16 Facts About British Honduras

1.

British Honduras was a British Crown colony on the east coast of Central America, south of Mexico, from 1783 to 1964, then a self-governing colony, renamed Belize in June 1973, until September 1981, when it gained full independence as Belize.

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2.

British Honduras was the last continental possession of the United Kingdom in the Americas.

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3.

Early in 1867, more than 300 British Honduras troops marched into the Yalbac Hills and destroyed the Mayan villages, provision stores, and granaries in an attempt to drive them out of the district.

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4.

The British Honduras Company emerged as the predominant landowner of the Crown colony.

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5.

In 1875, the British Honduras Company became the Belize Estate and Produce Company, a London-based business that owned about half of all the privately held land in the colony.

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6.

The British Honduras government seized the opportunity to impose tighter control on the colony and endowed the Governor with reserve powers, or the power to enact laws in emergency situations without the consent of the Legislative Council.

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7.

The British Honduras government rescued the company by granting it an area of virgin mahogany forest and a loan of US$200,000 to erect a sawmill in Belize Town.

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8.

British Honduras said that he would continue fighting for the cause and that he was not afraid to die.

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9.

Finally, in 1954 British Honduras achieved suffrage for all literate adults as a result of the emerging independence movement.

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10.

British Honduras remained the predominant politician in the country from the early 1950s until his retirement in 1996.

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11.

The devaluation enraged labour because it protected the interests of the big transnationals, such as the Belize Estate and Produce Company, whose trade in British pounds would have suffered without devaluation while it subjected British Honduras's working class, already experiencing widespread unemployment and poverty, to higher prices for goods—especially food—imported from the United States.

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12.

British Honduras faced two obstacles to independence: British reluctance until the early 1960s to allow citizens to govern themselves, and Guatemala's complete intransigence over its long-standing claim to the entire territory.

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13.

Territorial dispute's origins lay in the 18th-century treaties in which Great Britain acceded to Spain's assertion of sovereignty while British Honduras settlers continued to occupy the sparsely settled and ill-defined area.

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14.

In February 1948, Guatemala threatened to invade and forcibly annex the territory, and the British Honduras responded by deploying two companies from 2nd Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment.

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15.

From 1749 until 1884, British Honduras was governed as a dependency of the British colony of Jamaica.

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16.

The Confederate settlements in British Honduras introduced large-scale sugar production to the colony and proved that it could be profitable where others had previously failed.

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