As part of the diplomatic settlement ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch Republic prioritized the lucrative sugar-producing colony of Suriname in South America over the fur-trading colony of New Netherland in North America, which became English New York. The trade seemed sound by 17th-century economic logic, sugar was immensely more profitable than furs, but in hindsight ranks among history's most consequential real estate decisions.
The Second Anglo-Dutch War had scrambled colonial holdings across the Atlantic world, and by 1667 both sides needed a settlement. Dutch negotiators, weighing their overseas priorities, made a calculation that seemed entirely rational at the time: the sugar plantations of Suriname, worked by enslaved Africans and generating enormous profits in the European sugar trade, were worth vastly more than a struggling fur-trading outpost on the Hudson River with a few thousand settlers.
England, in turn, was happy to formalize its hold on New Netherland, which it had already seized by force in 1664, renaming New Amsterdam as New York after the Duke of York. The Treaty of Breda, finalized later that year, confirmed these territorial arrangements alongside other colonial swaps involving Caribbean islands.
The decision looked shrewd for generations, Suriname's plantation economy indeed generated fortunes for Dutch merchants well into the 18th century. But New York's eventual rise as a global financial and cultural capital transformed the trade into a byword for historical irony, the kind of decision textbooks love to cite as proof that no one can predict which patch of colonial dirt will become the center of the world.