In June 1675, a delegation of commissioners from England landed in Surinam, charged with the removal of the king's subjects, remnants of the English colony before its loss to the Dutch eight years earlier. In English hands from 1650 to 1667, Surinam was, by all accounts, a failed enterprise, falling to the Netherlands after just seventeen years. The “Articles of Capitulation” signed by the two European powers allowed English settlers to remain yet also stipulated that they might leave for English territory at any time. By the following decade, many decided that life under Dutch rule was intolerable, opting for transportation to Jamaica. Their removal, however, was no simple matter. The Dutch authorities were eager to secure the payment of debts owed by the English. The king's commissioners, in turn, claimed a group of settlers that the Dutch did not consider to be under the Crown's purview, seeking the removal of “His Majesty's subjects in Surinam as well the Hebrew nation as English.”Footnote 1 Their attempt to evacuate English subjects would include the colony's Jews, members of the Sephardic diaspora who had migrated from surrounding areas of this remote corner of South America.
In 1665, Surinam's governor, council, and assembly had declared that all Jews in the colony, along with future Jewish settlers, would be “considered as English-born.”Footnote 2 This extension of full subjecthood to Surinam's Jews and its subsequent defense by the Crown after the colony's loss shows how competition between imperial powers at the periphery led to articulations of belonging that were embraced by agents at the center. Surinam's governors had extended English subjecthood to Jews in a bid to save an ailing colony, seeking to attract experienced Jewish planters from neighboring Dutch territory. A decade later, representatives of the Crown attempted to evacuate members of the “Hebrew nation” on the grounds that they remained English subjects under Dutch rule and that this status would continue after their transportation to Jamaica. This policy was a departure from the Crown's frequent rejection in the seventeenth century of the validity of colonial naturalization beyond the borders of the granting colony.Footnote 3 Their efforts sealed the creation of a specifically colonial form of English subjecthood, forged by a combination of imperial rivalry and local diversity.
Scholars have recently begun to acknowledge that we must look beyond legal sources in order to fully understand the history of English and, later, British subjecthood. The 1608 ruling known as Calvin's Case had defined allegiance in the courtroom, affirming that birth in any one of the Crown's territories made one a subject in all of the others. Yet subjecthood was something that was practiced, performed, and contested by a variety of actors, whether on the streets of London, in the forests of North America, or on the shores of the Caribbean. As Hannah Weiss Muller has recently noted, the definitions and benefits of subjecthood remained in flux as late as the second half of the eighteenth century. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Paris, this allowed both newly conquered French Catholics and British colonial officials to shape competing notions of belonging.Footnote 4 The challenge of incorporating new groups also existed in England's seventeenth-century empire. When the English conquered New Netherland, they absorbed both Dutch Calvinists and Scandinavian Lutherans. Meanwhile, indigenous nations advanced their own definitions of subjecthood, appealing directly to the Crown as coequals of colonial authorities. All of this took place under the aegis of a seventeenth-century composite monarchy rather than a unitary British state, at a time when naturalization primarily applied to individuals rather than to groups.Footnote 5
English subjecthood was shaped by the loss of colonies as well as by the conquest of new territories, by failure, as well as by success.Footnote 6 As the example of Surinam shows, not all English subjects remained under English rule, and not all colonists were Christians. Surinam's Jews had become “English-born” collectively, as members of a distinct “Hebrew nation.” They went on to form an unusually high proportion of the settler population, far larger than in colonies such as Jamaica or Barbados. After Surinam fell to the Dutch, its precarious nature meant that both Christian and Jewish subjects of England's king remained vital to its survival. And both remained valuable assets to the English Crown, which needed experienced planters for its colonies elsewhere in the Caribbean. The resulting dispute over who could leave hinged not just on who was English, but also on the underlying relationship between subjecthood and nationality. While the colony's Dutch governor asserted that only the English colonists were the king's subjects, the Crown's commissioners argued that members of the “Hebrew nation” also fell under his allegiance, indicating that they would continue to do so elsewhere in his empire.Footnote 7 Amplified by Anglo-Dutch rivalry, what had initially been a local, pragmatic, and largely ad hoc attempt to attract settlers to an ailing colony, received the robust defense of the Crown.
THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT OF SURINAM
Surinam was first colonized by the English in the early 1650s under the patronage of Lord Willoughby of Parham, royalist governor of Barbados.Footnote 8 Hampered by its founder's political fortunes, the colony did not receive formal letters patent until after the Restoration.Footnote 9 Issued by the Crown in June 1663, these granted joint proprietorship to Willoughby and Lawrence Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon's second son. The new proprietary colony would henceforth be known as “Willoughby Land” and would extend “one English mile … beyond the westerly banks of the river Copenam and easterly one mile … beyond the river Marawyne.” Forty leagues in breadth, Surinam's territory would continue upriver “and from thence by direct lines unto the main ocean called the south sea.”Footnote 10 In return for this grant, the proprietors were to reserve thirty thousand acres for the king and were to provide the Crown with an annual payment of two thousand pounds of tobacco along with a fifth of the gold and silver mined in the colony.Footnote 11
The patent outlined the boundaries of religious and civil belonging in the colony. Surinamese-born children of English “natives or denizens” were to enjoy the “liberties, franchises and immunities of free denizens of England as fully and amply” as if they had been “abiding and born within any other the dominions of England” or its possessions.Footnote 12 Here the terms “native,” “denizen,” and “free denizen,” while used interchangeably, indicate full English subjecthood acquired by birth, rather than the more limited status conferred to aliens by letters patent of denization.Footnote 13 Surinam's grant was thus in keeping with common law and practice: following Calvin's Case of 1608, anyone born under the allegiance of the Crown was to be considered a subject in any of the other lands held by that monarch, including the colonies.Footnote 14 Such born subjects received the full protection of the king, in contrast to aliens, who paid higher taxes and customs and had limited property rights.Footnote 15
The Crown clearly intended to attract both strangers and religious dissenters to Surinam, making favorable provisions for both. The patent encouraged the settlement of those who “will become our subjects and will live under our allegiance.” Unlike in England, those who remained aliens were to pay the same customs and duties as the English. Residents of the colony prevented by conscience from conforming to the Church of England were to receive “indulgences and dispensations” at the discretion of the colony's governors, provided that they remained loyal to the monarch.Footnote 16 However, no mention was made of any specific non-Anglican group, whether Jewish or dissenting Christian.
