Suriname

A Dutch plantation colony traded for New York, and the most ethnically plural country in South America. The Netherlands acquired it from England in 1667 under the Treaty of Breda, exchanging it for New Amsterdam, and built a sugar economy whose conditions were notoriously among the harshest in the Americas. Large numbers of enslaved people escaped into the interior forest and formed Maroon societies - Saramaka, Ndyuka and others - that fought the Dutch to treaties in the 1760s and still hold their territory with their own languages and law, the largest surviving Maroon communities anywhere. After abolition in 1863 the Dutch imported indentured labour from British India and from Java, so the population is now roughly a quarter Indian-descended, a fifth Maroon, a sixth Creole and a seventh Javanese, with no group a majority. Independence came in 1975 and around a third of the population emigrated to the Netherlands rather than stay. Desi Bouterse seized power in 1980, was later convicted of the 1982 killings of fifteen opponents and of drug trafficking, and was elected president in between. Dutch is the official language and Sranan Tongo the lingua franca. Paramaribo's wooden centre is a World Heritage site. The country has about 620 thousand people, the smallest population in South America. More than ninety per cent of its territory is forest, the highest share of any country. Gold and oil are the main exports. Hindu temples, mosques, synagogues and churches stand within a few streets of each other in Paramaribo. It is the only South American state where Dutch is official.

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