boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela . s. l. 1879
- ^ The Guiana Boundary Case (Brazil, Great Britain); Reports of International Arbritral Awards, XI, pp. 11–23 (English)
- ↑ Brown; Charles B .: Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana; London 1876. ( digitized ).
- ^ Odeen Ishmael: The Guyana story. From earliest times to independence . Xlibris, Bloomington 2014, ISBN 978-1-479-79589-5 , p. 338.
- ^ West Indian Court of Appeal. A bill to provide for the establishment of a Court of Appeal for certain of His Majesty's colonies in the West Indies . Proquest, Cambridge 1919.
- ↑ Report: Travels in British Guiana in the years 1840–1844: together with a fauna and flora of Guiana based on models by Johannes Müller, Ehrenberg, Erichson, Klotzsch, Troschel, Cabanis and others; 1847, in several volumes