The precise mechanism for creating new subjects remained undefined, the patent failing to mention where and how aliens would come to fall under the allegiance of the king and whether that status would remain valid beyond Surinam.Footnote 17 This was not unusual in early colonial grants, where references to the transportation of “strangers” who were to become the king's “loving subjects” left the place of admission to subjecthood unstated. In practice this usually entailed naturalization by colonial assemblies, mirroring the role of England's parliament, yet those naturalized subjects were routinely regarded as aliens in the king's other dominions. In the seventeenth century, the Crown often failed to recognize the validity of colonial naturalizations outside of the granting territory, its position ultimately cohering around outright rejection. Only after the 1740 Plantation Act was it clear that fully portable subjecthood could be acquired outside of the British Isles. While some colonies’ grants did contain clauses that implied “that colonial naturalization had an imperial, and not merely a local, effect,” this was not the case with Surinam's patent.Footnote 18 When it came to conferring subjecthood, lack of definition regarding both process and scope left plenty of room for ambiguity.
The economic strengths of the colony came to rest not with gold, silver, or tobacco, but with sugar. George Warren's Impartial Description of Surinam, printed in 1667 but based on observations made during the previous three years, describes around five hundred plantations, forty or fifty with sugar-works, “yielding no small profit to the owners.”Footnote 19 While accurate population statistics are unavailable, contemporary estimates give some indication of the colony's growth. In May 1661, the Committee for Foreign Plantations noted that Surinam had one thousand inhabitants, and that it “yields as good sugar as Barbados.” Two and a half years later, Renatus Enys reported a population of four thousand. Also remarking on the quality of the sugar produced, he suggested that the colony would become more profitable “[w]ere the planters supplied with negroes, the strength and sinews of this western world.”Footnote 20 Neither population figures note whether their numbers count only English settlers, or also include Surinam's African or indigenous slaves.Footnote 21
The colony's growth peaked by the middle of the decade. In his journal, Governor William Byam reported that in May 1665 “the colony of Willoughby Land [was] in its meridian and after this month had its declination and went ever retrogrado.” At this point, according to his account, Surinam was defended by around fifteen hundred men, fewer than half of whom were armed, many with weapons of poor quality.Footnote 22 When Willoughby visited from Barbados that year, he found the territory under a “contagious sickness” that had “spread itself all over the colony and swept away many people.”Footnote 23 By August of 1666, according to Byam, sickness had killed over two hundred men along with “very many women and children.” There were, he wrote, not “100 sound men in the whole country to oppose an enemy.”Footnote 24 However, despite this dire account—subsequently shaped, perhaps, to excuse defeat by the Dutch—probably between one and two thousand English settlers remained by 1667.Footnote 25
ESTABLISHING A JEWISH PRESENCE
While the English were colonizing Surinam, Jews were establishing an open presence in English territory on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, the formal readmission of Jews to England and their settlement in its overseas territories shared the same underlying impetus. Expelled from Dutch Brazil in 1654 following the colony's loss to Portugal, members of an Amsterdam-oriented Sephardic diaspora settled throughout the Caribbean. Prevented by the Navigation Acts from trading directly with their parent community in the Netherlands, those in English colonies required a presence in London.Footnote 26 Overtures to the Commonwealth by representatives of the Dutch Jewish community were successful and allowed Jews to live openly in England from 1656, yet a lack of enforcement of the medieval expulsion order and an absence of any positive protections guaranteed that their legal status remained ambiguous.Footnote 27 In 1664, Charles II confirmed that Jews could remain in the realm, though only with a pithy statement denying that he had given “any particular order” for their “molesting or disquieting.”Footnote 28 Until the nineteenth century, England's Jews would be subject to restrictions aimed at Christian dissenters and barred from parliamentary naturalization, which required a sacramental oath.Footnote 29
The composition of Surinam's Jewish community would come to differ radically from that of other English territories. In Jamaica and Barbados, for example, most Jews were merchants who settled in urban areas, forming a relatively small population. By 1680 seventeen of 507 householders in Port Royal, Jamaica were Jewish.Footnote 30 The numbers were higher in Barbados in the same year. Bridgetown's 404 householders included fifty-four Jews; a total of 184 Jews lived on the island, out of a white population of twenty thousand. Both colonies’ governors received anti-Jewish complaints, including outright calls for expulsion.Footnote 31 Surinam's Jewish community, in contrast, included a large number of planters, recipients of generous privileges. The population would reach two hundred under English rule, constituting at least 10 percent of the colony's free inhabitants, and would, according to one report, equal the number of Dutch colonists by 1675.Footnote 32
While there are hints of a Jewish presence in Surinam as early as the 1640s, the first clearly documented Jewish settlement occurred after the Restoration.Footnote 33 In 1661, Henry Benjamin de Caseres, Henry de Caseres, and Jacob Fraso petitioned the Crown for the right to settle in Barbados and Surinam.Footnote 34 Their request, while successful, exposed existing tensions in the metropolis about the admission of Jews to England's colonies. The Council for Foreign Plantations, to whom the Crown referred the case, met to consider the matter on 24 July 1661.Footnote 35 In doing so, it debated not only the costs and benefits of allowing Jews to settle within the king's territories, but the role of Jews amidst competing visions of the economics of empire.
