The 'wijkregister' of Paramaribo 1846: creating a social map of a colonial city
Thunnis van Oort (2022)
Introduction
Since the 17th century, Suriname was a part of the Guianas colonized by the Netherlands. It was fully geared towards producing lucrative agricultural products such as sugar, coffee, cotton, cocoa and wood. Until 1873, the labor for the plantation work was almost completely supplied by people who had been taken by force from Africa to South America – and their descendants, as the trans-Atlantic slave trade was officially abolished in 1808.
During the 19th century, Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname and the only settlement in the colony that could be categorized as urban, grew in size and importance. In part, this growth was triggered by an increase of the free population of color through manumissions. As women were manumitted at a higher rate than men, the urban society that developed in Paramaribo had a skewed sex ratio (Hoogbergen & ten Hove 2001; Hoefte & Vrij 2004). If most scholarly work has focused on the plantations, recently there has been a growing interest in Paramaribo’s fascinating social history (Fatah-Black, 2018; Neslo, 2016). The ‘wijkregister’ of Paramaribo from 1846 available as structured data can provide a quantitative basis to further explore this rich history and provide new insights into the impact of ethnicity and gender on the social landscape of the city.
The source: Wijkregister 1846
Since 1828, the city administration kept a register of all inhabitants, called the ‘wijkregister’ (district register). For each district, a ‘wijkmeester’ (district master) was appointed by the Governor, tasked with creating and maintaining a register of all inhabitants living in his district. In January of each year, he would ask all the heads of households (owner or main renter of the parcel) to supply him with information on everyone living on his or her household, including sub-renters living on the ‘erf’ (yard). Failure to comply or to supply truthful information was punishable by fine. (Gouvernementsblad van de Kolonie Suriname) The districting changed over time; in 1846, Paramaribo was divided into the districts A to F, plus the first and second ‘outer districts’.
For each free person, the register would contain: address, name, age, occupation, religious affiliation and skin color (either ‘white’, of European descent, ‘colored’, of mixed descent, or ‘black’, of African descent) and the number of people in slavery that were housed on the plot, their skin color (‘black’ or ‘colored’), the sex of the enslaved persons and whether they were adult or child. Lastly, the form allowed room for general remarks, often about the ownership of the parcel or enslaved persons.
The wijkregister is a very rich source, but with obvious limitations. Most importantly, this is a document that served the needs of a colonial bureaucracy and therefore is a biased representation of Paramaribo society. A clear example is the registration of skin color: we do not know whether this was self-reported or decided by the wijkmeester, but one can imagine how this was not exact science (see also Hoefte & Vrij 2010). I have chosen to use the terms ‘white’, ‘colored’, and ‘black’ in order to remain close to the source and prevent over-interpretation. For the term 'colored' I also use the interchangeable term 'brown', because this was the term in use in the rdf vocabulary that I selected to denote skin color.
Not all inhabitants were registered, for instance soldiers stationed at the fort were not in the register and neither were enslaved people owned by the government, and it is not fully clear what other groups might have been left out, such as for example missionaries. The register leaves out several important characteristics of free persons: the relation to the head of the household is unfortunately not documented which makes it difficult to make claims about family relations within households. Moreover, the sex of free persons was not registered (this variable has been added by matching first names). Also, the register does not usually provide ownership information: we cannot be certain that the head of the household (or another member of the household) was the owner of the parcel and/or the enslaved persons domiciled there.
For this project, only the edition of 1846 has been converted into rdf, because that edition was available as structured data (Dikland 2009). Recently, more editions have been transcribed by John Sang-Ajang (Stichting Surinaamse Genealogie 2022). Hopefully they can also be converted into rdf one day, but for now we are limited to one year. All the available districts have survived in the 1846 edition, except for the second outer district.
An example from the Wijkregister of 1845 from the National Achives:
A list of entities of a specific type
This query describes the entities in the dataset with a description
Adding variable 'sex'
In the Wijkregister, the sex of free persons is not explicitly mentioned. Sometimes, it can be inferred from the fact that someone is registered as widow, or from the double surname that would usually refer to a married women (a combination of her maiden and married name). But for most persons, the sex was deduced from the first name. By matching the first names to the Clariah Core NAMES dataset for most persons we could establish the sex. Most names used in Paramaribo were Dutch first names that proved easy to match. For some first names that were typical for people in slavery the probable sex could be ascertained using the Slave Registers. In the end, of 7719 free persons, 589 persons were labelled with 'sex unknown'. For enslaved persons, the sex was usually given.
This query produces an overview of all the free persons in the data set and their sex: male, female or unknown.
Karwan Fatah-Black states in his book Eigendomsstrijd that most free non-white inhabitants of the city lived in the newest districts E and F (p. 18) and that in the older city parts, roughly corresponding to districts A to D, 'black and white' were mixed (p. 85). We can verify this claim for 1846 using the Wijkregister data.
