Berkley Wendell Semple
THE history we inherit in Guyana, and across the Caribbean, is too often a history of rumour and apocrypha rather than one grounded in verifiable fact. What has been remembered as truth is often what was repeated most often, not what was most accurate. For generations, we had not had enough substantiated history to persuade us otherwise. At times, it has seemed as though countries like ours were never considered worthy subjects of serious historical inquiry. When we did appear in written accounts, usually authored by distant observers from the metropoles of the West, it was often with a brevity that overlooked, or deliberately ignored, anything of real consequence that we achieved.
Such accounts were sometimes scarcely removed from the fantastical imaginings of Walter Raleigh in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with its golden cities and embellished geographies. The line between myth and history was thin, and too often myth endured. We encounter similar patterns in the travel writings of James Anthony Froude in The Bow of Ulysses, Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main, and Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, each offering portrayals of the Caribbean filtered through an imperial gaze that reduced, simplified or dismissed the region and its people. Even V. S. Naipaul, writing from within the Caribbean experience, echoed elements of this tradition.
There is a particular irony in this: a son of the soil reproducing, in certain respects, the same tone of detachment and disdain. Yet it is not entirely unexpected. Naipaul’s assertion that “nothing was created in the West Indies” reads as internalised condemnation, a sweeping judgement that borders on pathology. More importantly, it is demonstrably untrue. It is opinion masquerading as knowledge, an interpretation that gestures toward historical truth while revealing the observer’s limitations and biases. Reading Naipaul’s The Middle Passage can be an infuriating experience for a Caribbean person; it often feels less like an inquiry into Caribbean reality than an argument against it.
The imperial gaze has long shaped how the Caribbean was written about and understood. These texts, enshrined within the canon of Western literature, carried forward a distorted vision of the region, one that diminished our humanity and rendered our societies as lesser reflections of some superior “mother country”. This was not truth, but through repetition, institutional authority and literary prestige, it acquired the appearance of truth.
For this reason, we have always needed to wrest our history from the pens of colonial scribes. Only then can we begin to approach the past with the honesty it demands and restore to it the nuance, dignity, complexity and seriousness so often absent from accounts marked by dispassion, derision or dismissal.
In Guyana, this reclamation began in earnest with Walter Rodney, whose work brought intellectual rigour and moral clarity to Caribbean history. His scholarship offered a perspective unclouded by the conventional colonial gaze and grounded instead in careful research, historical consciousness and a profound responsibility to fact. That tradition continues in the detailed, exhaustively researched studies of scholars such as Clem Seecharan and, more recently, Dr Estherine Adams in Slavery, Indentureship, and Women’s Labour: Early British Guiana’s Jails (2026). Adams’s work is a meticulous excavation of the exploitation of women within the colonial prison system, an area of history that has long been neglected, obscured or, in some cases, effectively erased.
These modern histories stand in stark contrast to the simplified narratives that, for generations, were allowed to pass as historical truth. We were told, for example, that we were brought to Guyana as enslaved Africans; that others arrived as indentured labourers from India, Portugal and China; and that still others came as migrants from elsewhere in the Caribbean archipelago. These statements may be broadly accurate, but they rarely answer the questions that history demands: Where precisely did these people come from? Under what conditions did they arrive? Who organised and financed their movement? What systems governed their labour and settlement? What did they encounter when they arrived? And how did their experiences shape the society that eventually emerged? Apocrypha cannot adequately answer such questions. It lacks the precision, documentation and accountability that distinguish historical inquiry from inherited narrative.
In this context, new scholarship matters. Dr Joanne Collins-Gonsalves’s book, The Portuguese in Business in Guyana 1835–1935: A History of Entrepreneurship, Expansion, and Diversification, contributes to this growing body of corrective history. Like Dr Adams’s work, Collins-Gonsalves’s study has a deliberately narrow focus and a specific geographical orientation: Guyana. That focus, however, should not be mistaken for insignificance. The very opposite is evident. A history of one community, one institution, one economic activity or one geographical area can illuminate the larger historical structure in which it is embedded. Sometimes, the most effective way of understanding a country in its totality is to examine, with unusual precision, one of the strands from which that country’s history was woven.
Collins-Gonsalves’s book is precisely such a work. It examines a particular and important dimension of Guyanese history: the Portuguese presence in Guyana and their economic development within the colony. There is nothing mythical about this enterprise. The book is an exercise in historical recovery, grounded in documentary evidence and sustained by extensive research.
What makes the study especially valuable is the historical period it examines. It takes us back into the territory’s pre-independence history, reaching into the period before the colony became British Guiana and offering glimpses of its earlier periods under French and Dutch rule. In doing so, Collins-Gonsalves situates the Portuguese experience within a colonial landscape already taking shape before British dominance was firmly established.
