I have been asked for a list of good source material. Sadly, some of the books below are long out of print (I found them in the British Library) but a few of them might be available on abe.com. Here’s the list:
1. For a general history of Guyana (or British Guiana, as it was), I turned, as everyone does, to Vere T. Daly’s A Short History of the Guyanese People (Oxford, Macmillan 1975) and The Making of Guyana (London, Macmillan 1975).
2. Three remarkable accounts of life in Georgian Guyana (then the Dutch colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice) are provided by Edward Bancroft’s An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana (London, 1769), Henry Bollingbroke’s A Voyage to the Demerary (Norwich 1807) and George Pinckard’s Notes on the West Indies (London, 1806).
3. In Georgetown, a good place to start is the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology (see photo). In my research on the Dutch forts of this period, I was also greatly assisted by the museum’s Journal of Anthropology, Archaeology and Anthropology, volume 10, 1995 (Georgetown, Walter Roth Museum, 1995).
4. Some interesting Afro-Guyanese perspectives on slavery can be found in Emancipation (The African-Guyanese Magazine volume 2, No 15, 2007-2008).
5. Alvin Thompson’s The Berbice Revolt (Georgetown, Free Press, 1999) provides a helpful Guyanese analysis of the slaughter of 1763.
6. Meanwhile, Victorian British Guiana is subjected to splendid analysis in Graham Burnett’s Masters of all they Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (University of Chicago Press, 2001). It’s a perfect companion to Robert Schomburgk’s sombre memoir, Travels in British Guiana 1840-1844 (London 1847).
