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Building a city in the land of water: Constructing Paramaribo in colonial Suriname, c. 1650–1850

par Martino, Davide
Référence Faire l'histoire de l'architecture au prisme des questions environnementales et décoloniales (09-11/04/2025: Institut d'Études Avancées (IEA), Paris, France)
Publication Non publié, 2025-04-11

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

The stretch of South-American coast between the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers, known to early modern Europeans as ‘wild coast’ for the impassability of its forest, had a different name for its indigenous communities: referencing instead the penetrability of its rivers, they called it Guiana, ‘land of water’. During the long eighteenth century these indigenous communities, as well as European colonists and enslaved African labourers, set up a sophisticated hydraulic infrastructure to turn one part of this ‘land of water’, the Dutch possessions along the river Suriname, into a ‘model’ plantation colony. Dutch profits were predicated upon violence and exploitation, but also upon the construction of a manageable hydraulic environment. This paper investigates this construction by focusing on the architectural and environmental history of Paramaribo, the only urban settlement in colonial Suriname.Just like Dutch colonists thought they recognized in Guiana some of the watery features of their native Low Countries, earlier historians of Suriname have assumed that the hydraulic technologies used in the colony were imported wholesale from the metropole. Such technologies were essential in Paramaribo, the administrative centre of Suriname, which was also the most important Dutch harbour on mainland south America after the Portuguese recovered Brazil in 1654. The city sported several canals and, being constructed on the bank of the river Suriname, near its estuary, it had to deal with variations in the river flow and consequent flooding threats. Following the lead of recent scholarship on Batavia and the Dutch East Indies, this paper shows that the Dutch were not alone in the construction of hydraulic environments and infrastructure, but relied (often without acknowledgement) on indigenous ways of knowing and working. In Suriname, the physical toil of enslaved, mostly African labourers was indispensable for the erection of dams, canals, and sluices; were their skills and knowledge, honed in distant estuaries on the African coast, just as crucial? Answering this and other questions, this paper will contribute to current debates about the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and the extraction of natural resources.