A Demographic Repartition of Enslaved People Living in Paramaribo, 1837-1847

by Gerry Rogers - Isa Maria Liz - Teun van Kasteel - Camille Le Brettevillois

Introduction

From 1828 to 1847, the colonial government of Paramaribo, in Suriname, recorded its population in detailed ward registers. This practice, common in many colonial territories since the eighteenth century, particularly those under Portuguese exploitation, was intended to ensure control and systematise demographic information on overseas populations.

Although only partially preserved, citizen scientists transcribed these records in recent decades. They are now available as a large-scale dataset containing over 2 million data points at the International Institute of Social History database.

Enslaved individuals constituted around 70% of Paramaribo's inhabitants in the 1860s (van Galen et al., 2023, p. 192). Considering the opportunity to briefly explore such an important foundational group within a colonial society, this data story seeks to explore how the enslaved population of Paramaribo was distributed by age, gender and location between 1837 and 1847. To address this question, we consider four sub-questions:

a. What was the overall size of the enslaved population?

b. What was their gender distribution?

c. How many were children or adults?

d. Where were they located?

This analysis traces demographic changes over a decade, contributing to a better understanding of Paramaribo’s social history and the bureaucratic mechanisms that framed enslavement. It also offers insights into the ways colonial administration quantified and categorised enslaved lives.

Data Sources and Limitations

The source for this analysis is the harmonised ward register database, accessible through the DRUID platform. The registers, compiled by ward masters, provide annual data on each city’s districts, though with some gaps. While data on free inhabitants is more complete, information on enslaved people is limited and consistently available only from 1837 onwards.

Despite its scale, the dataset presents several limitations:

i. The annual recording of enslaved individuals only began in 1837, nearly a decade after the start of the registers.

ii. The data includes the number of enslaved individuals within households, age category (child or adult), gender, and ethnicity. No individual names or attributable details are recorded.

iii. Not all yearly registers are available. For instance, the data for 1844 is entirely missing. Other years are partially missing; for example, in the case of Wijk C, data is only available for three out of ten years.

iv. Errors may have occurred during the transcription and digitisation processes. The final version of the dataset was not systematically verified against the original scans, leaving room for inconsistencies or inaccuracies that may remain.

The Number of Enslaved People

Between 1837 and 1847, the ward registers from Paramaribo reveal significant fluctuations in the annual number of enslaved individuals, ranging from 6,783 in 1837 to 166 after ten years. While this decline could suggest a demographic shift, it is more plausibly attributed to gaps in the source itself. As previously mentioned, several registers are missing or incomplete, particularly 1844 and 1847. Rather than indicating a consistent demographic decline, these fluctuations appear to be based on inconsistencies in recordkeeping. Historical contexts, such as the international abolitionist pressure, may have impacted how these numbers were recorded, but this does not explain the drop in the enslaved population of Paramaribo at this time.

This query was created to count each observation with an entry from https://www.ru.nl/hdsc/example/isEnslavedBy and filtered by year, from 1837 to 1847. The results were grouped and ordered by year.

The Gender of Enslaved People

When it comes to gender, the records consistently point to an imbalance, in which women represented an average of 61% of all those enslaved from 1837 to 1847, oscillating from 58 to 64% per year. It should be noted that both free and enslaved women have historically outnumbered men in many territories in this period, especially in manumission. In colonial territories, as well, a slightly higher number of enslaved women compared to their counterparts was common. Traditional literature associates male enslaved individuals with the system of the plantation, and enslaved women with domestic service. While this generalisation is contested, since both men and women could be rented and perform different daily activities, our sources are directly related to households. Therefore, it favours the visibility of enslaved women. This gender pattern also reveals how colonial systems saw and counted individuals.

This query was created to show the relative gender proportions of enslaved people using https://www.ru.nl/hdsc/example/isEnslavedBy and filtered by year, from 1837 to 1847. The results were grouped and ordered by gender and year.

The Age and Gender of Enslaved People

The distribution of enslaved individuals by age and gender presents an additional challenge when analysing these historical data. While adult women consistently outnumbered men, male children were more frequently recorded than enslaved girls during these ten years. This may reflect a greater perceived value in tracking enslaved boys for labour. Although no law formally emancipated enslaved children before 1863, as seen in other colonial territories, there is evidence that children were often kept with their mothers and not sold separately, even into adulthood, in Suriname (van Galen et al., 2023, p. 199). This practice could be associated with the high rates of female manumission, generally achieved through lifetime savings or following the death of their enslavers. While these numbers could reveal a gendered logic in urban Paramaribo, they may also result from source limitations.

This query counted observations with an entry from the https://www.ru.nl/hdsc/example/isEnslavedBy data field and assigned each observation to a gender category (female or male) and age group (child or adult). It was filtered by year, and the results were grouped and ordered by year.

