The Guianas: South America's Weirdest Countries?

At the top of South America are three small territories. Until about ten years ago, not a single road connected them to the outside world. They are some of the world’s least talked about places and yet all three have interesting stories to tell. Stories of sugar and slavery, calypso and cults. In this series of videos I’m going to tell the story, of the Guianas...

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Books
John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, 2011
John Hemming, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, 2008
Charles C. Mann, 1491: The Americas Before Columbus, 2005
Charles C. Mann, 1493: How the Ecological Collision of Europe and the Americas Gave Rise to the Modern World, 2011
McNeill, J. R, Mosquito Empires; Ecology and War in the Greater Carribbean, 2010
English colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon, 1604-1668, James A. Williamson, 1923

Articles
The Economist
Tim Merrill, ed. Guyana: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1992.
‘A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas’, Adam Rutherford The Atlantic, 2017
Suriname: 2016 Country Review, www.countrywatch.com
‘Genome-wide Ancestry and Demographic History of African-Descendant Maroon Communities from French Guiana and Suriname’, Fortes-Lima et al, Am J Hum Genet. 2017
FREIRE, José R. Bessa. “Da ‘fala boa’ ao português na Amazônia brasileira”. Amerindia. Revue d’Ethnolinguistique Amerindienne, Paris, 1983, 8, pp. 39-83
‘MI5 files reveal details of 1953 coup that overthrew British Guiana's leaders’, Associated Press, The Guardian, 2011
Richard Price, ‘Maroons in Guyane: Getting the Numbers Right’, Brill, 7th December 2018
Scott B. MacDonald, ‘Has anything changed since French Guiana’s 2017 social upheaval?’, April 20, 2021
‘A Path to Prosperity for Oil-Rich Guyana’, Harvard International review, 27 September, 2023
‘Venezuelans to vote in referendum over large swathe of territory under dispute with Guyana’, AP, December 3rd 2023

00:00 Intro
00:56 Overview
04:47 Kaieteur Falls
08:24 A People's History of the Guianas
14:25 The Transatlantic Slave Trade
18:10 Arrivals from India
19: Conclusion