colony and secondly by demonstrating the choices available to settlers to move on to other colonies not under Dutch sovereignty. Suriname and the Atlantic Although we cannot be certain, it seems very likely that the Piedmontese physician Louis De Bussy ended his life as a one-legged beggar on the streets of New York in the early 1750s. His leg was amputated after the ship Rebecca, on which he sailed from Suriname to North America, had been wrecked. 2 Before his disastrous voyage he had been the head of the hospital in Paramaribo, and in that capacity had tried to found a hortus medicus. He had also had the ambition to start a Swiss village in the colony, and for which he received a commission from the Suriname Company in November 1747. To recruit families for his settlement he had gone to Basel and, under false pretences, had managed to convince several of these families. His unfortunate voyage from Suriname to New York came after his project to establish the Swiss village in the colony had failed and he was banished from the colony. 3 The connection between Switzerland, Suriname and British North America in this tragic life might seem arbitrary, but in fact it aptly illustrates the structure of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. The Atlantic connections of Suriname stretched deep into the European hinterland, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. Using several cases of settler recruitment and passenger movement, this article questions the usability of empire-centred approaches to the colony and places Suriname in the Atlantic world. The cases that will be discussed are the arrival of Huguenots in the 1680s, the Palatine Germans of the 1730s and Swiss settlers of the late 1740s. Figures of inward and outward movements from Suriname are used to quantify inter-colonial connections in the second half of the eighteenth century. Both the quantitative and qualitative parts of this study concentrate on the movement of settlers. This means that several circuits of migration are excluded, most notably the captive Africans arriving 1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, guest editors and editors of the bmgn-lchr for their many insightful comments, as well as my colleagues in Leiden for providing a fruitful working environment. 2 John H. de Bye, Database van passagiers van en naar Suriname (Paramaribo 2003); H. Pijttersen, Europeesche kolonisatie in Suriname, een geschiedkundige schets (The Hague 1896) 25-30. 3 Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands) (NL-HaNA), The Hague, Sociëteit van Suriname (SvS), Resoluties van de directeuren 1746-1747, toegang 1.05.03, inv.nr. 37; Stukken betreffende de zaak van de Zwitserse families, inv. nr. 414; Missieven, rekeningen en brieven, inv.nr.