Belize History: The Treaty of Paris Between Spain And Britain

January 8, 2023
by belizehubstaff +

The Treaty of Paris And Other International Agreements Affecting Belize

1763 marked the end of the Seven Years’ War and was when the Treaty of Paris was signed. Said treaty established the limits of influence that both Spain and Britain’s governments would enjoy regarding the area now known as Belize—it would not be called British Honduras until 1862. This specific treaty allowed the British government to occupy lands solely for the purposes of cutting and transporting logwood while also acknowledging that the area was otherwise Spanish land. Spain would reassert this dominion in subsequent measures in the years 1783 and 1789, respectively known as the Treaty of Versailles and the Convention of London.

The Treaty of Versailles

This document, signed by both the British and Spanish governments, gave a more exact interpretation of where the British could engage in logging operations than the Treaty of Paris. This time, Spain clarified that the British were only to cut wood between the Hondo, Belize, and New Rivers—the New River was also deemed the western boundary after which no British logging was permitted.

The Convention of London

This time, Spain permitted the British to cut logwood and mahogany as far south as the Sibun River but also banned Britain from establishing fortifications, any semblance of a formal government, agricultural efforts, or anything else that was not explicitly and wholly geared toward the industry of cutting wood. British settlers, known as “Baymen,” were permitted to collect all the wild fruits and produce from the land but any sort of plantation for intensive crops like cocoa, coffee,sugar, and so on, was forbidden.

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The Convention also allowed Spain to send commissioners to check in on Baymen settlements twice each year. Furthermore, it specified that, in return for the many concessions made by the Spanish government for Britain to even maintain a presence of any sort within the region, Britain had to forfeit all other settlements within the region, such as the Mosquito Shore and Roatan island. This forced the British to evacuate and relocate to mainland Belize and is widely regarded as a major moment in the early society of Belize.

With war no longer an ongoing endeavor between the two nations, Britain and Spain each signed the Treaty of Versaille on September 3, 1783. Subsequently, somewhere between 500 and 700 individuals, including several American loyalists, came to settle within Belize.

Four years later, 2,650 individuals, over three-quarters of whom were slaves or indentured servants, were evacuated from the Mosquito Shore and all but 436 of them were taken to Belize. These individuals outnumbered the Belizean residents by a factor of five and by the time the settlement had been attacked in 1779, 3,000 slaves and 500 free individuals, lived within Belize. This was a sharp contrast from what things were like in 1735 when there were only 500 merchants and slaves, or in 1725 when there were no more than 50 White men and roughly 120 African slaves that called the area their home away from home.