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Accepted Paper:
Our country: extractivism, colonialism, and indigeneity in the Venezuela-Guyana borderlands
Joan Flores-Villalobos
(University of Southern California)
This article considers the territorial struggles along the Venezuela-Guyana border (at times called the Essequibo territory) during the 19th century, comparing the visions of land and sovereignty among multiple colonial and national regimes and Native tribes at the height of the gold rush.
Paper long abstract:
The borderlands of the Venezuela-Guyana border form a crucial conjuncture that sheds light on two key macro historical developments of the 19th century: the development of export economies in Latin America driven by foreign capital and the exclusionary projects of modernization and nation-building. In Venezuela, both of these projects were built on a legitimization of natural resource exploitation through a justification based on inherited colonial borders and Native recognition of sovereignty. This article uses the papers of the 1899 arbitration trial alongside local 19th century Venezuelan newspapers, photography, and maps to consider the multiple claims advanced for the Essequibo territory by Venezuela, Great Britain, and local Native people to show the impact this borderland had on the development of capitalist resource exploitation and notions of national territorial unification in Venezuela. The multi-sided colonial contest for this territory exploited the land and rivers of the Essequibo for gold and relied on the labor and recognition of indigenous people, even as they tried to obliterate Native claims to the land. Claiming the Essequibo was part of a broader project of stabilizing and modernizing the nation in its transition out of a major civil war. The gold of the Essequibo formed the great majority of Venezuela’s exports during the period and would grant Venezuela the economic and political power to enter into 19th century liberal statehood. Through these discourses of ownership and territorial sovereignty handed down through colonial borders, Venezuela built the Essequibo region as legitimately exploitable.