Paramaribo and Dutch Suriname

How did Suriname become Dutch?

Paramaribo’s name probably comes from an Indigenous village near the mouth of the Suriname River. In 1650 English settlers sent by Lord Willoughby, the governor of Barbados, built a fort there, called Fort Willoughby, and began planting sugar.

In February 1667, during a war between England and the Dutch Republic, seven ships from the Dutch province of Zeeland under Abraham Crijnssen sailed up the river. The English governor surrendered after a short fight, and the fort was renamed Fort Zeelandia. That summer the Treaty of Breda ended the war. The Dutch kept Suriname, and England kept New Netherland, which it had seized in 1664 and renamed New York. People often call this a swap, but the treaty simply let each side keep what it already held.

Who ran Paramaribo in 1715?

Not the Dutch West India Company on its own. From 1683 Suriname belonged to the Society of Suriname, a company with three equal partners: the city of Amsterdam, the West India Company, and the noble Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family. The Society chose the governor and ran the colony until 1795.

Its first governor, Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, made peace with the Indigenous nations in 1686 and brought in soldiers and new settlers. After he imposed strict rules, his soldiers complained about their pay and food, and in July 1688 mutinous soldiers shot him dead in Paramaribo.

Around 1715 Paramaribo was still small. Historian Karwan Fatah-Black counts only a few hundred inhabitants around 1700. By 1737 maps show a neat grid of streets, and by 1800 about ten thousand people lived there. The wooden Dutch colonial centre that UNESCO protects today is mostly later than 1715.

Who worked Suriname’s plantations?

Suriname’s wealth came from plantations strung along the Suriname River and the rivers nearby. Sugar was the main crop in 1715. Coffee was just arriving: in the 1710s the Society’s directors sent the governor a newly published French book, from 1716, to teach him how coffee was grown. Cacao and, later, cotton were grown too.

Almost all of the work was done by enslaved Africans, forced across the Atlantic and sold to the planters. They cleared forest, dug drainage ditches, cut cane and boiled it into sugar, under harsh and often violent discipline.

Upriver stood Jodensavanne, the “Jewish savannah”, a settlement of Sephardic Jewish planters whose families had fled the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal, and some later expulsion from Brazil. Its brick synagogue, opened in 1685, is described by the World Monuments Fund as the first brick synagogue of major architectural importance in the Americas. It notes that by about 1700 the settlement had more than forty plantations and roughly 1,300 enslaved people. Jodensavanne became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023.

What did Paramaribo trade, and with whom?

Suriname was not an open port like Dutch Willemstad on Curaçao. The Society’s rules said ships had to sail directly from the Dutch Republic with the Society’s permission, carrying sugar back to Amsterdam.

There was one big exception. A local rule of 1704 made trade with ships from England’s North American colonies legal. They brought horses, which planters badly needed, along with flour, salted fish and other food. In return they took molasses, the sticky syrup left over from sugar-making. Planters wanted more freedom to trade than this, and some smuggled, for example bringing in horses from Ireland.

What happened when Cassard raided Suriname in 1712?

During the War of the Spanish Succession, France and the Dutch Republic were enemies. In October 1712 the French naval commander Jacques Cassard arrived with a squadron, landed troops across the river from Paramaribo and bombarded the town and Fort Zeelandia.

The colony could not drive him off. After about two weeks the governor agreed to pay a huge ransom in money, goods and enslaved people, and Cassard sailed away. Accounts disagree on its exact value, but one estimate puts it at about a full year of the colony’s production. Colonists blamed the Society for leaving the defences weak. A few months later, in early 1713, Cassard also held Curaçao to ransom.

Who were the Maroons of Suriname?

Maroons were people who escaped slavery and built free communities. Suriname’s rainforest was close to every plantation, and from the late 1600s enslaved people fled into it, alone, in small groups and in revolts. One record describes a revolt in 1690 on the plantation of Immanuel Machado, a Jewish planter, after which the people who escaped joined the Maroons.

The 1712 raid made the Maroons stronger. Planters sent the people they enslaved into the forest to hide them from the French, and many never came back.

For decades the Maroons fought Dutch soldiers and raided plantations. In 1760 the Ndyuka, and in 1762 the Saramaka, signed treaties with the Dutch that recognised them as free peoples about a century before slavery itself was abolished in the colony. Saramaka people still tell the stories of their ancestors’ escape, which they call “First-Time”; the anthropologist Richard Price recorded many of them in his book of that name.