Found for thought as to how easily entire new nations can be created by the random dumping of foreign peoples on its soil...
BELIZE - A POINTLESS COUNTRY THAT SHOULDN’T EXIST? 🇧🇿
While visiting Belize a question that would repeatedly come to mind was “why does this country exist?” Just walking around in what was in some places a borderline shantytown with not much to see and not much ‘going on’ except occasionally apparently crime (to be fair I am sure there were other things ‘going on’ I don’t know what though) it can sometimes be difficult to not think “what is the point of this place?”
The modern day territory of Belize was formerly a part of the Mayan Civilizational Sphere centred in the Yucatán Peninsula, though always a peripheral part of it. Chichén Itzá, Tikal, Tulum - these are the more famous Mayan cities people will know that existed instead in modern day Mexico and Guatemala. Belize was home to a minor Mayan city state called Altun Ha but this august history granted the city’s cultural zenith was still prior to the 10th century, before the Mayan collapse. Thereafter the area became even more of a backwater sparsely populated by indigenous groups until the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century. The Spanish considered it an unremarkable territory excepting for the quality and abundance of its wood but the European powers barely bothered logging until a few opportunistic English buccaneers (ie pirates) decided to take it upon themselves to do so. Gradually it fell into the British orbit and slaves were sent over to facilitate the development of the industry.
This is ‘basically’ the story of the ex-British Honduras colony, after independence renamed Belize. ‘Former Logging Outpost - The Country’. There are a fair few newer nation states like this - especially in Latin America and especially again in the Caribbean - where an ‘empty’ territory useful for cultivating some particular produce; wood, sugarcane etc is surveyed and then ‘has a load of slaves dumped on it’ in order to facilitate extraction. In some places like Guyana or Trinidad after slavery was abolished a second set of indentured (South Asian) labourers were dumped on top of the existing ex-slave populations just because it made the continuation of industry slightly easier, less costly. Some really nonsense mixed countries with permanent structural issues created as a result.
Every country is historically contingent in this way if you go back on a long enough timescale; ie on particular population movements and then on the novel synthetic cultures that emerge from the mixing of populations - but what you notice about somewhere like Belize is the kind of expedient non-sequitur creation of, here, ‘Belizean-ness’. In a way the historical process that created ‘Belize’ was a type of ‘Proto-Yookayification’, maybe you could call it ‘Ethnic Littering’, where (normally for reasons of expediency or sometimes moral posturing or sometimes both) random populations with no historical links to a territory are imported over and where after historical forces render the reasons for their being there redundant the populations are then ‘just left there’ never to return to their place of origin. Just random groups now forever in random places, another part of the world now indefinitely a random often semi-failed patchwork nation. Why? Because.
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