The Guianas

The Guianas span some nine hundred miles of Atlantic coast in northern South America, from the Orinoco River in the west to the Amazon River delta in the east. The name, from an indigenous word meaning “land of many waters,” is fitting for a region dissected by thousands of rivers and where most people live along the coast. Far off the tourist paths of the Caribbean Sea and Latin America, the Guianas are also understudied, despite having been the scene of intense European imperial rivalries, colonialism, and slavery for several centuries. Though geographically part of South America, the Guiana colonies have historically and culturally been considered part of the circum-Caribbean. Today, the Guianas are made up of three major political territories: the independent Republic of Guyana (formerly British Guiana and composed of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo), the Republic of Suriname (a former Dutch colony first established by the English), and French Guiana or Guyane (once a colony and now an overseas department of France and part of the European Union). Home to numerous and diverse indigenous societies, including Arawakan-speaking groups who migrated to the Caribbean islands, the Guianas were “discovered” by Columbus in 1498 on his third voyage to the Americas, but they became the site of sustained European exploration and conquest only in the early 17th century. In the wake of Sir Walter Ralegh’s wildly exaggerated account of his 1594–1595 voyage, which advanced the myth of a city said to be ruled by a golden king named “El Dorado,” English, Dutch, and French explorers jockeyed for access to the vast region between Spanish claims in the west and Portuguese Brazil in the east. The Dutch were the most successful early colonizers, establishing trading posts and eventually colonies along the Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice Rivers. They also captured Suriname from the English. Much of the scholarship on the Guianas understandably concentrates on Dutch colonialism and especially on Suriname, where the Dutch established a major slave society by the early 18th century. There is also a growing body of scholarship on Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, both under Dutch rule and during the period when the colonies were controlled by Great Britain (1803–1966), when the slave system expanded rapidly until emancipation (1834) and where planters responded to the post-slavery labor crisis by importing large numbers of indentured laborers, primarily from India. The experience of indentured Asian laborers, who also immigrated to Suriname after slavery was abolished there, has also been the subject of much study, both by historians of the Indian diaspora and by Caribbean historians. Overall, scholarship on the Guianas is uneven and linguistically fractured, with a large number of works on the Dutch Guianas and especially Suriname, most of which are written in Dutch; a smaller but sizable body of work on British Guiana is in English, and relatively little scholarship has been done on French Guiana, almost of all of which is in French. The historiography of the Guianas thus reflects the region’s historical divisions along imperial and linguistic lines and the persistent effects of colonialism.