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Guyana Preindependence
Guyana was first colonized by Dutch settlers in the 1600s.
Spanish explorers had ignored the area because it lacked obvious
mineral wealth. Key features of Guyana's current economic
structure, especially the patterns of land use, can be traced to
the period of Dutch stewardship. The Dutch West India Company,
which administered most of the colony from 1621 to 1792, granted
early Dutch and then British settlers ownership over 100-hectare
tracts of land
(see The Coming of the Europeans
, ch. 1). Settlers
augmented these narrow coastal tracts by clearing swampland and
expanding their holdings inland, for several kilometers in some
cases. Many of the large sugar plantations that formed the basis of
the colonial economy were established in this manner. Dutch
settlers also left their mark on the land. They built a system of
dikes and drainage canals on Guyana's low-lying coastal plain,
using techniques developed in the Netherlands. Parts of this
original sea-defense system continued to operate in the 1990s.
Sugar soon emerged as the most important plantation crop. Sugar
was first grown in colonial Guyana in 1658 but was not produced on
a large scale until the late 1700s, about 100 years later than in
the rest of the Caribbean region. Because Guyana's plantation
owners entered the sugar industry late, they were able to import
relatively advanced equipment for milling sugarcane. This
investment in advanced equipment gave the local sugar industry a
firm foundation and made it the leading sector of the local
economy. By 1800 there were an estimated 380 sugar estates along
the coast. In the 1990s, almost two centuries later, the population
was still concentrated on the same coastal strip of land, and sugar
was still one of the nation's two most valuable products.
Guyana's distinct ethnic makeup can be traced to conditions
that prevailed during the colonial period. To supply the labor
required for sugar cultivation, plantation owners at first imported
slaves from West Africa. (The indigenous Amerindian population of
Guyana was small and lived mostly in the impenetrable interior.)
Thousands of slaves were imported each year as plantations
expanded; more than 100,000 slaves worked in the colony by 1830
(see Afro-Guyanese
, ch. 2).
The British formally took over the colony in 1814. But British
Guiana's plantation economy fell into turmoil after 1833, when
Britain passed the Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the
British Colonies. The law provided a five-year transitional period
during which plantation owners were to begin paying soon-to-be-
freed slaves for their services. In practice, however, owners
alienated the slaves by wringing as much work as possible from them
during the last years in bondage. Upon emancipation in 1838, almost
all of the former slaves abandoned the plantations. Agricultural
production plummeted. Some groups of former slaves were able to buy
failed plantations, but they lacked the capital to reconstruct the
complex operations after years of neglect. Most former slaves
reverted to subsistence farming. By 1848 only 20,000 Africans
worked on sugar estates. Even so, few Africans left the country;
more than 40 percent of Guyana's postindependence population was
descended from African slaves.
Faced with the prospect of a complete extinction of the sugar
industry, plantation owners looked abroad for laborers. Free
immigrants had little enthusiasm for the harsh working conditions
on sugar estates, but indentured servants were less discriminating.
Indentured servants typically contracted to work for five years in
exchange for a one-way passage to British Guiana as well as food
and housing. (In some cases, a return voyage was offered in
exchange for extra years of service.) After taking on indentured
servants from Portugal, China, and the
West Indies (see Glossary),
plantation owners turned to what would become the most important
source of immigrants: India. About 240,000 indentured East Indians
were brought to British Guiana between 1838 and 1917, the date when
indentured labor was abolished
(see Indo-Guyanese
, ch. 2). The
British government supported this intraempire transfer of labor. In
the short term, the influx of labor saved British Guiana's sugar
industry. In the long term, the immigration deeply affected British
Guiana's ethnic makeup. Most of the East Indians remained in the
colony after completing their terms of indenture; many became
independent rice farmers. Their descendants, along with later
immigrants from India, accounted for about half of Guyana's
postindependence population.
The racial and ethnic divisions that arose out of the two great
waves of immigration into Guyana in the colonial period had a
profound effect on the country. The divisions between Afro-Guyanese
and Indo-Guyanese persisted into the modern period, in both
economic and political terms. In the early 1990s, most IndoGuyanese were still employed in agriculture, growing sugar and
rice, while the majority of Afro-Guyanese lived in Guyana's few
urban areas
(see
Population Distribution and Settlement Patterns
, ch. 2).
The most important change in Guyana's economy after the turn of
the century was the development of the bauxite (aluminum ore)
industry by North American companies. Mining of bauxite began in
1914, and the ore would alternate with sugar as Guyana's most
valuable product. Guyana possessed vast reserves of bauxite in the
northeast, and by the 1960s, the country had become the world's
fourth largest producer (after the Soviet Union, Jamaica, and
Suriname). Until the 1980s, Guyana was also the leading producer of
calcined bauxite, a high grade of the mineral required for
specialized applications.
Data as of January 1992
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