Peculiarly dispersed and stereotypically associated with unique avarice, Jews served to either catalyze or threaten trade and commerce. The council noted the existing debate about the desirability of Jewish settlement, suggesting that opinion was divided between merchants and planters. Merchants opposed the presence of Jews, arguing that their facility for commerce and dispersal among numerous nations would lead them to “engross trade among themselves.” This would divert the benefits of trade from the king's colonies, removing it from the control of his subjects. For planters, on the other hand, “the admission of the Jews, or any other accession of a free trade with other nations” provided much-needed competition with English merchants, who sought to keep the prices of provisions artificially high. The “industry and dexterity of the Jews and other strangers” was a positive thing, lowering the price of goods and strengthening the Crown's plantations.Footnote 36
For the council, then, Jews were merely stand-ins for the larger debate about the benefits and drawbacks of a mercantilist vision of empire. Merchants supported the system of trade put in place by the Navigation Acts, a system for which Jews, by virtue of their inherent duplicity and multiple loyalties, were unsuited to participate. The planters, on the other hand, saw in Jewish settlement the possibility of wider commerce beyond the English system that would, in turn, enrich both the plantations and the metropolis. And, at least according to the account provided by the councilors, for the planters true avarice lay not with the Jews but with the merchants, who sought to engross the riches of empire.Footnote 37
The Council of Foreign Plantations ultimately opted to sidestep such questions. Rather than regard the petitioners as members of a collective group—the community of Jews, with all that was implied by their Jewishness—it chose to consider them “as so many single persons.” While the arguments for and against admitting Jews into the king's colonies were “of great weight,” the councilors’ report stated that they “hath not thought fit to proceed to the giving [of] any judgment” on the matter of Jews as a whole. Instead, on the basis of an accompanying letter from the King of Denmark and the fact that the petitioners had already lived in Barbados for many years without causing trouble, they recommended that Henry Benjamin de Caseres, Henry de Caseres, and Jacob Fraso be allowed to reside either in that island or any other of the king's foreign plantations.Footnote 38
The council's musings highlight metropolitan anxieties about the relative merits of a Jewish presence in England's empire. This contrasts sharply with the later pragmatism of Surinam's governors, for whom the attraction of Jewish settlers was simply a matter of survival. And while the councilors decided to respond to their petitioners as individuals, Surinam's rulers would treat Jews collectively, attempting to save a failing venture by offering communal privileges that included full English subjecthood. In their colony, at least, on-the-ground exigencies took precedence, shaping belonging in the process.
By 1662, at least one of the three petitioners was living in Surinam. A pamphlet printed that year, Robert Sanford's Surinam Justice, reproduces two depositions that describe events at “the house of Senior [sic] Henrico de Casseres.”Footnote 39 The text also contains other references to Jews. In detailing the colony's religious divisions, Sanford describes how Surinam's governor, William Byam, “hath heard the savior of the world worse than blasphemed, his enemies the Jews crying shame at the fact and connivance.”Footnote 40 And a further deposition, given by Thomas Duke in November 1661, provides tangential evidence for a Jewish presence, describing how one Captain Crook stated that “neither Dutch nor Jew should live here.”Footnote 41 As L. L. E. Rens notes, from Sanford we can presume that Jews other than de Caseres resided in Surinam by 1662, suggesting that they “lived at the capital Thorarica” and thus “were then not engaged in any agricultural occupation.” However, the Jewish population in the first half of the decade remained small, probably no more than thirty people.Footnote 42
Only from the middle of the decade would the Jewish community grow to significant numbers, a result both of flight from neighboring colonies and of direct overtures for Jewish settlement by Surinam's governors. From 1665 around one hundred Jews arrived from Dutch Cayenne after its capture by the French and subsequent destruction by the English. They joined about fifty other Jewish settlers from the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Pomaroon in Western Guyana, after its temporary occupation by English forces arriving from Barbados. Experienced sugar planters, the new arrivals would become central to Surinam's prosperity.Footnote 43
SURINAM'S JEWS AS ENGLISH SUBJECTS
The colony's attempts to attract Jewish settlement took the form of a 1665 “Grant of Privileges by the Governor, Council, and Assembly of Surinam, to the Jews,” issued to bolster a settler population that had been devastated by disease and desertion. This included extensive privileges for any Jews who might choose to settle in the colony, far exceeding any rights available to Jews in England. While stating the desirability of attracting colonists “of whatsoever country and religion,” the grant offered full toleration for the Jewish religion, including recognition of Jewish law, exemption from serving in the militia on the Sabbath, and a host of other privileges. The grant also extended full English subjecthood to any present or future Jewish inhabitant.Footnote 44 The aim of the “Grant of Privileges” was to encourage settlement with as attractive an environment as possible for Surinam's Jews. The governors praised the contributions of the current Jewish population and, as inducement, declared that “[e]very person belonging to the Hebrew nation now resident here, or who may hereafter come to reside and trade here … shall be considered as English-born.” Jews were to have “full liberty” to plant and trade for their own profit as long as they remained loyal subjects of the English King. Their property (real and personal) was secure and they were exempt from most peacetime civic obligations. Equally important were the Grant's guarantees of religious freedom. Members of “the Hebrew nation” could practice their religion without fear of harassment; hindering their observances was a punishable offense, and Jewish marriages and wills were declared fully legitimate. Jews were exempt from all court appearances on holidays and the Sabbath, their own courts were recognized, and they were allowed to swear oaths “in conformity with the customs of the Hebrew nation.” The community also received land for a synagogue, school, and burial ground.Footnote 45
In offering a series of clearly enumerated religious rights, the 1665 “Grant of Privileges” far surpassed the minimal statement of protection issued to Jews in England by Charles II during the previous year.Footnote 46 It also provided a degree of communal recognition unavailable to Jews in other English colonies, who usually benefited, at best, from a suspension of religious tests.Footnote 47 In doing so, the grant drew upon existing Dutch precedents, closely mirroring rights extended to Jews by the Dutch West India Company in neighboring Essequibo that were, in turn, based on proposals made by Brazilian Sephardic exiles in 1657.Footnote 48 Such explicit grants of collective toleration were as rare in the wider Dutch world as they were in the English. As Evan Haefeli has noted, early modern Dutch tolerance usually took the form of “connivance,” the turning of a blind eye, rather than codified statements of protection. Where formal grants of toleration did occur, as in Brazil, they were “always in response to political pressures, especially the exigencies of war.”Footnote 49 In this sense the rights offered by the English in Surinam echoed Dutch examples in context as well as content, framed five months into the second Anglo-Dutch war in a bid to attract experienced Jewish planters from adjacent Dutch territory.
