d region into a "logwood industry center," although it would not be until near the end of the 18th century that the British officially claimed the land as their own colony (Martin and Lovett 58). In the hands of the British from 1638 until the official administrative takeover by the British in 1786, Belize remained a rich source of wood, but as for other, political or strategic interests, it was apparently the dispute with Guatemala which primarily led to the official British claim.
The majority of the sources emphasize that the British hardly developed the land, certainly in comparison to their efforts in other areas of the New World. Setzekorn writes that the British introduction to the land was an "accident" in which British seamen were shipwrecked and started what was then known as
the Honduran Bay Settlement--a British enclave surrounded by hostile Spanish neighbors near the mouth of the Belize River--[which] struggled for two hundred years before gaining the recognition and protection it sought as a British Colony (Setzekorn 4-5).
Clearly, had the settlers developed the land and established it effectively in political and economic terms, the British would have more quickly annexed it to the Empire. In fact, Setzekorn notes that the nation has experienced great development since gaining independence, greater relatively than it experienced in a far greater length of time under British rule:
The importance of the role that the "microstate" of Belize may have in future western hemisphere affairs should not be judged by its present lack of population and its current low standard of living, but by its rapid rate of progress over the past decade since achieving total independence from Great Britain (Setzekorn 4).
Before the British came, then, the nation could hardly have been termed a nation at all. The Br
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