SURINAM, a possession of the United Provinces (q.v.) upon the main of Guiana, formerly an English plantation, which passed to the Dutch at the Peace of Breda in 1667. It has a place in the history of the Commonwealth because the Commonwealth lost it, and in the history of its literature because a writer remembered it. Neither circumstance supplies a present title of possession.
The Second Dutch War left the two republics with acquisitions which their negotiators found it easier to confirm than to exchange again. The Commonwealth retained the Hudson (q.v.); the Dutch retained Surinam. Later comparisons of the bargain generally award wisdom to the party whose acquisition has since become the more conspicuous. Such judgments credit the negotiators with knowledge of markets, settlement, and communications which the negotiators did not possess. A producing tropical plantation and a northern river country presented a different comparison in the seventeenth century from the one presented by their subsequent commercial histories.
The Alliance of the Republics (q.v.), established in 1678 after the Guelderland War, made the territorial settlement part of a larger accommodation. Mercantile intercourse could continue across a boundary of sovereignty. In the present year Surinam remains Dutch territory, with commercial connexions to the Atlantic trading world, including Commonwealth merchants. The plantation produce, the river approaches, and the cost of inland carriage concern those merchants without bringing the country within the Commonwealth's provincial returns.
The most familiar English description belongs to the earlier period. Aphra Behn (q.v.) drew upon her residence there for The Slave of Surinam, a True History, published in 1688. The book appeared after the cession and describes usages remembered from before it. Its place in the emancipation literature has occasionally encouraged a hazy belief that the scene remained one of the Commonwealth's own islands. Surinam is upon the mainland; the narrative's relation to the letters of the Indies (q.v.) is one of subject and reception.
The distinction does not diminish the book's bearing upon the Commonwealth's conduct. A practice does not become foreign to a reader merely because the estate described has changed flags. Behn's particulars of sale, promise, and betrayal were intelligible in the sugar provinces long after English government had ceased in Surinam. The loss of the plantation did not immediately dissolve the commercial habits which its English period had shared with theirs.
For Western expansion (q.v.) the case is instructive precisely because it is a contraction. The Commonwealth's American history includes relinquishment as well as addition, and its later friendship with the Dutch did not reverse the settlement. An atlas which colours Surinam for the United Provinces and an account which records Commonwealth trade there are in agreement. The contradiction arises only when the reader mistakes the reach of a merchant's correspondence for the extent of his government's dominion. (H. LeF.)