Suriname
Suriname, officially the Republic of Suriname, is a country in northern South America, also considered as part of the Caribbean and the West Indies. Situated slightly north of the equator, over 90% of its territory is covered by rainforest, the highest proportion of forest cover in the world. Suriname is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north, French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west, and Brazil to the south. It is the smallest country in South America by both population and territory, with around inhabitants in 2021 in an area of approximately. The capital and largest city is Paramaribo, which is home to roughly half the population.
Suriname was inhabited as early as the fourth millennium BC by various indigenous peoples, including the Arawaks, Caribs, and Wayana. Europeans arrived and contested the area in the 16th century, with the Dutch controlling much of the country's current territory by the late 17th century. Under Dutch rule, Suriname was a lucrative plantation colony focused mostly on sugar; its economy was driven by African slave labour until the abolition of slavery in 1863. Approximately 300,000 enslaved Africans were taken to Suriname during the transatlantic slave trade, from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. After 1863, indentured servants were recruited mostly from British India and the Dutch East Indies. In 1954, Suriname became a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. On 25 November 1975, it became independent following negotiations with the Dutch government. Suriname continues to maintain close diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties with the Netherlands.
Surinamese culture and society strongly reflect the legacy of Dutch colonial rule. It is the only independent state outside Europe where Dutch is the official and prevailing language of government, business, media, and education; an estimated 60% of the population speaks Dutch as a native language. Sranan Tongo, an English-based creole language, is a widely used lingua franca. Most Surinamese are descendants of slaves brought from Africa by Europeans, and indentured labourers brought from Asia by the Dutch. Suriname is highly diverse, with no ethnic group forming a majority; proportionally, its Muslim and Hindu populations are some of the largest in the Americas. Most people live along the northern coast, centred on Paramaribo, making Suriname one of the least densely populated countries on Earth.
It is a developing country with a high level of human development; its economy is heavily dependent on its abundant natural resources, namely bauxite, gold, petroleum, and agricultural products. Suriname is a member of the Caribbean Community, the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Organization of American States.
Etymology
The name Suriname may derive from an indigenous people called Surinen, who inhabited the area at the time of European contact. The suffix -ame, common in Surinamese river and place names, may come from aima or eima, meaning river or creek mouth, in Lokono, an Arawak language spoken in the country.The earliest European sources give variants of "Suriname" as the name of the river on which colonies were eventually founded. Lawrence Kemys wrote in his Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana of passing a river called "Shurinama" as he travelled along the coast. In 1598, a fleet of three Dutch ships visiting the Wild Coast mention passing the river "Surinamo". In 1617, a Dutch notary spelt the name of the river on which a Dutch trading post had existed three years earlier as "Surrenant".
British settlers, who in 1630 founded the first European colony at Marshall's Creek along the Suriname River, spelt the name "Surinam"; this would long remain the standard spelling in English. The Dutch navigator David Pietersz. de Vries wrote of travelling up the "Sername" river in 1634 until he encountered the English colony there; the terminal vowel remained in future Dutch spellings and pronunciations. The river was called Soronama in a 1640 Spanish manuscript entitled "General Description of All His Majesty's Dominions in America". In 1653, instructions given to a British fleet sailing to meet Lord Willoughby in Barbados, which at the time was the seat of English colonial government in the region, again spelt the name of the colony Surinam. A 1663 royal charter said the region around the river was "called Serrinam also Surrinam".
As a result of the Surrinam spelling, 19th-century British sources offered the folk etymology Surryham, saying it was the name given to the Suriname River by Lord Willoughby in the 1660s in honour of the Duke of Norfolk and Earl of Surrey when an English colony was established under a grant from King Charles II. This folk etymology can be found repeated in later English-language sources.
When the territory was taken over by the Dutch, it became part of a group of colonies known as Dutch Guiana. The official spelling of the country's English name was changed from "Surinam" to "Suriname" in January 1978, but "Surinam" can still be found in English, such as Surinam Airways and the Surinam toad. The older English name is reflected in the English pronunciation,. In Dutch, the official language of Suriname, the pronunciation is, with a schwa terminal vowel and the main stress on the third syllable.