Surinam's 1663 patent made no mention of the possibility of collective naturalization. And while it contained provisions for the toleration of recusancy, the full enumeration of positive religious rights for specific groups remained, at best, latent.Footnote 50 The 1665 “Grant of Privileges” was therefore unusual in declaring an entire class of people to be “considered as English-born.”Footnote 51 This departed from normal English colonial practice, whereby both naturalization and denization generally applied only to specific, named individuals. Some colonies did occasionally naturalize entire groups of aliens by “enrolment,” but the grant went further than that, promising full subjecthood to Jews not yet resident in the territory.Footnote 52 The 1665 grant also allowed for the possibility that their status exceeded the usual scope of colonial naturalization. While English naturalization law “operated retrospectively,” deeming “the alien actually to have been born within the protection of the king,” strangers naturalized outside of England frequently found their subjecthood questioned beyond the granting colony, authorities seizing their goods on the grounds that they remained aliens according to the Navigation Acts.Footnote 53 Those literally born under the king's protection were subjects in all of his territories; in the seventeenth century it was far from clear that the same could be said for born aliens subsequently naturalized in his overseas possessions. Yet as we will see, the English Crown would come to defend the subjecthood of Surinam's Jews after the colony's loss, attempting to transport them to Jamaica where, by implication, they would still be regarded as English. Was this because the grant conferred the portable subjecthood accorded to those of actual English birth, rather than the territorially bound subjecthood of colonial naturalization?
DUTCH RULE AND THE FATE OF THE ENGLISH
Two years after the 1665 grant, Surinam fell to the Dutch as part of the hostilities of the second Anglo-Dutch war. Seven vessels under the command of Abraham Crynsens made landfall in February 1667. The English offered only cursory resistance, surrendering the colony after a few hours of fighting. According to one report, many English transferred their allegiance to the Dutch after assurances that they could keep their estates, offering to show the victors “every crook and corner of the country, and where the cattle, provision[s] and negroes were.” Governor Byam, after meeting with the colony's council and assembly, entered into negotiations with Crynsens to settle the terms of surrender.Footnote 54 These were, according to his own narrative, “tedious, we not understanding Dutch well, neither they English, so that all things were twice translated.”Footnote 55 Ultimately, however, the two sides agreed upon a series of articles that would dictate the treatment of the English under Dutch dominion, signed by Crynsens and Byam on board the ship Zealand on the 6 March 1667.Footnote 56
The articles negotiated between the old and new rulers of the territory spoke of two nations residing in the colony, English and Hebrew, the latter numbering around two hundred out of about two thousand colonists. All residents at the time of surrender were to receive confirmation from the Dutch of their “estates, lands [and] goods,” with perpetual rights of both bequest and inheritance. This applied to colonists “of what nation so ever, whether they be English, Jews, etc.” Under the Dutch, as under the English, people of any nation were also to enjoy “free liberty of conscience in matters of religion.”Footnote 57 And any inhabitant wishing to depart would “have power to sell his estate,” aided by the colony's governor, who was obligated to arrange that those leaving the colony receive transportation for themselves and their property at reasonable cost.Footnote 58 Yet despite guaranteeing freedom of religion and equal treatment, neither the final text nor governor William Byam's initial “proposals to the enemy” referred directly to the colony's Jews as English subjects, leaving their status implicit rather than explicit.Footnote 59
In February 1668, the Crown instructed William Willoughby to command all of the king's subjects in Surinam “to withdraw themselves and their families into some parts of his majesty's dominions in America” and to assist them in their departure.Footnote 60 While the wealthiest of the English arrived in Barbados that month, a total of sixty-seven colonists with 412 slaves, the overwhelming majority remained in Surinam.Footnote 61 Writing in April 1670, Governor Philip Julius Lichtenbergh reported that the colony was in good condition, with the majority of English inhabitants remaining. Rumors that “all had affection to go off” were unfounded. None of the respectable English inhabitants were inclined to leave and many remained bound by debt. With God's blessing the colony would soon flourish.Footnote 62 Despite the governor's optimistic assessment, after only a few years under Dutch rule the remaining English would opt to exercise their right to leave. The Crown made two major evacuation attempts, in 1671 and 1675. Neither mission went smoothly, and negotiations between the two sides broke down over issues ranging from monies owed by English colonists to whom was considered the king's subject.Footnote 63
The first mission arrived in Surinam on 9 January 1671 under the command of Major James Bannister, who had briefly governed the colony in the last days of de facto English rule.Footnote 64 Bannister's party spent three acrimonious months in the territory, locked in negotiations with its Dutch hosts regarding the settling of English debts. Jews appear in his account of the mission only in a supporting role, accompanying Dutch colonists during a 16 February meeting between the governor's secretary and the English delegation.Footnote 65 Although the colony's Jewish inhabitants had been granted English subjecthood in 1665, there seems to have been no attempt to claim them as the king's subjects. The mission failed to secure the release of all but the poorest colonists, 105 families totaling 517 people.Footnote 66 Weighing anchor in early March, the delegation's ships were seen off by most English subjects “of any accompt in the colony, with their wives.”Footnote 67
