White Lies and Black Markets: Evading Metropolitan Authority in Colonial Suriname, 1650–1800 by Karwan Fatah-Black, and: Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800 ed. by Cátia Antunes and Amélia Polónia, and: Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550–1800: Connectors of Commercial Maritime Systems ed. by Manuel Herrero Sánchez and Klemens Kaps (review)

Transnational and Cross-Imperial Trade Networks in the Early Modern World

Almost as ironic counterpoints to the global rise of nationalism, protectionism, identitarian movements and accompanying narratives of imperial grandeur and purported ethnic or national purity, historians have in recent years demonstrated that the exact opposite characterised global development in the early modern period. Not just in spite but precisely because of ongoing projects of state, nation and empire building, this was an era of porous boundaries and constant cross-cultural and cross-imperial exchange which provided the very foundations of the survival and growth of European commercial, economic, and imperial expansion.

Karwan Fatah-Black's White Lies and Black Markets provides a convincing case study, giving fascinating insights into the development of the early modern Dutch colony of Suriname as a product of – largely illegal – transimperial Atlantic connections.

Suriname's European colonisation had been a plurinational effort from the outset, and, as Fatah-Black shows, it remained a heterogeneous affair throughout the early modern period. The first expeditions to the Guiana coast in the early seventeenth century were, he argues, 'based on shared business interests rather than being strictly French, Dutch, Irish or English undertakings' (p. 16). The several attempts at dispersed settlement along the Guiana rivers became more permanent along the Suriname River when colonists from Barbados began to settle there and, in this first period of English rule (1651–1667) set up sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Jewish planters settled in the more welcoming legal climate of Suriname and brought invaluable knowledge about how to run sugar plantations with African slave labour while dealing with colonial populations. They came from Brazil after the Portuguese defeat of the Dutch there in 1654 and from Barbados. The strong connection to Barbados as well as largely peaceful relations with the Amerindians, sustained the 'British' colonists and permitted them to trade for the necessary provisions. In 1667 the Dutch State of Zeeland's fleet captured Surname during the Third Anglo-Dutch War and claimed it for themselves. The fortunes of their colony declined in the 1670s, however, when a protracted guerrilla war with Amerindian groups who allied with Maroons destroyed many plantations, while the numbers of enslaved people arriving dwindled, planters left, and the connection to nearby colonies like Barbados deteriorated. Hence in 1682 the States of Zeeland sold their troublesome colony to the Dutch West African Company, who, together with the city of Amsterdam and the family van Sommelsdyck, founded the Suriname Company a year later. This company ran the colony until the newly founded Batavian Republic, allied to Revolutionary France, brought Suriname and the other Atlantic Dutch possessions under state control in 1795, only four years before it was taken by the British in the course of the war against France. This period of company control provides the focus of Fatah-Black's book.

After the Suriname Company's take-over, renewed investment in the colony saw a growth in the slave trade and the increasingly financialised plantation economy, funded by metropolitan Dutch capital. Dutch Suriname attracted migrants from all over Europe. Next to its earlier connection to Barbados and its substantial Jewish community with its pan- and trans-Atlantic links, the colony assimilated...