Surinam (Dutch colony)

Surinam was a Dutch plantation colony on the north-east coast of South America, between British Guiana to the west and French Guiana to the east, and the forerunner of the modern Republic of Suriname. The Dutch took it from the English in 1667 and ruled it as a colony until 1954, when it became one of the Kingdom of the Netherlands' equal constituent countries. Its economy was built on the labour of enslaved Africans and, after abolition, of indentured workers from Asia.

The colony began as an English settlement founded under Francis Willoughby. On 26 February 1667, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, Dutch forces captured it. The Treaty of Breda that July let each side keep what it held, so the Dutch kept Surinam while the English kept New Netherland, which they had seized in 1664; the Treaty of Westminster of 1674 confirmed the exchange. Its seat of government was Fort Zeelandia.

From 1683 the colony was run by the Society of Suriname, owned in equal shares by the city of Amsterdam, the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family and the Dutch West India Company, though all citizens of the Dutch Republic could trade there. Planters had a voice through a Council of Police. Enslaved Africans, mostly shipped by the West India Company from its West African posts, grew sugar, cotton and indigo, and from the early 18th century coffee became the chief export. Conditions were notoriously harsh; the historian C. R. Boxer wrote that "man's inhumanity to man just about reached its limits in Surinam", and many enslaved people escaped from the plantations.

The crash of the Amsterdam exchange in 1773 hit the planters hard, and the end of the slave trade, decreed for Dutch colonies in 1814, ruined many estates. In 1795 the Batavian Republic nationalised the Society, and the colony was then ruled directly by the Dutch state, apart from British occupations in 1799–1802 and 1804–1816. After Britain kept the other Dutch colonies on the coast in 1814 and merged them into British Guiana in 1831, Surinam was often called Dutch Guiana, though its official name never changed.

Slavery was abolished on 1 July 1863, still celebrated as Ketikoti, but the freed people had to work through a ten-year transition that ended in 1873. A treaty with Britain in 1870 opened the way for indentured labourers from British India, and workers from Java and China in the Dutch East Indies followed. Some resisted their conditions, as in a rebellion led by Janey Tetary in 1884. A government regulation of 1865 created an elected Colonial Council that shared power with the governor, though only a narrow elite could vote.

Gold finds on the Lawa River led to the building of the Lawa Railway from 1902, but output disappointed. In 1916 the American company Alcoa began mining bauxite near Moengo, and in 1938 it opened a smelter at Paranam. The Great Depression brought mass unemployment and riots in 1931; the nationalist Anton de Kom was arrested after organising a protest against the governor and was shipped to the Netherlands. In the Second World War Surinam's bauxite was vital to Allied aircraft production, and the first 1,000 American troops arrived in Paramaribo in November 1941 to help protect it.

A Basic Law of 1937 renamed the Colonial Council the Estates of Suriname, and reforms in 1948 brought universal suffrage for men and women. On 15 December 1954 the Charter for the Kingdom made Suriname a self-governing partner of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles. In 1975 it left the kingdom as the independent state of Suriname.

Our maps label the colony Dutch Guiana and draw it in 1878, 1880 and 1900, between British Guiana, today's Guyana, and French Guiana. Our 1815 map shows the wider Guiana coast under a single label, and from 1914 the same territory appears as Suriname.