The history of Guyana

Guyana lies on the north-eastern shoulder of South America, a land of great rivers, rainforest and savanna whose name is usually explained as an Indigenous word meaning "land of many waters". Indigenous peoples lived here for thousands of years before the Dutch founded plantation colonies in the seventeenth century, worked by enslaved Africans. Britain took over in 1796 and 1803, and after slavery ended the planters brought indentured labourers, above all from India, creating the multi-ethnic society of today. Independent since 1966, Guyana has lived through decades of authoritarian rule and political division along ethnic lines, a long-running claim by Venezuela to more than two-thirds of its territory and, since the 2010s, an offshore oil boom that has made it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. It is the only English-speaking country in South America.

The ancestors of Guyana's Indigenous peoples arrived thousands of years ago, the descendants of the first settlers of the Americas, who had crossed from Asia during the last Ice Age. In the north-west, near the Venezuelan border, people living on the coast left large mounds of shells from their meals, and later communities there made pottery and farmed. Across the interior, carvings and paintings on rocks, such as the petroglyphs of the Rupununi and the Mazaruni valley, are the work of peoples whose names are unknown.

By the time Europeans arrived, the coastal lands were home mainly to the Lokono, an Arawak-speaking people who grew cassava, hunted and fished, and to the Kalina, or Caribs, a Carib-speaking people living further inland and along the rivers. The Warao lived among the swamps and waterways of the Orinoco delta and the north-west coast, travelling by canoe. Inland, the Akawaio, Arekuna and Patamona lived in the forested Pakaraima mountains, the Makushi and Wapishana on the Rupununi savannas, and the Wai Wai in the far south near the sources of the Essequibo. Most practised shifting cultivation of cassava, which they processed into bread and drink, together with hunting and fishing. These nine peoples still live in Guyana, where Indigenous people, locally called Amerindians, make up about one-tenth of the population and the majority in the southern interior.

The Lokono and Kalina were linked by trade and migration to the islands of the Caribbean, and both had long histories of moving between the Guianas and the Antilles. The Spanish, who sighted the coast after Christopher Columbus's voyages and claimed the region, found no gold there and never settled it. In the 1590s the English courtier Walter Raleigh searched the Guiana interior for El Dorado, said to stand on the shores of a great lake, and his best-selling account of 1596 kept European interest in the region alive.

The first lasting European settlement was Dutch. In 1616 traders from the Dutch Republic set up a post up the Essequibo River, later protected by the island fort of Kyk-Over-Al, and in 1621 the Dutch West India Company took control of the colony of Essequibo. A second colony on the Berbice River was founded in 1627 by a Dutch merchant family, and the Demerara River between them was opened to settlement in the 1740s. At first the Dutch traded with Indigenous peoples for dyes, hammocks and food, and allied with the Kalina, Lokono and Akawaio, paying them to capture people who escaped from the plantations. European contact nevertheless brought epidemics, slave raiding and warfare that devastated many Indigenous communities.

As the colonies turned to growing tobacco, sugar, coffee and cotton on the flat, fertile coast, the planters relied on enslaved Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade. The Dutch drained the coastal swamps with a system of dykes, canals and sluices that still protects the low-lying coast, much of it below high-tide level. The enslaved population soon far outnumbered the Europeans.

In February 1763 enslaved people on plantations along the Canje River in Berbice rose in revolt. Led by Coffy, an African-born cooper, the rebels took control of most of the colony as the Europeans fled to the coast, and for months they held Berbice and negotiated with the Dutch governor. Divisions among the rebel leaders, the arrival of troops from neighbouring colonies and from the Netherlands, and the help of Indigenous allies of the Dutch eventually crushed the rising, followed by mass executions. Coffy is now Guyana's national hero, and Republic Day is held on 23 February, the anniversary of the revolt.

From the 1740s the Dutch encouraged British planters from the Caribbean islands to settle in Demerara, and by the 1760s the English were a majority of the colony's European population. During the wars of the late eighteenth century the colonies changed hands several times. Britain seized them in 1781, France held them from 1782 to 1784 and founded a new town at the mouth of the Demerara, which the Dutch renamed Stabroek and made their capital, and after the French Revolution brought the Netherlands under French control, Britain occupied the colonies again in 1796. Returned to the Dutch in 1802, they were retaken by Britain in 1803 during the Napoleonic Wars and formally ceded in 1814. Stabroek was renamed Georgetown in 1812, and in 1831 the three colonies were joined as British Guiana, part of the British Empire.

