Bauxite, Bonded Labor, and American Capitalists in Suriname

• In Event: Commodity Extraction across Transimperial Spaces

Abstract

During the First World War, Suriname became a critical node in the Aluminum Company of America’s (Alcoa) transimperial operations. Company engineers cultivated ties to Paramaribo’s colonia bourgeoisie, who possessed the land and labor needed to transform the interior for mineral extraction. In the Hague, American capitalists were granted the right to tap the global circuits of unfree labor that had driven the global tropical commodity boom at the turn of the twentieth century. In Suriname, indentured workers from Java cleared the mosquito-rich forests and plowed the Indigenous and Maroon land, which enabled the company to erect the colonial mining city of Moengo. For Alcoa’s engineers, this racialized and bonded labor force made the tropics hospitable to global industrial capital. Drawing on Dutch and American sources, I ask what Alcoa’s investment in Suriname tells us about labor coercion and global environmental change in the early twentieth century.

Author

• Jordan Howell, University of Manitoba