British Guiana

Three Dutch colonies stapled together by Britain, on a coast that has to be pumped dry to exist. Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice were separate Dutch possessions whose planters had drained the coastal swamp with dykes, canals and sluices, creating cultivated land below sea level that requires continuous maintenance. Britain took them during the Napoleonic wars and united them as British Guiana in 1831. The Demerara rising of 1823, in which some ten thousand enslaved people rebelled, and the death in prison of the missionary John Smith afterwards, did a great deal to turn British opinion against slavery. After emancipation in 1834 the freed population left the estates and bought abandoned plantations collectively as villages, so planters imported indentured labour from India on a scale unmatched anywhere - around two hundred and forty thousand people over eight decades. That created the demographic division that has structured the country's politics ever since. Britain and the United States engineered the removal of the elected premier Cheddi Jagan in the early 1960s. Independence came in 1966. Venezuela has claimed two-thirds of the territory since the nineteenth century. Georgetown was the capital and sits below the high tide line behind a sea wall. The colony covered around 215 thousand square kilometres, most of it forest and almost none of it settled. Sugar estates ran in narrow strips perpendicular to the coast, each with its own drainage. Portuguese from Madeira and Chinese labourers were also recruited. English remained the official language despite the Dutch origin of most place names.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration