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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2021
Taking mid-nineteenth century Belize as a case study, this article considers the role of migration in forming political, legal, and spatial geographies in a region with weak state institutions and disputed borders. The Caste War—a series of conflicts starting in 1847 in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán— resulted in the movement of thousands of people into the neighboring British settlement of Belize. This population movement reshaped the interface between the metropole and the settlement. This was a colony-defining moment in the development of Belize, leading to an extension of imperial control that eventually culminated in the transition to Crown colony in 1871. The refugee crisis was tied to broader Atlantic questions around asylum, law and empire. The benevolent treatment of refugees became the gauge of a “civilized” colony until the refugee crisis turned into a race crisis. This article examines how local administrators used a humanitarian discourse to enshrine white settler colonialism in a territory suddenly inhabited by a foreign-born multi-ethnic majority. The refugee label became a way to secure British sovereignty over the territory and its inhabitants, including non-British subjects, while extracting resources from the newcomers.
1. Until the name of the colony changed from British Honduras to Belize in 1973, the name “Belize” referred to the town of Belize on the Caribbean coast. In this article, the name “Belize” refers to the territory of British Honduras and present-day Belize. On the Caste War, see Rugeley, Terry, Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatán, 1800–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Dumond, Don E., The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatán (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997)Google Scholar. For a summary of the historiography, see Michele McArdle Stephens, “Caste Wars in Yucatán,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2017. https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-386 (accessed October 2, 2019).
2. Christopher Hempstead to James Buchanan, May 26, 1848, Despatches from United States consuls in Belize, 1847–1906, Records of the Department of State, National Archives and Records Service, Washington D.C. (hereafter NARA), National Archives Microfilm Publication T334, roll 1.
3. Bolland, O. Nigel, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 4Google Scholar.
4. Acts of Parliament, 57 Geo. III, chap. 53, 1817.
5. M. Bianet Castellanos, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism in Latin America,” American Quarterly 69 (2017): 777–81.
6. Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Caroline Shaw, Britannia's Embrace. Modern Humanitarism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
7. C.R. Pennel, “The Origins of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act and the Extension of British Sovereignty,” Historical Research 83 (2010): 465–85; Josiah Kaplan and Brownen Everill, eds., The History and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention and Aid in Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Fae Dussart and Alan Lester, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Luke Glanville, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Lauren Benton, Bain Atwood, and Adam Clulow, eds., Protection and Empire: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Matthew Hilton, Emily Baughan, Eleanor Davey, Bronwen Everill, Kevin O'Sullivan, and Tehila Sasson, “History and Humanitarianism: A Conversation,” Past & Present 241 (2018): 1–38.
8. Caroline Shaw, “Success in a Failed Campaign: The French Refugees of Jersey and the Making of an Abstract ‘Right to Refuge,’” Journal of British Studies 57 (2018): 493–515.
9. Shaw, Britannia's Embrace, 6–7, 80.
10. Bolland, Formation, 4.
11. Shaw, Britannia's Embrace, 74–75; see also ch. 4, 5, and 7.
12. Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Rosa Torras Conangla, “Los refugiados mayas yucatecos en la colonización de El Petén: Vicisitudes de una frontera,” Boletín Americanista 2 (2014): 15–32.
13. On this question of worthy and unworthy refugees today, Didier Fassin argues that debates about refugees have shifted from a legal question of rights to a moral question of favor, “The Precarious Truth of Asylum,” Public Culture 25 (2013): 39–63.
14. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 145–49; Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Traveling Laws: Buton and the Draft act for the Protection and Amelioration of the Aborigines 1838,” in Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Entanglements, and Legacies, ed. Shannaugh Doresett and John McLaren (New York: Routledge, 2014), 171–86; and Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 117 (2012), 92–121.
15. Adam Sitze, “Foreword,” in Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, ed. Adam Sitze and trans. Elisabeth Fay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxii. An excellent overview is Fabricio Prado, “The Fringes of Empires: Recent Scholarship on Colonial Frontiers and Borderlands in Latin America,” History Compass 10 (2012): 318–33.
