par Martino, Davide
Référence 13th European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference on 'Climate Histories' (18-22/08/2025: Uppsala, Sweden)
Publication Non publié, 2025-08-22
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : The stretch of South American coast between the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers, known to early modern Europeans as ‘wild coast’, had a different name for its indigenous communities, who 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 plantation colony. Dutch profits were predicated upon violence and exploitation, but also upon the construction of a manageable hydraulic environment. This paper focuses on Paramaribo, using the urban hydraulic environment as a case-study to understand the dynamics at play in the wider colony. Paramaribo was the administrative centre of the Suriname colony as well as the most important Dutch harbour on mainland South America after the Portuguese recovered Brazil in 1654. It sported a canal and, being constructed on the bank of the river Suriname, near its estuary, it had to deal with variations in the river flow. Although these have often been compared to the flooding threats facing Dutch cities in the Low Countries, this paper focuses on the specificity of climatic conditions in Suriname and the ways in which contemporaries perceived and recorded them. In so doing, this paper argues that the responses of European colonists, indigenous communities, and enslaved labourers to the local climate were key to define what was desirable, feasible, and ultimately done in constructing the hydraulic environment.

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