"A Theater of Perpetual War": Administrative Anxiety and Knowledge Production in Colonial Suriname, 1749-1762
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Fought intermittently between 1749 and 1762, the First Saramaka War was a primal moment in the history of Maroon relations with the Dutch colonial Surinamese state. The war was part of the violent history between Suriname's Maroon communities–-formed by slave refugees in the bush–-and its governmental authorities. During the war, the relationship between colonists, slaves, and Maroons was defined by a condition of fear and contingency. In this thesis, I argue that colonists created and indexed information specific to the condition of the colony as a means of combating both the Maroon threat and its attendant anxieties. For colonists, the impulse to create and disseminate such information intensified over the course of the First Saramaka War and was compounded by a concern that the information they cataloged was either untrue or of unreliable origin. In response, colonists-–both planters and administrators-–deployed literary, diplomatic, and clandestine methods of knowledge production in an attempt to secure their hold on the colony. These methods of knowledge production proved unsuccessful in the conduct of war, though they were also used to reinforce the political and economic foundations of the colonial state. Colonists ultimately suffered defeat in the First Saramaka War and recognized full Saramaka independence in 1762. I argue that their defeat was the result of living in a colony whose conditions proved resistant to European attempts at "knowing": where maps, ordinances, poems, plays, secret codes, and treaties were insufficient means of understanding the threat posed by slaves and Maroons to the stability of colonial Suriname.