Belize

From the great Maya cities of Caracol, Xunantunich and Lamanai, through the logwood and mahogany camps of the British Baymen, the slavery on which they rested and the Creole, Garifuna, Maya and Mestizo society that grew up around them, to the colony of British Honduras and independence as Belize on 21 September 1981 — its frontier still claimed by Guatemala before the International Court of Justice.

Belize is a small, English-speaking nation on the Caribbean coast of Central America, the only country in the region with a British colonial past rather than a Spanish one. Its lowland forests were once dense with Maya settlement — Caracol, Xunantunich, Lamanai and Altun Ha among them — before the Classic Maya world unravelled in the ninth and tenth centuries. From the seventeenth century British buccaneers and woodcutters, the "Baymen", settled the coast to cut logwood and then mahogany, importing enslaved Africans for the work and repelling a final Spanish assault at the Battle of St. George's Caye in 1798; the colony of British Honduras was formally constituted in 1862. A distinctive plural society of Creoles, Garifuna, Maya and Mestizos took shape, and under George Cadle Price and the People's United Party the colony moved through self-government to independence as Belize on 21 September 1981 — though Guatemala's long-standing claim to the territory, neutrally before the International Court of Justice since 2019, remains unresolved.