The Location of Enslaved People

The ward registers offer the opportunity to map slavery in Paramaribo between 1837 and 1847 spatially. Following years of growth, authorities introduced a new distribution of districts in 1837, which is illustrated below in a map published in 1850 (Muntjewerff, 2016). Although parts of the Tweede Buitenwijk in the northwestern part of the city (indicated in red) were officially designated for habitation in 1847, the map offers a reasonably accurate visualisation of district distribution in Paramaribo. Combining the map and bar chart below allows us to see the spatio-temporal distribution of enslaved persons between 1837 and 1847 for the years and districts we have data. Both the new Eerste Buitenwijk and Tweede Buitenwijk had relatively small numbers of enslaved individuals, while Wijk A - the oldest district - consistently had the largest number of enslaved persons. There are several potential explanations for this. Wijk A may historically have been the city's wealthiest district, as it was the foothold of Europeans in Suriname for a long time. Further research should, therefore, look into wealth distribution in Paramaribo during this same period. Another explanation might be Wijk A’s location on the waterfront and near the administrative and military centre of Dutch rule over the colony, as labour demands may have been physically heavier. To test this hypothesis, future research should draw on our data regarding gender, age, and spatial distribution. Since labour was (and remains) deeply gendered, meaningful patterns may be waiting to be uncovered.

Plan of Paramaribo showing wijken 1850 (source: Wikimedia Commons)

This query counted observations with an entry from the https://www.ru.nl/hdsc/example/isEnslavedBy data field and assigned each observation to a city wijk based on their location. It was filtered by year, and the results output to a table grouped and ordered by year.

Conclusion

Studies on enslaved individuals have been growing in the past few decades, under different headings: labour relations, individual trajectories, socioeconomic exclusions, and forms of resistance. While slave records are unique in understanding the life course of enslaved individuals, ward records provide information on the broader structures within which these individuals lived (van Galen et al., 2023, p. 206). Organised by neighbourhoods, these records offer valuable data on Paramaribo's free and enslaved population, such as personal information, age, ethnicity, place of birth, occupation, and religion.

This brief data analysis of the Paramaribo’s ward registers, spanning from 1837 to 1847, reveals both historical trends and limitations in how enslaved individuals were recorded. Across the decade of analysis, it is clear that the total number of enslaved people was in decline over time. While the Dutch had abolished the slave trade in 1814, slavery itself was legally permissable until 1863. However, it remains unclear whether this decline was due to the implementation of new legal policies by the Dutch authorities, or just gaps in the historical record. While adult women consistently surpassed men, male children were frequently more registered than girls, suggesting a pattern shaped by labour expectations, manumissions, and household visibility. A first spatio-temporal mapping of enslaved persons in Paramaribo raises many valuable questions, from which meaningful conclusions are challenging without additional research.

Further research, especially combined with other types of records on enslaved individuals – and compared with data from other colonial societies – may be able to deepen our understanding of these historical patterns and specificities. While the research questions could well have been answered using tabular data, the use of graphics and maps permits the reader to digest the data in a more meaningful fashion, better supporting the historical narrative. Crossed-referenced with other types of data found in other kinds of sources (e.g. ship or slave records), scholars might be able to challenge the gaps in the records, or at least to identify potential directions this data analysis could take. When combined, both quantitative and qualitative approaches can enhance this enquiry, or indeed stem from it. Our research question focused on extracting information from the available ward register data. Therefore, this analysis can contribute to more in-depth, precise, and elaborated studies.

The script developed for this data analysis could also be adapted to similar sources – including parish registers, ship records, and slave records. It may assist in highlighting particular information on specific segments of a population within a defined location.

References & Bibliography

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• BRANA-SHUTE, Rosemary, “Approaching freedom: The manumission of slaves in Suriname, 1760–1828”, in Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, vol.10, 1989 pp. 40-63.

• FUJITANI, J. ; EKAMA, K. ; HELLMAN, L. ; ROSSUM, M. (van) (ed.), Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850: Towards a Global History of Coerced Labour, De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 2022.

• GOUNDER, F. ; HIRALAL, K. ; PANDE, A., HASSANKHAN, M.S. (ed.)., Women, Gender and the Legacy of Slavery and Indenture, Abingdon : Routledge, 2020.

• MUNTJEWERFF, Henk, ‘Concordans Paramaribo’, 2016, see: https://www.concordansparamaribo.info/historie.

• NESLO, Ellen, “The formation of a free non-white elite in Paramaribo, 1800-1863”, in Caribbean Studies, vol. 43, n.2, July-December 2015, pp. 177-210.

• SCHRIKKER, A. ; WICKRAMASINGHE, N., (editor), Being a Slave, Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean, Leiden University Press, Leiden, 2020.

• ZEMON DAVIS, Natalie, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves' Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname”, in Law and History review, vol. 29, n. 4, November 2011, pp. 925-984.