Writing to the king from Jamaica on 8 April 1671, Bannister explained that his “utmost endeavor,” while “not altogether fruitless,” had resulted in disappointment. The two ships had left full. However, due to inadequate shipping and the “perverseness of the governor,” he was forced to leave behind over half of the English population, including those with the best estates. The Dutch, he suggested, “do well know that that colony is broke if all the English go off,” and without further royal intercession, the king's subjects “will be miserable and undone.” He included with his letter some Indian weapons, a snake's skin, three birds, and a petition from some of the remaining English colonists begging further royal aid in securing their evacuation.Footnote 68
The colonists’ petition to the king contained fifty-six signatures, none with names of obvious Jewish origin. Echoing Bannister's tale of Dutch perfidy, the petitioners presented themselves as the backbone of the colony, the welfare of which “consists in the [Dutch] detaining the intelligent and the industrious planter of whom they have few of their own nation.” Many petitioners sold their plantations, and expecting evacuation, ran up “extraordinary expenses,” becoming “so deeply indebted to the Dutch, that without apparent ruin … it was altogether at this time impossible to remove.” They asked the Crown to provide two more ships to secure their departure. The colonists would then be able to sell their remaining estates, which with the yield provided by the crops they had planted, would allow them to settle their debts and begin anew in Jamaica.Footnote 69
Not all English inhabitants opted to leave Surinam. Ten colonists with English names signed an 11 March 1671 petition to the Zeeland States proposing measures to improve the state of the colony, along with thirty-five Dutch and Jewish signatories, suggesting that they remained invested in the territory's future. At least two of the English petitioners seem to have hedged their bets: William Cowell and John Venman also signed the petition to the king requesting transportation to Jamaica.Footnote 70
The proposal of the English planters for evacuation received the endorsement of the Council for Foreign Plantations in August 1671.Footnote 71 However, arrangements for a further attempt to remove the English from Surinam took almost four years, coming to fruition only after the end of the third Anglo-Dutch War. This was concluded by the February 1674 Treaty of Westminster, which explicitly set the stage for another evacuation. Recognizing that tensions surrounding the execution of the 1667 articles of surrender had “contributed much to the late misunderstanding” between the king and the States General, the treaty stipulated that the articles now be carried out “without any manner of tergiversation or equivocation.” And it declared the right of the king to send a mission to Surinam to enquire into the state of his subjects and to arrange a time for their evacuation, lawfully dispatching vessels to carry them away along with “their goods and slaves.”Footnote 72
Over the course of the following year there was a flurry of correspondence between the Council for Trade and Plantations and the king regarding a new mission. This included varying estimates of the number of colonists to be removed. A March 1674 memorandum from Arlington to Locke suggested that the English and their slaves numbered seven hundred. By October the Council was estimating that three hundred English and between eleven and twelve hundred slaves needed to be transported.Footnote 73 Proposals sent from the Council to the king that December asserted that, in fact, English subjects in Surinam were “very little if at all in debt,” implying that their removal would face fewer obstacles than the 1671 mission.Footnote 74 None of this correspondence mentioned the presence of Jews.
THE 1675 MISSION: JEWS, NATIONALITY, AND SUBJECTHOOD
The new mission finally took place in 1675. It is during this attempt that the English delegation would first exercise a claim upon Surinam's Jewish population, although it is unclear why it occurred at this particular time, and not in 1671. According to the Dutch governor, English interest in removing the colony's Jews was a new strategy enacted to destroy the territory's prosperity before conquering it.Footnote 75 This implied, perhaps, that he viewed the English actions as an attempt to continue the recently concluded third Anglo-Dutch war by other means. The English remained silent about their timing and, although they claimed that their efforts were a result of a request that came from the Jews, there is no evidence of earlier Jewish interest in departure for English territory.Footnote 76
The removal of Surinam's Jews required a shift away from the undifferentiated language of subjecthood present in the Crown's preparatory correspondence to a language that evoked multiple nationalities. For the English, such a language of nationhood bolstered, rather than challenged, subject status, for in Surinam, as in the British Isles, members of different nations could be subjects of the same king. The Dutch, however, would conflate subjecthood with nationality, arguing that only members of the English nation could be evacuated as subjects of an English monarch. Both sides had practical reasons for laying claim to the Jewish community, the Dutch to ensure the tenuous colony's survival, and the English to gain experienced planters in order to bolster their own holdings in Jamaica and elsewhere. Such expedient factors shaped the ways in which both sides framed their respective markers of belonging.
Like all other correspondence originating from the metropole, the Crown's initial directions to the English delegation referred to an undifferentiated body of English subjects. In a letter signed 28 March 1675, the king gave authority to three commissioners, Edward Cranfield, Richard Dickenson, and Mark Brent, to secure the removal of his subjects from Surinam according to the 1667 articles of capitulation, subsequent articles of 1668, and the 1674 Treaty of Westminster.Footnote 77 In further instructions the Crown stressed that the commissioners should take “principle care to accommodate all things in an amicable manner.”Footnote 78 There is no hint that the distinction between subject and nation would become the mission's fundamental sticking point. Yet the very heterogeneity of Surinam forced those officials who were actually present in the colony to acknowledge the presence of multiple nationalities. When confronted by local realities agents of the Crown had to adapt their language.
