British Honduras was a Crown colony on the east coast of Central America — specifically located on the southern edge of the Yucatán Peninsula from 1783 to 1964, then a self-governing colony — renamed Belize from June 1973 until September 1981, when it gained full independence as Belize. British Honduras was the last continental possession of the United Kingdom in the Americas.
The colony grew out of the Treaty of Versailles (1783) between Britain and Spain, which gave the British rights to cut logwood between the Hondo and Belize rivers. The Convention of London (1786) expanded this concession to include the area between the Belize and Sibun rivers. In 1862, the Settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras was declared a British colony called British Honduras, and the Crown's representative was elevated to a lieutenant governor, subordinate to the governor of Jamaica.
History
Baymen, enslaved Africans, and Shoremen
In the early seventeenth century, English and Dutch pirate merchants, defying the Spanish who claimed sovereignty over the entire Caribbean coast, engaged in "sporadic but fairly frequent" smuggling from the Bay of Honduras. Large quantities of indigo and logwood were supplied to their home markets. At some point, the English operators began surreptitiously cutting logwood, as opposed to merely seizing Spanish-cut logwood. Although clear primary sources are lacking, the first English logging settlement in the territory is generally attributed to Peter Wallace's 1638 landing at the mouth of Haulover Creek which runs through what is now Belize City.
As their interest turned in the 18th century from logwood to mahogany, the growing numbers of "Baymen" employed enslaved Africans, purchased in Jamaica and Bermuda. While they might be left in logging camps, without the whip-wielding drivers ubiquitous on large plantations elsewhere in the Americas, the enslaved were dependent on their owners for rations and supplies. Many of the enslaved maintained African ethnic identifications and cultural practices. Those of Ibo origin and descent were particularly numerous, a section of Belize being known as "Eboe Town." land was distributed by lottery in which "the meanest mulatto or free negro has an equal chance".
To the suggestion from the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, that it was impolitic to put "affluent settlers and persons of a different description, particularly people of colour" on an "equal footing", Despard replied "the laws of England ... know no such distinction". He characterised the wealthy cutters among the Baymen as an "arbitrary aristocracy", buttressing his argument with the results of the magistracy election in which he won a resounding majority on an unprecedented turnout. Unimpressed by his democratic mandate, and persuaded by the Baymen's entreaty that under "Despard's constitution" the "negroes in servitude, observing the now exalted status of their brethren of yesterday [the free, and now propertied, blacks among the Shoremen] would be induced to revolt, and the settlement must be ruined", in 1790 Sydney's successor, Lord Grenville, recalled Despard to London.
Despard's colour-blind policies were reversed: by the 1820s the settlement had seven legally distinct castes based on skin colour. Under this colour-bar system, free Creole people were denied full civil rights until, in 1831, the British Colonial Office threatened to dissolve the Baymen's legislative Public Meeting.
left|thumb|280px|Belize and Guatemala
Negotiations between Britain and Guatemala began again in 1961, but the elected representatives of British Honduras had no voice in these talks. As a result, in 1965 the United States President Lyndon Johnson agreed to mediate and proposed a draft treaty that gave Guatemala control over the newly independent country in areas including internal security, defence and external affairs. All parties in British Honduras, however, denounced the proposals. Talks resumed in 1973, but broke off again in 1975 when tensions flared once more.