Guyana

On the South American mainland, Caribbean in culture, and largely below sea level. The Dutch held the three colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice from the seventeenth century and did what the Dutch do: drained the coastal swamp with dykes, canals and sluices, creating a narrow cultivated strip that has to be pumped and walled against the Atlantic permanently. Britain took the colonies during the Napoleonic wars and united them as British Guiana in 1831. The Demerara rebellion of 1823, in which some ten thousand enslaved people rose, and the execution of the missionary John Smith afterwards, did much to turn British opinion against slavery. After emancipation the freed population left the estates and bought villages collectively, so planters imported indentured labour from India on a scale unmatched anywhere - about two hundred and forty thousand people - making Indo-Guyanese the largest group and setting up a racial division in politics that has shaped every election since. Britain and the United States engineered the removal of the elected Marxist premier Cheddi Jagan in the early 1960s, and independence came in 1966 under his rival Forbes Burnham, who then governed increasingly autocratically. Jonestown, where over nine hundred Americans died in 1978, was in the interior. Venezuela claims two-thirds of the country. Offshore oil found in 2015 is transforming its economy. Georgetown, the capital, sits about a metre below high tide behind a sea wall. Kaieteur Falls drops more than two hundred metres in a single uninterrupted plunge. English is the official language, the only case in South America. Most of the country is rainforest with almost no one in it.

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