Suriname

A colony the Netherlands acquired by giving up New York, and ran with a brutality remarked on even by contemporaries. England took the settlement in 1667 and traded it back at Breda in exchange for New Amsterdam - a swap that looked sensible at the time, since sugar was worth more than a fur-trading town. The plantations produced sugar, coffee and cotton with enslaved labour under a mortality regime that required constant importation, and John Gabriel Stedman's illustrated account of the 1770s, engraved partly by William Blake, made the colony's punishments notorious in Europe. The rainforest behind the plantations allowed escape on a scale seen almost nowhere else: Maroon societies formed, fought the Dutch for decades, and won treaties in the 1760s recognising their autonomy, which their descendants still hold. Abolition came only in 1863, later than most of the Americas, with a further ten years of compulsory labour attached. Indentured workers from British India and Java followed, producing the country's plural population. Suriname became an autonomous part of the kingdom in 1954 and independent in 1975. Paramaribo was the capital and its wooden centre is now a World Heritage site. The colony covered about 164 thousand square kilometres, over ninety per cent of it forest. Jodensavanne, a Jewish plantation settlement founded in the seventeenth century, was among the earliest in the Americas. Dutch remained the language of administration and schooling. Around a third of the population left for the Netherlands around independence, and more followed after the 1980 coup.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration