Surinam (Dutch: Suriname), also unofficially known as Dutch Guiana, was a Dutch plantation colony in the Guianas and the predecessor polity of the modern country of Suriname. It was bordered by the fellow Dutch colony of Berbice to the west, and the French colony of Cayenne to the east. It later bordered British Guiana (modern-day Guyana) from 1831 to 1966.

Surinam was a Dutch colony from 26 February 1667, when Dutch forces captured Francis Willoughby's English colony during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, until 15 December 1954, when Surinam became a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The status quo of Dutch sovereignty over Surinam, and English sovereignty over New Netherland, which it had conquered in 1664, was kept in the Treaty of Breda of 31 July 1667, and again confirmed in the Treaty of Westminster of 1674.

After the other Dutch colonies in the Guianas, i.e., Berbice, Essequibo, Demerara, and Pomeroon, were lost to the British in 1814, the remaining colony of Surinam was often referred to as Dutch Guiana, especially after 1831, when the British merged Berbice, Essequibo, and Demerara into British Guiana. As the term Dutch Guiana was used in the 17th and 18th centuries to refer to all Dutch colonies in the Guianas, this use of the term can be confusing (see below).

Although the colony has always been officially known as Surinam or Suriname, in both Dutch and English, the colony was often unofficially and semi-officially referred to as Dutch Guiana (Dutch: Nederlands Guiana) in the 19th and 20th century, in an analogy to British Guiana and French Guiana. Historically, Suriname was only one of many Dutch colonies in the Guianas, others being Berbice, Essequibo, Demerara, and Pomeroon, which after being taken over by the United Kingdom in 1814, were united into British Guiana in 1831. The Dutch also controlled northern Brazil from 1630 to 1654, including the area that, when governed by Lisbon, was called Portuguese Guiana. Thus, before 1814, the term Dutch Guiana described not only Suriname, but all the colonies under Dutch sovereignty in the region taken together: a set of polities, with distinct governments, whose external borders changed much over time.

The economy of the Colony of Suriname depended upon people enslaved at its plantations. Slave labour was mostly supplied by the Dutch West India Company from its trading posts in West Africa, to produce their crops. Sugar, cotton, and indigo were the main goods exported from the colony to the Netherlands until the early 18th century, when coffee became the single most important export product of Surinam. Planters' treatment of the slaves was notoriously bad. The historian C.R. Boxer wrote that "man's inhumanity to man just about reached its limits in Surinam", and many slaves escaped the plantations. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange crashed in 1773, which dealt a severe blow to the plantation economy that was further exacerbated by the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807. This abolition was adopted by William I of the Netherlands, who signed a royal decree in this regard in June 1814, and who concluded the Anglo-Dutch Slave Trade Treaty in May 1818. Many plantations went bankrupt as a consequence of the abolition of slave trade. Without supply of slaves, many plantations were merged to increase efficiency.

Slavery was eventually abolished on 1 July 1863, a date now celebrated as the public holiday of Ketikoti, although slaves were only released after a ten-year transitory period in 1873. This spurred the immigration of indentured labourers from British India, after a treaty to that effect had been signed between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in 1870. There were rebellions against the wages and tasks given to indentured labourers, such as by Janey Tetary in 1884. As well as from immigration from British India, Javanese workers from the Dutch East Indies were also contracted to work on plantations in Surinam. At the same time, a largely unsuccessful attempt to colonize Surinam with impoverished farmers from the Netherlands was started as well.

In the 20th century, the natural resources of Surinam, which include rubber, gold and bauxite, were exploited.

The gold rush that followed the discovery of gold on the banks of the Lawa River spurred the construction of the Lawa Railway in 1902, although construction was halted after gold production proved disappointing. In the 1930s, the grandmother of Hennah Draaibaar discovered more than 80 kilos of gold, which made her briefly the richest woman in Surinam; the Dutch took most of the gold to the Netherlands.