Refugees from the Imperial Nation: the Poyais Case and Belize, 1823

Jeffrey Jones

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Chapter 9 Refugees from the Imperial Nation: the Poyais Case and Belize, 1823

In: Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1815â1949

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Jeffrey Jones

Jeffrey Jones
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 227â254

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004689145_010

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Abstract

Over the course of 1823, several hundred British merchants and labourers journeyed from Britain to the Afro-Indigenous region of Mosquitia (or the Miskito Coast) on the Caribbean coastline of Central America. They travelled as part of the âPoyaisâ colonisation scheme devised by the notorious confidence trickster Gregor MacGregor. Upon landing in Central America, the hopeful colonists found they had been the victims of a spectacular investment fraud and no colony existed. Instead, they would have to look for succour from the British authorities in the small settlement of British Honduras (now Belize) some four hundred miles to their north. While initially sympathetic to the Poyais settlersâ plight, the colonial government in Belize had to contend with the cost and logistics of admitting several hundred people rapidly into the settlement while also attempting to address a parallel marronage crisis as enslaved freedom-seekers fled Belizeâs slave society into neighbouring Guatemala and Mexico. At several public meetings in Belize City during 1823, the white population routinely referenced the âcall of humanityâ that compelled them to come to the Poyais settlersâ aid. At the same meetings, and in nearly the same breath, they demanded greater action to block and recapture outward-bound enslaved refugees seeking their manumission. This chapter studies how Belizeâs small white population struggled to devise a refugee management system for several hundred of their fellow countrymen while fighting to preserve an oppressive slave system that they passionately argued was âhumaneâ. In so doing, the chapter argues that Belize functioned as a diffuse frontier zone in nineteenth-century Central America and provides an innovative space to reconsider refugee studies through questions of slavery and freedom-seeking, imperial culture, and colonial administration at a frontier of the British Empire.

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Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1815â1949

Series:Â Studies in Global Social History, Volume: 55/18Â andÂ Studies in Global Migration History, Volume: 55/18

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004689145

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 13 Mar 2025

Subjects
- History
  - Modern History
  - Migration History

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Part 1 Introduction

Part 2 The Metropole

Part 3 British Imperial Experiences

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Chapter 9 Refugees from the Imperial Nation: the Poyais Case and Belize, 1823

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Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1815â1949

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Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1815â1949