Suriname

From the Arawak and Carib coast to a Dutch plantation colony built on sugar and slavery, the Maroon republics of the forest, the most ethnically plural society in the Americas, and an independent nation born in 1975.

Suriname was home to Arawak, Carib, and other Indigenous peoples for millennia before Europeans charted its coast around 1500. After a short-lived English settlement under Lord Willoughby, the territory passed to the Dutch, who confirmed their hold by the 1667 Treaty of Breda, keeping Suriname while ceding New Netherland and its town of New Amsterdam, the future New York, to England. The colony grew into one of the harshest sugar-plantation economies in the Americas, sustained by enslaved Africans, many of whom escaped to form the Maroon societies of the interior that eventually won treaties recognising their freedom. Slavery was abolished in 1863 and replaced by Indian and Javanese indentured labour, producing one of the world's most diverse populations, and the country became independent of the Netherlands on 25 November 1975, passing through a military period in the 1980s before returning to democracy and, today, the threshold of an offshore oil era.