“Our Country”: Extractive Colonialism and Labor in the Essequibo Borderland

Abstract This article examines the long history of claims over the Essequibo territory (now the Venezuela-Guyana border), focused on the late nineteenth-century gold rush and the ensuing diplomatic battles that culminated in the boundary arbitration trial of 1899 that formally settled today's borders. Reading across British and Venezuelan sources, including travel accounts, newspapers, British Colonial Office records, and Venezuelan Ministry of the Interior documents, I argue that the advance of extractive capitalism into the Essequibo precipitated heightened battles over control of this territory. While the arbitration trial argued over colonial lineage, the border conflict, as this article shows, was rather made in everyday conflicts over labor and jurisdiction. In their encounter with this racialized borderlands, Venezuela and Britain solidified ideas about national borders and imperial governance, but these imaginaries of state power were constantly challenged by Black migrants and Indigenous residents whose mobilities and imaginaries could not be contained by the state.