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, but slavery continued, and conditions on the expanding sugar estates were harsh. In August 1823 more than ten thousand enslaved people in Demerara rose in the Demerara rebellion, demanding their freedom. The rising was crushed within days, well over a hundred rebels were killed in the fighting or executed, and the death in prison of the English missionary John Smith, accused of encouraging it, fed the campaign for abolition in Britain. Slavery was abolished in 1834, followed by a period of compulsory "apprenticeship" that ended in 1838. The owners received compensation; the formerly enslaved received none.

Many freed people left the plantations, and some pooled their savings to buy abandoned estates and founded villages of their own, such as Victoria on the East Coast of Demerara, the start of an independent Afro-Guyanese peasantry. To replace their labour, the planters turned to contract workers. Portuguese labourers from Madeira arrived from 1835, though most soon moved into shopkeeping, and some 14,000 Chinese came between 1853 and 1912. By far the largest group came from India. The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in May 1838, and before the system ended in 1917 roughly 240,000 had come, mostly from the Bhojpuri- and Awadhi-speaking regions of northern India, bound to work on the sugar estates for a fixed number of years. Most stayed, bringing Hinduism and Islam to the colony. Indian workers lived under strict labour laws, and strikes on the estates were often met with force.

Through the nineteenth century the colony was run by a small planter elite through the Court of Policy, a body inherited from the Dutch. Gold and diamonds were found in the interior, and from the early twentieth century bauxite, mined at Mackenzie, now Linden, joined sugar and rice as the main exports. Afro-Guyanese workers in Georgetown rose in the Ruimveldt riots of 1905, and in 1917 Hubert Critchlow founded the British Guiana Labour Union, one of the first trade unions in the Caribbean. In 1928 Britain made the colony a crown colony under direct rule. The Great Depression brought unemployment and unrest across the British Caribbean, and a royal commission under Lord Moyne recommended reforms.

When Britain took the colony it inherited an undefined western frontier with the Spanish territories that became Venezuela. Venezuela held that its territory ran to the Essequibo River, while Britain claimed land far to the west. In the 1830s and 1840s the explorer Robert Schomburgk surveyed a line for the British government, which Venezuela rejected. The discovery of gold in the disputed area raised the stakes, and in 1895 the United States intervened under the Monroe Doctrine and pressed Britain to accept arbitration. In 1899 a tribunal in Paris made up of two British judges, two Americans chosen on Venezuela's behalf and a Russian president awarded the great majority of the disputed territory to British Guiana, though Venezuela kept the mouth of the Orinoco. The boundary was marked on the ground by 1905.

The matter seemed closed until 1949, when a memorandum by Severo Mallet-Prevost, one of Venezuela's lawyers in the arbitration, was published after his death. It alleged that the award had been a political bargain between Britain and Russia. In 1962 Venezuela declared the award null and void before the United Nations and revived its claim to all the land west of the Essequibo, which Venezuelans call Guayana Esequiba and which makes up more than two-thirds of Guyana's area. Guyana's position is that the 1899 award is a valid and binding settlement that both sides accepted for more than half a century.

After the Second World War, demands for self-government grew. In 1950 Cheddi Jagan, an Indo-Guyanese dentist trained in the United States, and Forbes Burnham, an Afro-Guyanese lawyer trained in London, founded the People's Progressive Party, which united workers of both communities on a left-wing, anti-colonial platform. The PPP won the first election under universal adult suffrage in April 1953, taking 18 of the 24 seats. After only 133 days, Britain, under Winston Churchill, suspended the constitution, sent in troops and removed the government, accusing it of planning a communist state.

The party split in 1955, and Burnham's faction became the People's National Congress, drawing support largely from Afro-Guyanese, while Jagan's PPP drew mainly on Indo-Guyanese voters. Jagan won elections in 1957 and 1961 and became premier, but his friendship with Fidel Castro's Cuba and his talks with Che Guevara alarmed Washington in the Cold War. The administration of John F. Kennedy launched covert programmes against him, and the CIA supported strikes and opposition groups. From 1962 to 1964 riots, strikes and violence between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese communities left about 160 people dead and many thousands displaced. Britain then introduced proportional representation, and after the 1964 election Burnham formed a government with the conservative United Force. British Guiana became independent as Guyana on 26 May 1966.

