History of British Guiana (Guyana) – The Booker Prize’s Bad History
By
At one time the Booker company owned so much of British Guiana that the country was sarcastically referred to in Britain as Booker Guiana. The Booker family, along with other slave owning entities, had been handsomely compensated by the British Government for the loss of their slaves after the emancipation of the slaves.
The Bookers used this cash infusion to buy up the estates of the other estate/slave owners who were using this opportunity to depart the colony.
They ended up owning 16 of the 18 functioning sugar estates in the days when sugar was king. This compensation also lead to the acquisition of many other enterprises in the colony by the company, and was the basis of their expanding world wide empire. As recently as 1972 Booker was still drawing 45% of their world wide income from British Guiana.
From The New York Times:
The Booker Prize-Bad History
It’s an award funded by the labor of enslaved people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/man-booker-bad-history.html
Comments
I have worked in Guyana for 4 years as senior chemist and assistant factory manager.
As an experience of which i learned a lot and came to love the Guyanese people. Worked at Blairmont estate
You got Dutch sounding last name.
I thought the British took British Guiana from the Dutch in 1814?
And by the way, lots of British Guiana contractors and their children & grandchildren of half-white, and mostly half-Indo ancestry are currently coming to Guyana in droves to retire and tek eye pass on the locals.
Someone should tell those boujees that this is Guyana, and not British Guiana. The colonial state of mind still exists in these half-white children of British Guianese contractors.
If you’re planning to retire in Guyana because of the oil prospects, remember to respect us as human beings unlike the other contractors who look down on us.