Abstract
This article considers what the migration circuits to and from Suriname can tell us about Dutch early modern colonisation in the Atlantic world. Did the Dutch have an Atlantic empire that can be studied by treating it as an integrated space, as suggested by New Imperial Historians, or did colonisation rely on circuits outside Dutch control, stretching beyond its imperial space? An empire-centred approach has dominated the study of Suriname’s history and has largely glossed over the routes taken by European migrants to and from the colony. When the empirecentred perspective is transcended it becomes possible to see that colonists arrived in Suriname from a range of different places around the Atlantic and the European hinterland. The article takes an Atlantic or global perspective to demonstrate the choices available to colonists and the networks through which they moved. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.
Highlights
The histories of the Europeans moving to and from Suriname in the eighteenth century clearly illustrate the limitations of an empire-centred approach to the history of the Dutch in the Atlantic
This article considers what the migration circuits to and from Suriname can tell us about Dutch early modern colonisation in the Atlantic world
Did the Dutch have an Atlantic empire that can be studied by treating it as an integrated space, as suggested by New Imperial Historians, or did colonisation rely on circuits outside Dutch control, stretching beyond its imperial space? An empire-centred approach has dominated the study of Suriname’s history and has largely glossed over the routes taken by European migrants to and from the colony
Summary
We cannot be certain, it seems very likely that the Piedmontese physician Louis De Bussy ended his life as a one-legged beggar on the streets of New York in the early 1750s. To recruit families for his settlement he had gone to Basel and, under false pretences, had managed to convince several of these families His unfortunate voyage from Suriname to New York came after his project to establish the Swiss village in the colony had failed and he was banished from the colony.[3] The connection between Switzerland, Suriname and British North America in this tragic life might seem arbitrary, but it aptly illustrates the structure of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Johannes Postma went beyond the imperial view and investigated the Atlantic interconnectedness of Suriname by mapping out the many regional and Atlantic ‘life lines’ of the colony He concluded that in the eighteenth century more than half of the ships sailing to Paramaribo were non-Dutch and arrived from regional ports.[11]. 35 multiple connections to the European hinterland, as well as inter-colonial connections as fundamental constituent of how the Suriname Company and its colony functioned.[12] a swiss village in the dutch tropics
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