“A Hard Strain on Imperialism”: South Asian Resistance to the British Honduras Scheme

In the fall and winter of 1908, the Canadian government attempted to relocate South Asians living in British Columbia to British Honduras for indentured labour. Those in favour of relocation claimed that most South Asians were unemployed, were unable to survive winter, and could not adapt to Canadian society because of their religious beliefs. South Asians who opposed relocation challenged many of these claims and formed a wide network across the British Empire to foil this relocation. This study discusses the overlooked subject of the Canadian state’s attempts to remove South Asians who had already settled in the country, as well as the agency of South Asians in early-twentieth-century Canada. The documents examined throughout this article show that the British Honduras Scheme failed when South Asians could not be convinced that it served their interests and found that they possessed the necessary resources to challenge deportation.

THE “BORDERS” OF BRITISH HONDURAS AND THE SAN PEDRO MAYA OF KAXIL UINIC VILLAGE

Having fled the violence of the Caste War in Mexico (1847−1901), the San Pedro Maya occupied nearly two dozen small villages in the forests of western British Honduras and the northeastern Peten from the 1850s to the 1930s. With no physically demarcated borders between British Honduras and its neighbors present prior to the late 1880s, archival and archaeological data demonstrate that the San Pedro Maya moved freely through the lightly populated forests of the area. Ultimately, however, the San Pedro Maya's ambivalence toward the border between British Honduras and Guatemala provided the Belize Estate and Produce Company (BEC) with an excuse to evict them from their villages in the 1930s. In this article, we present archival information and archaeological data from Kaxil Uinic, a small San Pedro Maya village in British Honduras, to examine the following issues: the conflicting views of the border held by the San Pedro Maya and their colonial counterparts; the evidence for ties between Kaxil Uinic and Icaiche, Mexico; and the roles chicle smuggling and commercial logging had in the eviction of the San Pedro Maya from BEC lands.

Mother Catherine and the Lower Ninth Ward

In the 1920s, as Prohibition took hold in the U.S., New Orleans became a key port for liquor smuggled out of Cuba, the Bahamas, and British Honduras. Crime and police corruption were major problems. As the city developed North, the Ninth Ward grew downriver as blacks, Sicilians, and other ethnic whites found housing near St. Claude Avenue. 19th-century Spiritualism mixed with New Orleans culture to form unique Spiritual churches. Leafy Anderson, a charismatic woman of African and native heritage, drew crowds by invoking the spirit of Black Hawk, a famous Native American warrior. Nanny Cowans Jenkins, later known as Mother Catherine Seals, founded the Manger, a chapel and community harbouring pregnant girls, homeless youth, and abused women and their children. Catherine’s religion was matriarchal, akin to the Great Mother cults. She also performed faith healings. Author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston documented the churches of both women. Two families, the Cagnolattis and Johnsons, revolved around the Manger through the 1930s. Mother Catherine died in 1930. Her wake ran four days and was heavily covered in the press. Hundreds of people, both black and white, attended.

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

This article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”