16. The main analysis is O. Nigel Bolland, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize. Essays in Historical Sociology (1988. Reprint, Belize: Cubola, 2003), 100–15, whose ethno-historical approach focuses on Maya resistance to the British. See also Angel Eduardo Cal, “Anglo Maya Contact in Northern Belize: A Study of British Policy toward the Maya during the Caste War of Yucatán, 1847–1872” (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, 1983), which explores how local authorities supported the Santa Cruz Maya in their fight against the state of Yucatán and the Icaiche Maya; Elisabeth Cunin and Odile Hoffman, “From Colonial Domination to the Making of the Nation: Ethno-Racial Categories in Censuses and Reports and their Political Uses in Belize, 19th-20th Centuries,” Caribbean Studies 41 (2013): 31–60, looks at processes of racial-ethnic classification; Rajeshwari Dutt, “Business as Usual: Maya and Merchants on Yucatan-Belize border at the Onset of the Caste War,” The Americas 74 (2017): 201–26, shows that merchants and traders influenced British policies toward the frontier. See also Dutt's Empire on Edge: The British Struggle for Order in Belize during Yucatán's Caste War, 1847–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
17. Herbert Curry, “British Honduras: From Public Meeting to Crown Colony,” The Americas 13 (1956): 27–28; and Brendan Gillis, The Specter of Peace (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 10–12.
18. Superintendent Despard, “Narrative,” 1790, The National Archives U.K. (hereafter TNA) CO 123/10.
19. Bolland, Colonialism, 37; and Curry, “British Honduras,” 39–40.
20. Superintendent and Commandant George Arthur to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies, March 9, 1822, British Honduras papers, Cambridge University, Archives of the Royal Commonwealth Society (hereafter RCS/RCMS) 270, box 2.
21. Curry, “British Honduras,” 38.
22. Ibid.
23. Criminal and Civil Justice in the West Indies and South America, 2nd series, 3rd report, Parliamentary Papers, vol. 24, No. 3334, session 1829, 14.
24. Colonial Office, April 28, 1849, TNA, CO 123/57.
25. Archibald Gibbs, British Honduras: An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Colony from its Settlement (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883), 667.
26. Minutes of September 22, 1841, TNA, CO 267/164.
27. David Hannell, “The Ionian Islands under the British Protectorate: Social and Economic Problems,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 7 (1989): 105–32.
28. “Memorial,” Honduras Observer (March 10, 1841), 1–2.
29. Lord John Russell to Colonel Alexander MacDonald, February 8, 1842, TNA, CO 124/5.
30. Lindsay Bristowe and Philip Wright, The Handbook of British Honduras for 1888–1889 (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888), 32.
31. Cited in David Fieldhouse, ed., Select Documents on the Constitutional on the Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 235; and Gibbs, British Honduras, 106.
32. Sir Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: W. Clarke, 1809), 180.
33. Supreme Court of British Honduras, Temple's charge to the jury, August 22, 1848, RCS/RCMS 268/1.
34. Dussart and Lester, Colonization, 37–76.
35. Supreme Court of British Honduras, Temple's charge to the jury, August 22, 1848, RCS/RCMS 268/1. Emphasis in the original.
36. Ibid.
37. Act of Parliament 59 Geo. III chap. 44, 1817. This act was supplemented by the Trials of Murders, Manslaughters, Rapes, Robberies, and Burglaries committed in Honduras Act in 1819, Act of Parliament 59 Geo. III, chap. 44, 1819.
38. Report of Trial of October 17, 1846, RCS/RCMS 269/22.
39. Supreme Court of British Honduras, Temple's charge to the jury, August 22, 1848, RCS/RCMS 268/2.
40. Laura Caso Barrera and Mario M. Aliphat Fernández, “De antiguos territorios coloniales a nuevas fronteras republicanas: la Guerra de Castas y los límites del suroeste de México, 1821–1893,” Historia Crítica 59 (2016): 81–100; and Christine Kray and Jason Yaeger, “Re-Centering the Narrative: British Colonial Memory and the San Pedro Maya,” in Archaeology of the British Empire in Latin America, ed. Charles E. Orser, Jr. (New York: Springer, 2019), 73–97.
