Essequibo was founded by colonists from the first Zeelandic colony, Pomeroon conquered in 1581, which had been destroyed by Spaniards and local warriors around 1596.

Led by Joost van der Hooge, the Zeelanders founded Fort Kyk-Over-Al in the Essequibo river (actually a side-river called the Mazaruni).

From 1624 the area was permanently inhabited and from 1632, together with Pomeroon, it was put under the jurisdiction of the Zeelandic Chamber of the WIC (West Indian Company).

In 1657 the region was transferred by the Chamber to the cities of Middelburg, Veere and Vlissingen, who established the "Direction of the New Colony on Isekepe" there.

Under governor Laurens Storm van 's Gravesande, English planters started coming to the colony after 1740.

In response, 185 Middelburg merchants invested 320,000 guilders in the newly established Society for Navigation on Essequibo and adjacent Rivers.

In March, two sloops of a Royal Navy squadron under Admiral Lord Rodney accepted the surrender of "Colony of Demarary and the River Essequebo".

At the Peace of Amiens (1802), the Netherlands received the Essequibo colony for a short time, from 1802 to 1803, but after that the British again occupied it during the Napoleonic Wars.

Essequibo became official British territory on 13 August 1814 as part of the Treaty of London and was merged with the colony of Demerara.

The British prime minister Lord Salisbury at first rebuffed the United States government's suggestion of arbitration, but when President Grover Cleveland threatened to intervene according to the Monroe Doctrine, Britain agreed to let an international tribunal arbitrate the boundary in 1897.

For two years, the tribunal consisting of two Britons, two Americans, and a Russian studied the case in Paris (France).

Although Venezuela was unhappy with the decision, a commission surveyed a new border in accordance with the award, and both sides accepted the boundary in 1905.

In 1949, the US jurist Otto Schoenrich, a named partner in the New York law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, gave the Venezuelan government a memorandum written by Severo Mallet-Prevost, the Official Secretary of the US–Venezuela delegation in the Tribunal of Arbitration, which was written in 1944 to be published only after his death.

Mallet-Prevost surmised from the private behavior of the judges that there had a political deal between Russia and Britain,[9] and said that the Russian chair of the panel, Friedrich Martens, had visited Britain with the two British arbitrators in the summer of 1899, and subsequently had offered the two American judges a choice between accepting a unanimous award along the lines ultimately agreed, or a 3 to 2 majority opinion even more favourable to the British.

Mallet-Prevost said that the American judges and Venezuelan counsel were disgusted at the situation and considered the 3 to 2 option with a strongly worded minority opinion, but ultimately went along with Martens to avoid depriving Venezuela of even more territory.