More importantly, she excavates in considerable detail the beginnings of the commercial organisations and economic enterprises that would later provide the foundation for Portuguese entrepreneurial activity in Guyana, sometimes at the expense of competing racial groups. One of the book’s most interesting arguments concerns the British Empire’s divide-and-conquer approach and how it shaped the colony’s social and economic hierarchy. Collins-Gonsalves argues persuasively that the economic success of the Portuguese was connected, in part, to their installation as a “buffer” between the British and the rest of the population, as well as to their early and forceful embrace of entrepreneurship. Collins-Gonsalves provides sufficient evidence that the British might have erred in this calculation, for within a decade, the Portuguese had become successful enough in certain areas of business to rival them. Soon after, the Portuguese parlayed their business acumen into political power, especially by building common ground with the Afro-Guyanese population on the coast and gaining political capital. This collaboration foreshadowed a later partnership between the Portuguese-led United Force Party and the African-dominated PNC regime of the 1970s and 1980s. Even while still indentured, the Portuguese had begun establishing small huckstering businesses, in some cases within a year or two of their arrival from Portugal.
The book carefully traces how Portuguese migrants established themselves economically. Names such as J. P. Santos, De Freitas, D’Aguiar, and others emerge from this history, many of whose enterprises would become part of Guyana’s economic backbone.
This is one of the book’s particular strengths. Collins-Gonsalves does not simply tell us that the Portuguese came to Guyana and became successful entrepreneurs. She takes us closer to the historical processes that made that development possible. She identifies the structures, circumstances, relationships, and enterprises through which a community established itself and participated in the colony’s economic life. We learn how the Portuguese came to Guyana, the political and economic undercurrents that made immigration necessary for some, and the personal histories of migrants arriving from Madeira, Cape Verde and the Azores, including those fleeing the economic and political circumstances of nineteenth-century Portugal.
The book therefore focuses on the causes underlying the exodus of Portuguese migrants from Portugal to Guyana. By tracing these causes alongside the migrants’ subsequent experiences, Collins-Gonsalves provides a more complete understanding of immigration, not simply as movement from one geographical location to another, but as a process shaped by economic necessity, political instability, opportunity and colonial policy. We therefore gain a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Guyanese society during this period. Ultimately, the reader gets more than a general account of Portuguese migration and entrepreneurship. The reader gets the facts and, through those facts, a clearer understanding of the underlying forces that helped shape Guyana’s nascent economy and the society that developed around it.
The book is, in part, a correction: a response to the limited understanding of the Portuguese presence in Guyana and to the tendency to reduce their history to a few familiar propositions about immigration, commerce and entrepreneurship. But it is also a revelation. Collins-Gonsalves brings to light information that has either been overlooked, insufficiently examined, or remained unknown to a wider readership. The discovery that Portuguese migrants had begun establishing small businesses even while still indentured is particularly revealing, not simply as evidence of their entrepreneurial spirit, but as an indication of how quickly migrants adapted to the economic possibilities and constraints of colonial society.
There is something pleasantly surprising about the way Collins-Gonsalves accomplishes this. The book does not seek to manufacture drama where the evidence does not provide it. Its revelations emerge through the patient accumulation of facts, documents, references and historical detail. She allows the evidence to do the work. Her citation notes fill many pages of the book. She clarifies and elucidates in the gentle, factual manner characteristic of good historical scholarship.
This distinction matters. This is not a history of opinion masquerading as fact, nor is it an argument constructed first and supported afterwards through selectively chosen evidence. Rather, it is an excavation of what was there: facts that once existed but were insufficiently recorded, insufficiently researched or insufficiently understood. The book recovers a past that has been obscured, not necessarily because it did not exist, but because the historical record has been uneven and our attention has too often been directed elsewhere.
That is the larger significance of Collins-Gonsalves’s work. The history of Guyana is not a single narrative but an accumulation of intersecting histories: African, Indian, Portuguese, Chinese, Indigenous, European, Caribbean, colonial, commercial, agricultural, religious and political. Recovering one of these histories with documentary precision enlarges our understanding of the whole. Closely allied with this notion is the remarkable contribution of Portuguese women in business and their significant successes.
The importance of such scholarship extends beyond the community it examines. A fuller history of the Portuguese is a fuller history of Guyana. A more accurate account of their arrival, settlement, commercial activity and social development allows us to see the country not as a collection of inherited myths, but as a complicated historical construction shaped by people whose lives, ambitions, struggles and achievements deserve to be known. This is what serious historical scholarship can accomplish. It does not merely replace one story with another. It interrogates the stories we have inherited, tests them against evidence and recovers what has been lost between memory and fact.