41. Supreme Court of British Honduras, Temple's charge to the jury, August 22, 1848, RCS/RCMS 268/2.
42. Queen vs. Rafael Monteil and Domingo Martinez, for murder of an Indian, name unknown; Queen vs. Juan Micanor Oliear, and Domingo Martinez, for murder of an Indian, name unknown, August 22, 1848, RCS/RCMS 268/2.
43. Luke Smyth O'Connor, “An Exploring Ramble Among the Indios Bravos, in British Honduras,” Littell's Living Age 34 (1852): 513.
44. Mexican Minister to Clarendon, May 16, 1853, TNA, FO 50/272.
45. Clarendon to Consul of Mexico, July 4, 1854, TNA, FO 50/272.
46. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, September 16, 1854, TNA, CO 123/89 and Governor of Jamaica to Lord Grey, October 4, 1854, TNA, CO 123/89.
47. Cited in Dutt, “Business as Usual,” 218.
48. Ibid.
49. Supreme Court, Case for piracy upon high seas, October 1850, RCS/RCMS 268/3.
50. Parkinson to Lord Grey, November 16, 1852, TNA, CO 123/85.
51. Curry, “British Honduras,” 41.
52. On colonial humanitarian governance in Honduras, see Dussart and Lester, Colonization, 45–60.
53. Andrew Porter, “Trusteeship, Antislavery and Humanitarianism,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3:198–221.
54. Edmund Burke to William Stevenson, May 28, 1855, TNA, CO 123/90.
55. Matthew Restall, “Crossing to Safety? Frontier Flight in Eighteenth-Century Belize and Yucatán,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94 (2014): 409–11.
56. Lieutenant Governor to Magistrates, January 9, 1822, RCSM 270/48.
57. Frederick Crow, The Gospel in Central America (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850), 470. On missionaries and humanitarianism in other parts of the empire, especially Sierra Leone, see, for example, Bronwen Everill, “Bridgeheads of Empire? Liberated African Missionaries in West Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2012): 789–805; and Padraic X Scanlan, “The Colonial Rebirth of British Anti-Slavery: The Liberated African Villages of Sierra Leone, 1815–1823,” The American Historical Review 121 (2016): 1085–113.
58. Hempstead to Bachanan, July 29, 1848, Despatches from United States consuls in Belize, NARA, T334, roll 1.
59. Superintendent to Governor of Jamaica, July 16, 1857, TNA, FO 39/3.
60. Chief Justice Temple, “British Honduras,” DeBow Review 6 (1869): 461.
61. Louis De Armond, “Justo Sierra O'Reilly and Yucatecan-United States Relations, 1847–1848,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 31 (1951): 420–36.
62. Hempstead to Buchanan, July 29, 1848, Despatches from United States consuls in Belize, NARA, National Archives Microfilm Publication T334, roll 1.
63. David Kazanjian, The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 133–53.
64. El Fénix, December 25, 1849. See Ginón Xhail Bojorquez Palma, “Opinión y poder: juegos de la prensa en Yucatán durante la Guerra de Castas,” Americanía. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos 2 (2015): 74–98. For a discussion of eighteenth-century Spanish terms (bárbaros, salvajes, bravos) as meaning “savage,” see David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 12–15.
65. Chief Justice Temple, “British Honduras,” Journal of the Society of the Arts 5 (1857): 121.
66. On the centrality of religious language and morality in humanitarian narratives, see Abigail Green, “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered, National,” The Historical Journal 57 (2014): 1157–75.
67. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, July 16, 1857, TNA, FO 39/3.
68. Richard Fletcher to Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, December 30, 1867, in Maya Wars: Ethnographic Accounts from Nineteenth-Century Yucatán, ed. Terry Rugeley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 104, 110.
69. O'Connor, “An Exploring Ramble,” 513.
70. Bristowe and Wright, Handbook, 27.
71. “Captivity Narrative of José Maria Rosado (1915),” in Rugeley, Maya Wars, 68–78.
