History · Guyana

Guyana: Land of Many Waters

An English-speaking corner of South America built on Dutch dykes and sugar — enslaved Africans and indentured Indians, a race-divided politics, decades of decline, and a sudden oil boom

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

Aerial view of flat green sugarcane fields divided into long rectangles by straight water-filled canals, with a town in the hazy distance
Sugarcane fields on Guyana's flat coastal plain seen from the air in 2015, cut into long rectangles by straight drainage canals. (Dan Sloan / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0)

A Caribbean country on the South American mainland

Guyana sits on the north-east shoulder of South America, but it belongs to the Caribbean — the only English-speaking country on the continent, a member of CARICOM, and shaped by the same forces as the sugar islands: Dutch and then British colonisation, African slavery, and Indian indentured labour. Its roughly 800,000 people are split into two large communities, Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese, and that division has organised its politics since the 1950s. Since 2019, offshore oil has made it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

A short history

  1. pre-1600

    Arawak and Carib

    Indigenous nations along the coast and rivers.

  2. c. 1616

    Dutch colonies

    Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara are founded.

  3. 1763

    Berbice rebellion

    A slave revolt holds the colony for nearly a year.

  4. 1814–1831

    British Guiana

    Britain takes the colonies and unites them.

  5. 1838–1917

    Indenture

    About 240,000 Indians are brought to the sugar estates.

  6. 1950–1955

    The PPP splits

    Jagan and Burnham divide along ethnic lines.

  7. 1966

    Independence

    Guyana becomes independent under Forbes Burnham.

  8. 1978

    Jonestown

    909 people die in a cult murder-suicide in the interior.

  9. 1992

    Free election

    Cheddi Jagan wins, 28 years after being forced out.

  10. 2015 / 2019

    Oil

    A giant offshore field is found, then comes on stream.

Dutch dykes and sugar

The coast and rivers were home to Arawak and Carib peoples, and the region carried the El Dorado legend that drew Walter Raleigh up the Orinoco. From about 1616 the Dutch established three river colonies — Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara — and built sugar plantations on land reclaimed from below sea level behind an elaborate system of dykes, dams and canals. That engineered coastal plain, and the sea wall that still protects Georgetown, is Guyana's most distinctive physical feature. The estates were worked by enslaved Africans, and in 1763 a rebellion in Berbice, led by a man remembered as Cuffy, held the colony for nearly a year.

A tall bronze statue of a defiant male figure on a plinth in a Georgetown plaza
The 1763 Monument in Georgetown, honouring Cuffy, leader of the Berbice slave rebellion — one of the largest revolts in the Americas before the Haitian Revolution. (David Stanley / Wikimedia Commons)

British Guiana

Britain took the colonies during the Napoleonic Wars and united them as British Guiana in 1831. After slavery was abolished in the 1830s, freed people left the estates and pooled their money to buy abandoned plantations and found their own villages. To replace their labour, planters brought in indentured workers — some Portuguese and Chinese, and about 240,000 Indians between 1838 and 1917, the largest Indian indenture stream after Mauritius. Indo-Guyanese became the sugar and rice population.

A large iron-roofed colonial market hall with a clock tower beside a white wooden church
Stabroek Market and the Reformed Church in Georgetown. The capital's wooden colonial architecture reflects a century and a half of British rule over a Dutch-built landscape. (Dan Sloan / Wikimedia Commons)

Jagan, Burnham, and the Cold War

Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham founded the multiracial People's Progressive Party in 1950. It won the 1953 election — after which Britain, alarmed by its leftism, suspended the constitution within months and sent troops. The party then split along ethnic lines: Jagan kept the PPP, with its Indo-Guyanese base, and Burnham formed the People's National Congress, with an Afro-Guyanese base.

The two founders

Cheddi Jagan seated with President John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1961
Cheddi Jagan meeting John F. Kennedy in 1961. Fearing 'another Cuba', the US and Britain covertly worked to keep Jagan from leading Guyana to independence. (White House / Wikimedia Commons)
A portrait of Forbes Burnham in a suit, 1966
Forbes Burnham, who led Guyana to independence in 1966 and ruled until 1985 — nationalising most of the economy and holding power through fraudulent elections. (Anefo / Wikimedia Commons)

A switch to proportional representation, pushed by London and Washington, let Burnham form a coalition in 1964, and Guyana became independent under him on 26 May 1966.

Decline, Jonestown, and recovery

Burnham's Guyana became a one-party socialist state that nationalised the bauxite and sugar industries, rigged every election, and drove the economy into collapse and shortage. Hundreds of thousands emigrated; the population has barely grown since. In 1978 the American Peoples Temple cult, settled in the north-western jungle, murdered a visiting US congressman and then killed 909 of its own members at Jonestown — the largest deliberate loss of American civilian life before 2001.

A long yellow timber-and-masonry court building with steep red gabled roofs, a sign reading The Supreme Court of Judicature, The High Court, and a white marble statue of Queen Victoria in front
The High Court in Georgetown, completed in 1887, with the marble statue of Queen Victoria that stands in front of it. (Dan Lundberg / Wikimedia Commons)

Under pressure, Guyana held a free election in 1992, won by Jagan — 28 years after he had been forced out. His PPP then governed for 23 years. The disputed 2020 election, which the incumbent government spent five months trying to rig before courts installed the PPP's Irfaan Ali, showed how raw the ethnic divide remains.

Oil, and Venezuela

In 2015 ExxonMobil found one of the century's largest oil deposits off Guyana's coast, and production began in 2019. Per head, Guyana has since been among the fastest-growing economies anywhere. The boom has sharpened an old danger: Venezuela claims the Essequibo region, two-thirds of Guyana's territory and the waters where most of the oil lies, a dispute rooted in an 1899 arbitration and now before the International Court of Justice.

What Guyana carries

Guyana's landscape was engineered by the Dutch, its population assembled by the British from Africa and India, and its politics frozen since the 1950s into a contest between the descendants of those two labour forces. Decades of authoritarian decline emptied the country of much of its talent. Oil has now made it suddenly rich — and put a far larger prize on the table of both its internal divide and its border dispute.

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