1644 to 1807 · Caribbeanspan
The Guianas took half a million captives and grew maroon republics
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The Guianas, a stretch of the South American coast held in pieces by the British, the French and the Dutch, received more than five hundred thousand enslaved Africans. West Central Africa and the Bight of Benin supplied most of them, following the commercial ties of Dutch and British merchants. Many arrived by transshipment from Caribbean hubs such as Curacao rather than direct from Africa, which is one more sign that the region's slave markets worked as a single connected system across imperial borders. Then the geography did something particular. Plantations sat along rivers that ran back into forest nobody controlled, and people who escaped could go far enough inland that no expedition could follow. The maroon communities of Suriname, among them the Saramaka and the Ndyuka, forced the Dutch into treaties recognising their freedom in the 1760s, four decades before Haiti won its own. The Guianas ended up among the most culturally varied sections of the African diaspora in the Americas.
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