72. Gibbs, British Honduras, 4.
73. Robert D. Aguirre, “Agencies of the Letter: The Foreign Office and the Ruins of Central America,” Victorian Studies 46 (2004): 290–92.
74. John Alder Burdon, Archives of British Honduras (London: Sifton, Praed and Co., 1935), 3:409.
75. British Museum Records, 1757–1878: 207–11; Temple, “Notes on Treasure Trove,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 15 (1859): 100–104.
76. Lázaro Pavía, Los Ingleses en México: o sea en origen y fundación de las colonial Británicas en el seno mexicano (México: Imprenta de José V. Castillo, 1888), 9.
77. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, September 17, 1858, TNA, CO 123/97.
78. Wayne M. Clegern, British Honduras: Colonial Dead End, 1859–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 10–11.
79. Superintendent to Burke and Blake, May 8, 1858, TNA, CO 123/96.
80. Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2017), 7–8.
81. Coke, “Calvin's Case,” Calvin's Case 7 Co. Rep. 1a, 77 ER 377, in The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, In Thirteen Parts, A New Edition (London: Joseph Butterworth and Son 1826), 4:10.
82. Gibbs, British Honduras, 107.
83. Burdon, Archives, 3:135
84. William Stevenson to the Governor of Jamaica, August 11, 1856, TNA, CO 123/94. Two years earlier, a circular cautioned Mexican citizens that they would lose the right of British protection if they engaged in acts of insurrection, “Circular addressed to the Mexican citizens Don Sebastian Mole and eight others residing in British Honduras,” March 17, 1854, TNA, CO 123/89.
85. Bolland, Colonialism, 113.
86. Derby to Lafragua, July 28, 1874, TNA, FO 50/433.
87. Henry Labouchere to Governor of Jamaica, December 12, 1857, TNA, FO 50/433.
88. Superintendent to Governor of Jamaica, August 13, 1857, TNA, FO 39/3.
89. Captain William Anderson to Superintendent, February 15, 1858, in Rugeley, Maya Wars, 65–67.
90. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, March 13, 1858, TNA, CO 123/96.
91. Paul Sullivan, Unfinished Conversations: Mayas and Foreigners Between Two Wars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 120.
92. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, March 13, 1858, TNA, FO 39/5; and Clegern, British Honduras, 13.
93. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, February 17, 1858, TNA, FO 39/5.
94. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, July 17, 1858, in Burdon, Archives, 3:207–8; and Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, June 22, 1859, in Burdon, Archives, 3:225.
95. Lieutenant Seymour, Bando, March 8, 1858, Biblioteca Virtual de Yucatán XI-1855-054, http://www.bibliotecavirtualdeyucatan.com.mx (accessed April 15, 2019).
96. Act for Removal of Aliens, Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, March 13, 1858, TNA, CO 123/96.
97. Superintendent to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, September 17, 1858, TNA, CO 123/97.
98. Address by Superintendent to Legislative Assembly, January 21, 1858, TNA, CO 126/3. A detailed account of the alcalde system is in Bolland, Colonialism, 133–38.
99. Nigel O. Bolland, “Labour control and resistance in Belize in the century after 1838,” Slavery and Abolition 7 (1986): 178; and Torrens O. Nigel Bolland and Assad Shoman, Land in Belize, 1765–1871 (Mona: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1977), 72–80.
100. Bolland and Shoman, Land in Belize, 66; Greg Taylor, “Torrens’ Contemporaneous Antipodean Simulacrum,” American Journal of Legal History 49 (2007): 400; and Christine Kray, Minette Church, and Jason Yaeger, “Designs on/of the Land: Competing Visions, Displacement, and Landscape Memory in British Colonial Honduras,” in Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas, ed. Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil Gutierrez (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 53–78.
101. Bolland and Shoman, Land in Belize, 116–20.
102. “Multiple Classified Ads,” London Evening Standard (March 10, 1863), 2.
103. “Immigration,” British Honduras Colonist and Belize Advertiser (March 11, 1865), 1.
