Surinamese Food History

Historical period

Indigenous cassava and river systems; English settlement, then the Dutch taking Suriname in 1667 in exchange for New Netherland — Suriname for Manhattan, which is how this coast became Dutch; sugar, coffee and cacao plantations on drained polder worked by enslaved Africans; the MAROON WARS and the treaties of the 1760s that recognised Saramaka and Ndyuka freedom and territory; the Sephardic community and Jodensavanne from the 1650s; ABOLITION IN 1863, late, with ten further years of compulsory labour; INDIAN INDENTURE from 1873 and JAVANESE INDENTURE from 1890, both of which the Dutch arranged precisely to replace the freed; Chinese from 1853; independence in 1975 and the very large emigration to the Netherlands that accompanied it; the interior war of the 1980s; and the gold mining that now contaminates the interior rivers.