Writing to the Zeeland States ahead of the arrival of the English commissioners, Surinam's governor, now Pieter Versterre, expressed fears not only of English evacuation, but of the exodus of the Jewish and Dutch nations. He reported the arrival from London of an advance vessel, the Henry and Sarah, “with an English person named Johan Frost” charged with making a “list of the voluntarily departing English.” While many were reluctant to declare their intentions before the arrival of the main delegation, Versterre estimated that out of 120 English (not counting women and children), around one hundred would leave, with the others forced to stay because of the difficulty of selling their estates. The Jewish nation, meanwhile, planned to send two deputies to Jamaica with the English in order to see what privileges they could negotiate from the colony's governor. And rumors that Holland would take Tobago appeared to offer a possible destination for the Dutch. In short, he wrote, you “would not believe how weak this colony shall be of white inhabitants, when the English nation shall be departed.”Footnote 79
The English delegation made landfall at Paramaribo on 4 June 1675. In their initial negotiations, both sides spoke of three nations residing in the colony: English, Dutch, and Hebrew. According to Cranfield's narrative, Versterre received his party “with civility.” After passing him letters listing those colonists who wished to depart, together with the details of their commission, the delegation demanded that he publish the orders of the States General regarding evacuation, and that the two sides arrange a time to resolve any outstanding issues. This the governor agreed to, with the orders published the next day in English and Dutch and 30 June set as the meeting date.Footnote 80 Both parties then issued a joint “publication,” signed on 10 June by the governor and the three English commissioners, stipulating a process by which the three nations would settle their debts. This gave no sign that Jews would be among those removed, speaking only of “debts between the Dutch and Hebrew nation and English who are to depart.” The text ordered that the “Dutch, Hebrew and English nation … draw their accounts … which are between themselves, discounting one debt with another as much as possible may be.” It also gave notice that the English delegation would remain in the colony for no more than four or five weeks.Footnote 81
The first explicit inclusion of the colony's Jewish population as English subjects appears in a 9 June letter from the English commissioners, addressed to “His Majesty's subjects in Surinam as well the Hebrew nation as English.”Footnote 82 The reference to the “Hebrew nation” occurs only in the salutation of the letter, which was written down after the fact in the same hand as the rest of Cranfield's narrative. It is, then, unclear whether it was part of the original correspondence. The text of the letter itself echoes the Crown's initial instructions, addressing the king's subjects as a whole without referring to nationality or religion. Here the commissioners informed the potential evacuees of the arrangements for their departure, promising to provide the means to transport not only colonists and their families, but also their servants, slaves, goods, and their “conveniences for the making of sugars and indigo.” While the Crown offered transportation to England itself or “any of the Caribbee islands,” it provided special incentives for settlement in Jamaica. If the evacuees agreed to make the island their new home they would each receive twice the land usually allotted to planters, taking into consideration the number of slaves as well as settlers. They would also be provided with “provisions and other necessaries, at moderate rates” until they were able to become self-sufficient. The letter instructed the colonists to repair as soon as possible to the ship America, where the commissioners would compile a list of their names and the number of their slaves, allowing sufficient time for the settlement of any differences with the Dutch.Footnote 83
The next entry in Cranfield's narrative, however, suggests that it was Surinam's Jews who first raised the idea of their evacuation. According to his report, “[s]ome few days before” the 30 June meeting held to settle “all matters between the English, Dutch and Hebrew nation the Jews that were inhabitants at the time of the surrender repaired to us and demanded transportation with His Majesty's subjects.” Whether the English commissioners made the first overtures in their 9 June letter, or whether the plan for Jewish removal first came from Jews themselves later in the month, the result was the same: immediate opposition on the part of the colony's governor. Upon hearing of the request, Versterre issued an order preventing Jews from departing on the English ships, “telling them his orders from the States was [sic] only to suffer the English to go.” The English commissioners, in turn, responded by intervening with the governor on behalf of the Jews, arguing that his attempts to prevent their departure violated the articles of surrender. Because the Jews “had no particular capitulations” the commissioners “presumed they were to have equal benefit of the articles with the English.”Footnote 84
Negotiations between the English and the Dutch, according to the commissioners’ account, turned from the settlement of debts to a dispute about the relationship between subjecthood and nationality. The conflict hinged on whether the term “subject” designated only the English nation, or whether it was a more general term of allegiance. In responding to the commissioners’ complaint that the Dutch were violating the articles of surrender, the governor replied that “the fifth article of the late treaty [of Westminster] made mention only of the English removing in his majesty's ships.” As evidence for this he produced “the articles in Dutch.” The English commissioners, in turn, responded by rejecting both the Dutch text and the governor's equation of subjecthood with nationality, drawing instead upon the composite nature of British monarchy in which allegiance to the Crown transcended individual nationality. Declaring that they refused “to be governed by Dutch translation,” they produced “the original in Latin” that “made mention of the word subject … which the Jews were to his Majesty before the Articles of Surrender.” And, they stated, if the word subject “be not allowed to be a general word of comprehension the Scotch and Irish may be detained as reasonably as the Jews.” Thus, while Jews were members of the Hebrew nation, they were, like the Irish and the Scots, also full subjects of the Crown, with the same right to evacuation as the English themselves.Footnote 85
Governor Versterre's account of these events, which he sent to Zeeland the following December, presents a picture of English dishonesty and ill intent, the commissioners laying claim to Surinam's Jews in order to hasten the destruction of the colony. The debate about the relationship between subjecthood and nationality present in the English account is echoed only in a brief reference to “those of the English nation … among which we judged the Scottish and the Irish were also included.” The commissioners’ claim to Surinam's Jews was a “new pretence,” made after they had agreed to deal only with English settlers. While their initial aims endangered the colony, the inclusion of Jews would ensure its ruin. These actions were a direct result of royal policy: the king would be satisfied with nothing less than “the delivery of the whole colony.” The commissioners’ behavior showed the fundamental duplicity of the English: “I judge an honest man very unlucky who must have to deal with that nation.”Footnote 86
Yet according to Cranfield's narrative, Versterre was won over by the arguments of the English, declaring himself “satisfied that the Hebrew nation were free to depart.” This was, however, only a brief change of heart. On 6 July, the English commissioners wrote to request the speedy resolution of Jewish debt, so that “such of his [the king's] subjects may not be debarred of their liberty.”Footnote 87 In response, the governor reneged, claiming that a recently arrived ship from Zeeland had brought “orders from the States not to suffer the Hebrew nation to remove with His Majesty's subjects,” yet he refused to show the English a written copy of these orders. For Cranfield, this was a sign of outright duplicity: the governor's “only ground” for “altering that which he had formerly given his consent unto” was the fact that he had found “more of the Jews would depart than he expected,” fearing that this “might too much weaken the colony.” He would allow only one “Signor Aaron de Silvis to send off 33 slaves under the conduct of an overseer being one that was naturalized by act of parliament.” Otherwise, according to the English, the governor was “deaf to all fair and friendly persuasion … in the behalf of all the other Jews that inhabited that country at the time of surrender, notwithstanding some of them were free denizens.”Footnote 88
JEWS, “FREE INDIANS,” AND THE MISSION'S DEPARTURE
Governor Versterre's refusal to allow the evacuation of the king's Jewish subjects led the commissioners to issue a final written protest condemning his behavior during the entire mission. The catalyst for this was a parallel dispute over the evacuation of another group, indigenous servants of the English, who the commissioners characterized as “free Indians.” Deserving of removal due to bonds of service and affection rather than of subjecthood, they were, Cranfield reported, prevented from leaving by the same recalcitrance and duplicity that led the governor to unfairly claim the colony's English Jews.