104. Burdon, Archives, 3:262–67.
105. Secretary of State to Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, September 22, 1865, Burdon, Archives, 3:264.
106. “Emigration to British Honduras,” Journal of the Society of the Arts 7 (1858): 24–25. A short-lived scheme was set up in 1863; see Phillip W. Magness, “The British Honduras Colony: Black Emigrationist Support for Colonization in the Lincoln Presidency,” Slavery & Abolition 34 (2003): 39–60.
107. Donald Simmons, A Study of the Efforts of Confederate Exiles to Establish Settlements in British Honduras, 1861–1870 (Jefferson: McFarland and Company Publishers, 2001).
108. Lieutenant Governor to Governor of Jamaica, April 16, 186, Burdon, Archives, 3:286.
109. Chief Justice Temple, “British Honduras,” DeBow's Review 6 (1869): 257.
110. Chief Justice Temple, “British Honduras,” Journal of the Society of the Arts 5 (1857): 113.
111. Superintendent to Governor of Jamaica, Report on the Blue book of Settlement of the Year 1858, June 22, 1859, Burdon, Archives, 3:214.
112. Petition, March 7, 1861, Burdon, Archives, 3:234–36.
113. Bolland, Formation, 140.
114. John Burdon, “Historical Note,” in Burdon, Archives, 1:4.
115. Frederick Rogers's Report, February 8, 1860, TNA, CO 123/103; Gibbs, British Honduras, 109–13; and Burdon, Archives, 3:80–83 and 3: 115–17.
116. British Honduras Grand Court Records, January 11, 1848, Latin American Library at Tulane, folder 1.
117. “The Public of Honduras and Colonel Fancourt,” Simmonds's Colonial Magazine 14 (May 1848), 91.
118. “Chief Justice Temple,” Honduras Gazette (October 19, 1861), 13.
119. Gibbs, British Honduras, 142–43.
120. Bristowe and Wright, Handbook, 27–28.
121. Gibbs, British Honduras, 134–38.
122. Ibid.
123. Lieutenant Governor to Governor of Jamaica, August 14, 1866, 272, in Burdon, Archives, 3:272
124. “Proclama de su magestad la Reina. Que observen y respeten la dicha neutralidad para con Yucatán,” Periódico Oficial del Estado de Yucatán. El Constitucional 403 (May 8, 1861): 1; and British Honduras Company, “On the Means of Defence for the British Honduras,” September 20, 1864, TNA, CO 123/118.
125. Regulations, in Memorandum by Lieutenant Governor, February 28, 1867, Burdon, Archives, 3:283.
126. Burdon, Archives, 3:273.
127. Bolland, Colonialism, 95.
128. Don E. Dumond, “Independent Maya of the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Anthropology and History in Yucatán, ed. Grant Jones (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), 114–15.
129. Rajeshwari Dutt locates a peak of arrests between 1871 and 1873 followed by a steady decline; Rajeshwari Dutt, “Loyal Subjects at Empire's Edge: Hispanics in the Vision of a Belizean Colonial Nation, 1882–1898,” Hispanic American Historical Review 99 (2019): 53–54.
130. Cunin and Hoffman, “From Colonial Domination,” 39.
131. Superintendent to Governor of Jamaica, July 16, 1857, TNA, FO 39/3.
132. Shaw, Britannia's Embrace, 205–35; and Bashford, Alison, and McAdam, Jane, “The Right to Asylum: Britain's 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law,” Law and History Review 32 (2014): 309–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
133. Bolland, Colonialism, 91; Donald C. Simmons Jr., “A Study of the Efforts of Confederate Exiles to establish settlement in British Honduras: 1861–1870” (PhD diss., University of Denver, 1992), 94–96; and Harrison-Buck, Eleanor, Houk, Brett A., Kaeding, Adam R., and Bonorden, Brooke, “The Strange Bedfellows of Northern Belize: British Colonialists, Confederate Dreamers, Creole Loggers, and the Caste War Maya of the Late Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 23 (2019): 172–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.