Ethnicity of free inhabitants per district
The picture becomes richer when we add information on where the non-free population in the city lived. A high concentration of people in slavery was living in district A, the most prestigious old part of the town where also the highest concentration of people of European descent lived. In the new district E, the relation was inverse: much more free people than enslaved people lived there.
In Suriname, most people in slavery worked at the plantations outside of the city. City dwellers owned slaves for various reasons. For the richest inhabitants, a large slave force was a status symbol. People in slavery performed domestic labor but they could also be deployed (or rented out for) other jobs. And sometimes people in slavery were owned by family or loved ones in order to be manumitted -- a costly process that could take years.
Distribution of free and enslaved persons per district
Distribution of the number of enslaved per household
This map show the female heads of households in Paramaribo. Blue = European descent, Red = Mixed descent, Green = African descent. Click on the symbol for name and age of the person.
Scholarly debates about the so-called Caribbean family model date back to at least the 1930s (Smith, 1978; Stuart, 1996). A distinguishing feature of households in the Caribbean region, is the high incidence of female heads of households. The Wijkregister data allows us to observe of this pattern is also visible in Paramaribo in 1846. The first person on each card of the Wijkregister was the head of the household. Indeed, this was often a women, especially among non-white residents, as the query below illustrates.
This table illustrates the skewed sex ratio in Paramaribo: women of color were much more often head of a household than white women.
The Wijkregister does give some information on the occupations of free women living in Paramaribo. This information is often not provided, and if provided usually only for female heads of households. If we link the data to the HistoryOfWork data that contains various historical spellings of occupations, we can normalise the occupations listed in the wijkregister. The register shows mostly service/domestic occupations such as laundry, sewing , housekeeper, and also commercial activities: selling food or running a shop. It also brings to light apparent mistakes in the source, as some professions appear to be highly unlikely to have been open to women ('Ambt', or civil servant), or are not occupations at all ('twins/gemini').
[met deze query gaat nog iets mis want de aantallen zijn veel te hoog]
In conclusion
The data explorations above show the richness of the Wijkregister as a source for examining the social make-up of a colonial city in the mid-nineteenth century. They invite more in-depth analyses, looking into how characteristics of gender, ethnicity and urban slavery were intertwined. And this is only one edition of the Wijkregister: hopefully we can expand our inquiries to the earlier editions going back to 1828, creating an integrated database of Paramaribo residents over an almost two-decade period. Also, linking the Wijkregister to other population databases, such as the slave registers, manumission records, civil records and other source, will lead to even more enhanced research opportunities.
References
Dikland, P. (2009) Wijkregisters Paramaribo 1846 (transcription). https://www.pinasroots.nl/cms/bronnen/volkstellingen/246-wijkregisters-1846 [accessed 20-7-2020]
Fatah-Black, K. (2018). Eigendomsstrijd. De geschiedenis van slavernij en emancipatie in Suriname (Amsterdam: Ambo Anthos)
Gouvernementsblad van de Kolonie Suriname (various editions)
Hoefte, R. en Vrij, J.J. (2004). Free black and colored women in early-nineteenth-century Paramaribo, Suriname. In: Gaspar, David Barry and Hine, Darlene Clark. (edit). Beyond bondage. Free Women of Color in the Americas. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois press: 145-168
Hoogbergen, W. & Okke ten Hove (2001). De vrije gekleurde en zwarte bevolking van Paramaribo, 1762-1863, OSO. Tijdschrift voor Surinaamse taalkunde, letterkunde en geschiedenis 20, 306-320
Neslo, E (2016). Een ongekende elite. De opkomst van een gekleurde elite in koloniaal Suriname 1800-1863, dissertation (Utrecht University).
Oort, T. van, Mourits, R.J., Quanjer, B., Galen, C.W. van & Kok, J. (2021). Sterfte in Suriname. Hoe databases een nieuw licht werpen op het leven van slaafgemaakten. Ex Tempore, 40 (3), 116-123.
Smith, R.T. (1978) The Family and the Modern World System - Some Observations From the Caribbean, Journal of family history, 3:4, 337-360.
Stichting Surinaamse Genealogie, SSG lezing Wijkregisters (2022)
Stuart, S. (1996) Female-headed families: A comparative perspective of the Caribbean and the developed world, Gender and Development, 4:2, 28-34, DOI: 10.1080/741922017
Acknowledgements
This research project was made possible by a CLARIAH Fellowship grant 2021 in a collaboration with Radboud University.
The Wijkregister 1846 was transcribed in 2009 by Philip Dikland. Other editions of the Wijkregisters have been and are being transcribed by John Sang-Ajang in collaboration with Stichting Surinaamse Genealogie. For the mapping, the 'Concordans' of Paramaribo created by dr. Henk Muntjewerff was of great value. Gratitude to Richard Zijdeman and Leon van Wissen for their support in the conversion to RDF. Of course: any and all mistakes are mine.