According to Cranfield's account, Versterre had objected after some Indians “came voluntarily on board” the English ships, demanding their immediate return. Acting at his behest, and against the wishes of their countrymen, the commissioners had ordered the ships’ masters not to allow their transportation. No Indians were to leave the colony on English ships, with the exception of “one free Indian belonging to Mr. Arthur Norris, which the Governor gave his consent thereunto.” This reluctant order caused “great discontents” among the English, prompting the Indians’ masters to demand that the commissioners “protest against the governor for his injurious detention of them, they having for many years inhabited amongst them as their menial servants.” According to the “articles” (presumably the 1667 articles of capitulation), such servants should be subject to removal with their English masters.Footnote 89
Versterre's own account told a different story. He had acted to prevent the removal of the Indians out of concern for the safety of the colony, which was endangered by indigenous fears of enslavement by the English. On the day that the English were due to set sail he had been approached by a number of Indians, who expressed concern that the English had persuaded thirty of their number to board their vessels. Yet the English claim that the Indians were members of their families was based solely on the fact that they had occasionally fished or hunted for them. Moreover, their attempt to sail with the Indians posed a grave danger to the colony. While the removal of even a hundred would be “of little harm or benefit” in and of itself, it would provoke a catastrophic response from those who remained. The Indians were, he wrote, “a people without reason,” who would judge that the Dutch had sold “their friends or children” into slavery. This would, in turn, provoke them to respond with “disasters, murders, fires and robberies.”Footnote 90
Frustrated by Versterre's obstinacy, the English commissioners responded with a sweeping protest, an indictment of what they perceived as his failure to abide by both agreements with the English Crown and the orders of the States General. He had, they wrote, “not given satisfactory answer, nor fully satisfied our demands, having given a flat denial concerning the removal of the Hebrew nation and free Indians that are domestic and belonging to his Majesty's subjects, having lived for many years in their families.” This was despite the fact that, on their part, the commissioners had used “all diligence and earnestness possible” to secure “liberty for all that were inhabitants in the time of the surrender” to depart with their estates, “as also the free Indians.” As such, failure to observe the “articles of surrender and treaties of peace” lay entirely on the side of the Dutch, “to the infinite prejudice and hindrance of the Hebrew nation.” All “mischievous consequences” resulting from “the detaining of the said Hebrew nation” and of the free Indians “ought wholly to be imputed to the said governor” along with his “authors and instruments, and no other.”Footnote 91
The conflict over the Indians had, momentarily at least, merged with that over the colony's Jews. Yet in the endgame of the English departure it was clear that the commissioners were more concerned about the governor's refusal to allow Jews to leave the colony than they were about the indigenous servants of the English. The Jews, like the English themselves, were subjects of the English Crown. And as experienced planters they were, presumably, a far greater asset than the Indians. The governor responded to the protest by suggesting that the two sides sign an “instrument” acknowledging all that they had reached agreement upon, leaving aside those matters to which the English had objected. The commissioners, “believing that which concerned the Jews to be a matter of importance,” asked for “time to consider of it.” And it was because of the matter of the Hebrew nation that they ultimately rejected the governor's request. According to Cranfield, “we thought it not reasonable to sign any stipulations, the Jews being, by the capitulation of surrender, in the same condition as his Majesty's natural born subjects.”Footnote 92
The commissioners took their final leave of the governor on 12 August 1675. That day the English colonists unanimously chose Jamaica as their destination, eschewing the king's offer of passage to other English colonies.Footnote 93 In a petition presented to Cranfield and his colleagues, they declared that there was no other island “more proper and suitable to our present condition.” Their request contained twenty-nine signatures, none with identifiably Jewish names.Footnote 94 The English ships Hercules and America left the mouth of the Surinam river two days later. On 8 September, following “a tedious passage occasioned by calms, currents and contrary winds,” the commissioners made landfall in Jamaica, after which they delivered the king's letter “in favor of his subjects” to the colony's governor. Along with the Hercules and America, one other vessel, the Henry and Sarah, had made the journey, arriving during the previous week. By the end of September, all ships had been unloaded and the mission was complete.Footnote 95
In the end, most of the colony's Jews were left behind. The mission had succeeded in evacuating 250 English subjects and 981 slaves, but there were no more than two members of the Hebrew nation on board.Footnote 96 In fact, it appears that more Indians than Jews made it to Jamaica. Along with a letter from the king, the commissioners delivered before the island's governor one James Davis, “for bringing of a planter and three free Indians in his sloop.” Fearing that the Dutch might seek damages, they suggested that Davis provide security to indemnify the king, a proposal that the governor rejected.Footnote 97
Only a small number of Jews appear to have sought removal with the English mission. Out of a total Jewish population of between two hundred and 250, roughly equal in number to the colony's Dutch inhabitants, probably around ten families asked to be evacuated.Footnote 98 According to Cranfield, the Jews who had initially demanded transportation were those who had been “inhabitants at the time of the surrender.”Footnote 99 When he provided a final list of passengers successfully removed to Jamaica, Cranfield also included the names of ten “such persons of the Hebrew nation” who had been prevented by the Dutch from departing, and who requested another opportunity to leave along with their 322 slaves. Among them was Aron da Silva, owner of seventy-four slaves, the greatest number of any Jewish colonist. It also referred to “several others [who] resolve to go when occasion shall present.”Footnote 100
There is no evidence that any Jews who had settled in Surinam after the Dutch conquest asked to leave for Jamaica. Whether this is because they saw themselves as unqualified for removal, lacking the English subjecthood conferred by the 1665 “Grant of Privileges,” or because they had a greater attachment to the colony and its Dutch rulers is unclear. For the English commissioners and the Jews seeking transportation, the grant had conferred perpetual, portable subjecthood. Yet while it had also stipulated that all future Jewish residents of the colony would be “considered as English-born,” it seems that all sides accepted that this had been nullified by the Dutch conquest; despite the fact that the English commissioners sometimes referred to the “Hebrew nation” as a whole, they recognized that those wanting to leave had lived in English Surinam. Governor Versterre seems to have feared a larger English attempt to evacuate the entire Jewish population, part of a deliberate plan to beggar the colony before seizing it. Yet if Aron da Silva's wealth is any indication, even a claim to those who had lived under English rule was cause for alarm: the longest-established members of Surinam's Jewish community were, perhaps, the richest and therefore the most vital to the colony's survival.
