How Guyana Was Made

Guyana is a place of deep, deep social fractures. It has the 20th highest homicide rate in the world, almost three times the global average. Almost anywhere here in the capital city it’s strongly advised not to walk alone at night.

So how did this tiny paradise get so violent? Unlike Brazil or Colombia or El Salvador, the story of Guyana is a little different. This video looks at how the Europeans smashed together the people of three different continents to create this little colony of sugar.

Books
- John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, 2011
- John Hemming, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, 2008
- Charles C. Mann, 1491: The Americas Before Columbus, 2005
- Charles C. Mann, 1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World, 2011
- McNeill, J. R, Mosquito Empires; Ecology and War in the Greater Carribbean, 2010
- English colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon, 1604-1668, James A. Williamson, 1923

Articles
- The Economist
- Tim Merrill, ed. Guyana: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1992.
- ‘A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas’, Adam Rutherford The Atlantic, 2017
- Suriname: 2016 Country Review, www.countrywatch.com
- ‘Genome-wide Ancestry and Demographic History of African-Descendant Maroon Communities from French Guiana and Suriname’, Fortes-Lima et al, Am J Hum Genet. 2017
- FREIRE, José R. Bessa. “Da ‘fala boa’ ao português na Amazônia brasileira”. Amerindia. Revue d’Ethnolinguistique Amerindienne, Paris, 1983, 8, pp. 39-83
- ‘MI5 files reveal details of 1953 coup that overthrew British Guiana's leaders’, Associated Press, The Guardian, 2011
- Richard Price, ‘Maroons in Guyane: Getting the Numbers Right’, Brill, 7th December 2018
- Scott B. MacDonald, ‘Has anything changed since French Guiana’s 2017 social upheaval?’, April 20, 2021
- ‘A Path to Prosperity for Oil-Rich Guyana’, Harvard International review, 27 September, 2023
- ‘Venezuelans to vote in referendum over large swathe of territory under dispute with Guyana’, AP, December 3rd 2023

00:00 Intro
01:22 Background
02:23 Dutch Guyana
06:47 Essequibo and Bartica
11:41 Fort Island
17:00 The British
19:40 Indentured Labour
21:30 The PPP and PNC
26:30 Racial Division
29:20 Independence