History
Pre-colonial
Indigenous settlement of Suriname dates back to 3,000 BC. The largest tribes were the Arawak, a nomadic coastal tribe that subsisted on hunting, foraging and fishing. The Arawak represent the first described inhabitants in the area. The Carib also settled in the area and conquered the Arawak by using their superior sailing ships. They settled in Galibi at the mouth of the Marowijne River. While the larger Arawak and Carib tribes lived along the coast and savanna, smaller groups of indigenous people lived in the inland rainforest, such as the Akurio, Trió, Warao, and Wayana.Colonial period
Beginning in the 16th century, French, Spanish and English explorers visited the area. A century later, Dutch and English settlers established plantation colonies along the many rivers in the fertile Guiana plains. The earliest documented colony in Guiana was an English settlement named Marshall's Creek along the Suriname River. After that, there was another short-lived English colony called Surinam that lasted from 1650 to 1667.From the early 17th century, Jews began to settle there after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal. They were granted freedom of religion in 1665 and the right to have their own courts and civil guard. They continued to enjoy autonomy after the colony was handed over to the Netherlands. Over half the sugarcane plantations in Suriname were owned by Jews. In 1825, these special rights were rescinded.
Disputes arose between the Dutch and the English for control of this territory. In 1667, during negotiations leading to the Treaty of Breda after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch decided to keep the nascent plantation colony of Surinam they had gained from the English. In return the English kept New Amsterdam, the main city of the former colony of New Netherland in North America on the mid-Atlantic coast. The British renamed it New York, after the Duke of York who would later become King James II of England.
In 1683, the Society of Suriname was founded by the city of Amsterdam, the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family, and the Dutch West India Company. The society was chartered to manage and defend the colony. The planters of the colony relied heavily on African slaves to cultivate, harvest and process the commodity crops of coffee, cocoa, sugar cane and cotton plantations along the rivers. Approximately 300,000 enslaved Africans were taken to Suriname during the transatlantic slave trade, from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. The treatment of slaves was notoriously brutal even by the standards of the time—historian C. R. Boxer wrote that "man's inhumanity to man just about reached its limits in Surinam"—and many slaves escaped plantations. In November 1795, the Society was nationalized by the Batavian Republic and from then on the Batavian Republic and its legal successors governed the territory as a national colony – barring two periods of British occupation, between 1799 and 1802, and between 1804 and 1816.
With the help of the native South Americans living in the adjoining rain forests, runaway African slaves established a new and unique culture in the interior that was highly successful in its own right. They were known collectively in English as Maroons, in French as Nèg'Marrons, and in Dutch as Marrons. The Maroons gradually developed several independent tribes through a process of ethnogenesis, as they were from different African ethnicities. These tribes include the Saramaka, Paramaka, Ndyuka or Aukan, Kwinti, Aluku or Boni, and Matawai.
The Maroons often raided plantations to recruit new members from the enslaved and capture women, as well as to acquire weapons, food, and supplies. They sometimes killed the Dutch planters and their families in the raids. European colonists built defences, which were significant enough that they were shown on 18th-century maps.
The Dutch colonists also mounted armed campaigns against the Maroons, who generally escaped through the rainforest, which they knew much better than the colonists did. To end hostilities, in the 18th century, the European colonial authorities signed several peace treaties with different tribes. They granted the Maroons sovereign status and trade rights in their inland territories.
Abolition of slavery
From 1861 to 1863, with the American Civil War underway, and enslaved people escaping to Northern territory controlled by the Union, United States President Abraham Lincoln and his administration looked abroad for places to relocate people who were freed from enslavement and who wanted to leave the United States. It opened negotiations with the Dutch government regarding African American emigration to and colonization of the Dutch colony of Suriname. Nothing came of the idea, which was dropped after 1864.The Netherlands abolished slavery in Suriname in 1863, under a gradual process that required slaves to work on plantations for 10 transition years for minimal pay, which was considered as partial compensation for their masters. After that transition period expired in 1873, most freedmen largely abandoned the plantations where they had worked for several generations in favour of the capital city, Paramaribo. Some of them were able to purchase the plantations they worked on, especially in the district of Para and Coronie. Their descendants still live on those grounds today. Several plantation owners did not pay their former enslaved workers the pay they owed them for the ten years following 1863. They paid the workers with the property rights of the ground of the plantation in order to escape their debt to the workers. 1 July 1863 is called Ketikoti.
File:Tropenmuseum Royal Tropical Institute Objectnumber 10030464 Kappen van suikerriet.jpg|thumb|left|Javanese indentured servants in Marienbourg plantation, c. 1930
As a plantation colony, Suriname had an economy dependent on labour-intensive commodity crops. To make up for a shortage of labour, the Dutch recruited and transported contract or indentured labourers from the Dutch East Indies and India. In addition, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, small numbers of labourers, mostly men, were recruited from China and the Middle East.
Although Suriname's population remains relatively small, because of this complex colonisation and exploitation, it is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the world.