In February 1676 the Privy Council received a petition from da Silva and another signatory on Cranfield's list, Isaac Perera, complaining that the Dutch continued to prevent the king's Jewish subjects from leaving Surinam. While the Council endorsed their removal to Jamaica, there is no clear evidence of their successful departure.Footnote 101 In what appears to have been the last attempt to evacuate English subjects from the colony, a 1680 mission succeeded in transporting 102 people, “blacks and whites,” to Antigua.Footnote 102 Thirty-nine English men remained behind, with 212 slaves. This endeavor seems not to have included members of the Hebrew nation. Surinam's Jews would remain in the colony, some English subjects by virtue of the friction between two colonial powers yet consigned, in the eyes of the English, to the perfidy of Dutch rule.Footnote 103
CONCLUSION
In 1665, the governor and assembly of Surinam sought to bolster an ailing colony by attempting to attract Jews from neighboring Dutch territory with an offer of full English subjecthood. A decade later, the English commissioners tried to evacuate those Jews who, as a result, fell under the protection of the king. While Cranfield's account positions this action as an idealistic defense of English subjecthood, his characterization of the reasons for the Dutch governor's reluctance to let them leave is revealing: their departure might “too much weaken the colony.”Footnote 104 Yet the contested status of Surinam's Jews reveals much more than antagonism between colonial powers or the competition for sugar and slaves. It shows how, on the periphery, practical circumstances eclipsed existing metropolitan norms, serving as a creative force for new forms of belonging.
The “Grant of Privileges” demonstrates one way in which Anglo-Dutch rivalry, local diversity, and the exigencies of survival combined to create a new articulation of subjecthood. Insofar as it declared Surinam's present Jewish residents to be “considered as English-born,” the grant adhered to the legal definition of naturalization, retroactively investing existing Jewish settlers with the privileges of native subjects. Yet the grant also went much further. Rather than targeting named individuals, as naturalization commonly did in the seventeenth century, it conferred communal rights upon an entire category of people, while incorporating future Jewish residents in its purview. As such it had far more in common with the privileges extended to Jews by the Dutch in Brazil and Essequibo—themselves anomalies in the wider Dutch world—than with the usual way in which the English created new subjects.Footnote 105
When the English commissioners endorsed the legitimacy of the grant a decade later they also went beyond usual practice. Their instructions from the Crown spoke only of removing the king's subjects, containing no mention of Surinam's Jews. Yet the commissioners staked a claim to the beneficiaries of the 1665 grant, seeing a clear advantage to drawing experienced Jewish planters to Jamaica. In doing so they endorsed the efficacy of the grant beyond Surinam. Departing from the Crown's usual stance on the limited scope of colonial naturalization, they offered an implicit recognition that Jews had received the portable subjecthood of the truly English-born. The manner in which they did this suggests the particular utility of composite British subjecthood in managing the diversity of empire.Footnote 106 In justifying their actions to the Dutch, the English delegation argued that to deny the subjecthood of Jews was equivalent to negating that of the Irish and Scots. While Charles II was king of Ireland and Scotland he was not, of course, king of the Jews. Yet the fact that his subjects came from multiple nations allowed the commissioners to claim members of the Hebrew nation without effacing their collective status.
The events discussed in this article took place at a time when the language of belonging exhibited manifold contradictions. While the legal distinctions between terms such as “subject,” “denizen,” and “alien” were clear, in practice actors on the ground often used them interchangeably, or in a manner that departed from their legal meaning. Thus Cranfield describes Aron da Silva's Jewish overseer as “naturalized by act of parliament,” a status denied to Jews by the requirement of a Christian oath, while referring to other Jewish residents of the colony as “free denizens.”Footnote 107 As Edward Coke noted in 1628, while the term “denizen” could refer to “an alien born, that is enfranchised or denizated by letters patent,” it also carried a broader meaning: “He that is born within the king's liegeance is called sometime a denizen, quasi deins nee, born within.”Footnote 108 Had some of Surinam's Jews been endenized by letters patent, or did Cranfield use the term “denizen” because, as the 1665 grant stipulated, he actually considered them as “English-born”?
If the terminology of belonging was frequently blurred, so too was actual practice. As the uncertain legal grounding of the 1665 “Grant of Privileges” reminds us, the need to attract settlers to colonies often trumped adherence to established law, colonial charters, and the directives of the English Crown. Reversing their usual roles, assemblies endenized as well as naturalized, while governors created subjects as well as denizens. The language used in both naturalizations and denizations was sometimes unusually expansive. And while the Crown generally denied the wider efficacy of colonial subjecthood, new denizens and subjects sometimes acted as if their status held throughout the empire, moving and trading between colonies in a manner that was variously challenged, ignored, and condoned. Even the universality of birthright subjecthood was routinely disregarded: slaves born in the king's territories were treated as property, not subjects, despite the stipulations of Calvin's Case.Footnote 109
The example of Surinam shows some of the ways in which such contradictions produced new forms of belonging. Responding to local circumstances, officials defined who fit in by disregarding the law as much as by adhering to it, and by making exceptions to existing practice, all in the name of survival and competition. In doing so they demonstrated that early modern conceptions of subjecthood could be adapted to fit the demands of empire and the diversity of colonial populations. Surinam itself was, perhaps, the most peripheral of peripheries, only briefly English, and even then with an unusually high proportion of non-Christian settlers. Yet it alerts us to analogous processes elsewhere. Other English possessions also had their own unique forms of heterogeneity, and their own idiosyncratic internal pressures, even as their governors interacted with the same Crown and faced similar inter-imperial rivalries. If we are to truly gauge how subjecthood worked beyond the courtroom and far from the metropolis, we must pay attention to the productive processes present in a wide variety of colonial settings, from ephemeral failures to mainstays of later imperial success.
