Surinam

Surinam, often called Dutch Guiana, was the Dutch plantation colony on the Caribbean coast of South America that became the predecessor of the modern republic of Suriname. Dutch forces seized the English settlement in February 1667 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and the Treaty of Breda later that year confirmed Dutch possession while leaving New Netherland to England. For nearly three centuries the colony's economy rested on slave labour: Dutch West India Company ships brought enslaved Africans to sugar, cotton, indigo and later coffee plantations, and the treatment of workers became notorious even by contemporary standards. The Amsterdam financial crisis of 1773 and the British abolition of the slave trade weakened the plantation system, and the Netherlands abolished slavery itself in 1863, with full freedom delayed until 1873. Indentured labourers from British India, Java and China then replaced the freed workforce, while gold, bauxite and rubber shaped the twentieth century. Administered from Paramaribo, Surinam remained a Dutch colony until December 1954, when it became a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; full independence followed in 1975. Its borders with British Guiana and French Guiana, fixed in the colonial era, survived into the modern state.