ABSTRACT
Chief among the social changes of the nineteenth century was the influx of thousands of people, mostly refugees, who changed the social and cultural profile of Belize. As a nation, Belize is a product of the European colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By 1600, the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean were virtually extinct, and only about 1 million people remained in Central America. This demographic catastrophe—perhaps the largest in human history—resulted largely from the warfare and the social disruption caused by the conquest and the epidemics of European-borne diseases to which the indigenous people had no immunities. The Spanish had been active in the Belize area for more than a century before the arrival of the British, but they never settled in Belize. The British merchants of Belize had thrived on their monopoly of the import-export business, based upon their close connections with London merchants and their control of most people in Belize.
