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Protecting Foreigners: The Refugee Crisis on the Belize–Yucatán Border, 1847–71
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2021
Abstract
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.
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References
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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