The state of research in Guyana
Walter Rodney
Guyana has no past or ongoing research into the history of the slave trade to
Guyana. Historical work on the regime of slavery itself is dated and superficial.^1
Rodway's History was based on secondary sources and translations from
the Dutch. General texts compiled in the present century have not gone beyond
this point.
A number of theses have been concerned with economic and social life
in Guyana in the nineteenth century, with emphasis on post-Emancipation
developments. They provide only brief introductions to the last years of slavery.
References to slavery in British Guiana are also to be found in reconstructions
of Caribbean history and of the history of the British West Indies in particular.
In effect, therefore, the field is still completely open and the areas of
research correspondingly wide. As an exception to the prevailing neglect, there
is a researcy project into the phenomenon of escaped slaves in British Guiana
conducted by Alvin Thompson of the University of the West Indies, Barbados.
The development of slave society in Guyana is assumed to have followed
the sam^ patterns as that of slave societies emerging under similar conditions
in the Caribbean. The crops were cotton, coffee, cocoa and above all sugar.
Slaves grew their own provisions and were also briefly engaged in gold-mining
in the eighteenth century. The only unusual activity in British Guiana (relative
to the Caribbean islands) was the creation of polders on the swampy coastal
environment.
The Guyana National Archives house documents which relate mainly
to the British period of slavery. Efforts are being made to recover copies of
relevant documents in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
- See, for example, James Rodway, A History of British Guiana, Georgetown, 1890,
3 vols.