Arawak and Carib tribes lived in the region before Columbus sighted the coast in 1498. Spain officially claimed the area in 1593, but Spanish and Portuguese explorers of the time gave the area little attention.

Dutch settlement began in 1616 at the mouths of several rivers between present-day Georgetown, Guyana, and Cayenne, French Guiana. Suriname became a Dutch colony in 1667. The new colony, Dutch Guiana, did not thrive.

The Dutch Government gave little financial support to the colony. Suriname’s economy was transformed in the years following World War I, when an American firm (ALCOA) began exploiting bauxite deposits in East Suriname.

In 1951, Suriname began to acquire a growing measure of autonomy from the Netherlands. Suriname became an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands on December 15, 1954, and gained independence, with Dutch consent, on November 25, 1975.