Three months before independence, on 17 February 1966, Britain, British Guiana and Venezuela signed the Geneva Agreement, which committed the parties to seek a practical and satisfactory settlement of the border controversy. The two sides have read it differently ever since: Venezuela sees it as acknowledging that the 1899 award was in doubt, Guyana as a framework for settling the matter that left the award in force. In October 1966 Venezuelan forces occupied the Guyanese part of Ankoko Island in the Cuyuni River, and in January 1969 a short-lived uprising by ranchers and Amerindians in the Rupununi, which sought Venezuelan help, was put down. The Port of Spain Protocol of 1970 froze the dispute for twelve years.

Burnham increasingly ruled through elections that observers widely regarded as rigged, in 1968, 1973 and 1980. In 1970 Guyana became a "co-operative republic", and Burnham proclaimed the paramountcy of his party over the state, nationalised the foreign-owned bauxite and sugar industries and joined the Non-Aligned Movement, while keeping links with both the Western powers and Cuba. Guyana was a founding member of the Caribbean Community in 1973, with headquarters in Georgetown. In November 1978 the world's attention turned to Jonestown, a settlement in the north-west founded by the American preacher Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple, which had moved from San Francisco. After his followers killed the visiting US congressman Leo Ryan and others at a nearby airstrip, more than 900 people, including many children, died at Jonestown in a mass murder and suicide.

Opposition grew around the multiracial Working People's Alliance, whose leader, the historian Walter Rodney, was killed by a bomb in Georgetown in 1980; later investigations implicated the government. A new constitution in 1980 made Burnham an executive president. By the time he died in 1985, the economy had collapsed, with shortages of basic goods and a large-scale emigration of Guyanese to North America, Britain and the Caribbean.

Burnham's successor, Desmond Hoyte, opened the economy and eased political controls. In October 1992, in elections monitored by the former US president Jimmy Carter and widely accepted as free and fair, Jagan and the PPP/Civic returned to power. After Jagan's death in 1997 his American-born widow, Janet Jagan, was elected president, followed by Bharrat Jagdeo from 1999 and Donald Ramotar from 2011. Elections remained tense and largely divided along ethnic lines, and the late 1990s and early 2000s saw riots and a wave of violent crime. In 2015 a coalition led by David Granger, A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance for Change, won power. Guyana also settled its maritime boundary with Suriname through international arbitration in 2007, while a land dispute between the two in the upper Courantyne remains unresolved.

In May 2015 ExxonMobil announced a large discovery of oil off the coast, and since then more than 11 billion barrels of reserves have been found. Production began in December 2019, and the economy grew faster than almost any other in the world, by about 44 percent in 2024 alone according to the World Bank. The 2020 election, after the Granger government lost a no-confidence vote, became a five-month standoff over the count before a recount confirmed a narrow victory for the PPP/C and Irfaan Ali became president. Ali was re-elected in September 2025, when a new party led by the businessman Azruddin Mohamed came second.

The oil discoveries, some of them in waters off the disputed territory, sharpened the border dispute. After decades of unsuccessful mediation through the United Nations, the Secretary-General referred the matter to the International Court of Justice in 2018, and Guyana asked the court to confirm that the 1899 award is valid. Venezuela argued that the court had no jurisdiction and that the dispute should be resolved by negotiation under the Geneva Agreement. The court ruled in December 2020 that it had jurisdiction, and in April 2023 it rejected a preliminary objection by Venezuela. Venezuela then filed written arguments on the merits.

In December 2023 Venezuela held a referendum in which the government reported overwhelming support for creating a Venezuelan state of Guayana Esequiba, though observers questioned the turnout figures. The International Court of Justice ordered Venezuela not to change the situation on the ground, Brazil reinforced its northern border, and at a meeting hosted by the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on 14 December 2023 the presidents of the two countries agreed not to use force or escalate tensions. In March 2024 Venezuela passed a law designating the territory as a new state. The court issued a further order on Guyana's request in May 2025 and heard the case on its merits from 4 to 11 May 2026; its judgment is awaited. Later that month a Guyanese soldier was wounded when a patrol on the Cuyuni River came under fire from the Venezuelan side. The Indigenous peoples who live in the disputed region have not been consulted by either state.