Danish Colony Research Articles

The Impact of the American Revolutionary War on the Slave Trade to Cuba

Abstract: Scholars intent on considering the American Revolution's relationship to and influence on systems of slavery must be sure to look outside of the United States. In mid-September 1783, the schooner Eagle , captained by David Miller, landed 104 enslaved Africans in Charleston. This is the first known U.S.-flagged transatlantic slave voyage arriving in the United States after independence. Before bringing these captives from Africa, Miller had conducted a previous voyage on the Eagle , which landed fifty other captives in Havana in May 1783. The latter group of enslaved men, women, and children, whom Miller brought from the Danish colony of Saint Thomas in the eastern Caribbean, were some of the nearly 14,500 captives we have found who were shipped to Havana, mainly from other Caribbean ports, by merchants based in Cuba, the Danish West Indies, and the United States from 1781 to 1785. Examining the actions of U.S. slave traders in Cuba during the American Revolution also opens up the chance to dramatically increase our understanding of the broader traffic in enslaved people to the island during this period, emphasizing the merchant networks connecting Saint Thomas, Saint Domingue, and Charleston with Havana.

Total pain and social suffering: marginalised Greenlanders' end-of-life in Denmark.

With a focus on socially marginalised Greenlanders in Denmark, this study explores the significance of the concept of social suffering for the concept of total pain. Greenland is a former Danish colony and Greenlanders retain the right to Danish citizenship with all the benefits of access to the resources of Denmark as any other Danish citizen. However, Greenlanders are overrepresented amongst the most socially disadvantaged in Denmark. They have a disproportionately high risk of early death, often undiagnosed and untreated. This study reports on research conducted with socially marginalised Greenlanders and some of the professionals who work with them. It interrogates the concept of total pain as developed by Cicely Saunders, the founder of modern palliative care. Saunders noted that pain at the end-of-life was not adequately explained by symptoms of a disease process because it was more like a situation that engulfed every aspect of the patient and those close to them; it included physical, psychological, spiritual, and social dimensions. We agree with other scholars that the social dimension of the total pain experience is underexplored. By drawing on the theoretical and methodological lens of intersectionality, our work with marginalised Greenlanders has enabled us to describe the multiple and intersecting social forces that create social suffering for this group. This leads us to conclude that social suffering is not entirely an individual experience but a product of social harm and disadvantage, poverty, inequality, and the various legacies of colonialism, which combine to place some citizens in a harmed condition. Our findings also draw us into a discussion with the concept of total pain and its neglect of the socially constructed nature of social suffering. We conclude by indicating ways in which the concept of total pain can be informed by a more thoroughgoing concept of social suffering. We conclude, with others, that there is a problem of inequity in the way that end-of-life care is currently distributed. Finally, we point to ways in which an understanding of social suffering can help to address the exclusion of some of the most vulnerable citizens from appropriate end-of-life care.

I Am Queen Mary

I Am Queen Mary is a transnational public art project created by La Vaughn Belle of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Jeannette Ehlers of Denmark—two artists connected by their shared Caribbean roots and colonial histories. Together they created the first collaborative sculpture to memorialize Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and those who fought against it. This monumental work debuted in March 2018 in front of the West Indian warehouse in Copenhagen in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the sale and transfer of the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands) to the United States. The first monument to a Black woman in Denmark, I Am Queen Mary made international headlines as a symbol that celebrates and centers the story of people who resisted Danish colonialism in the Caribbean. In 2020 the Danish government granted permission to permanently install I Am Queen Mary in front of a former colonial warehouse in Copenhagen, acknowledging the work’s shift from a temporary artwork to an important landmark in the city. To now build the permanent sculpture, and a twin monument on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, an international funding campaign began in August 2021. The artists are still working on funding the project.I Am Queen Mary is a monument with many reference points and layers. Standing seven meters (twenty-three feet), appearing as a counterpart to a replica of Michelangelo’s David, the figure sits on top of a plinth made of coral stones cut out of the ocean by enslaved Africans. These stones make visible their labor and presence as foundational to the colonial societies. The figure is an allegorical portrait of Mary Thomas, a sugarcane plantation worker who came to be named one of the “Queens of the Fireburn” for leading the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history in 1878. Fifty plantations and most of the town of Frederiksted in St. Croix were burned in protest of slavery-like conditions.I Am Queen Mary aims to change whose stories get to be told in the public space by centering the stories and agency of those who were brought to the Danish West Indies. This project also demonstrates how artists can be leaders in conversations around monuments and memory work around colonialism and slavery.

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

The Nightmare Island: Representations of St. Barthélemy in Swedish Novels

Christianity in India: From the Apostle Thomas to the Present

The first Christians appeared in southwestern India during Antiquity; they belonged to Nestorianism and were fully incorporated into Indian society. The descendants of the Christian settlers and the descendants of the converts formed different castes. In the mid-16th century a Catholic diocese was established in the Portuguese possession of Goa, and most of the local Christians were converted to Catholicism. Protestantism began to spread in the early 18th century in the Danish colony of Trakenbar on the southeast coast. The East India Company did not permit missionary activity on its lands. The evangelical revival movement in the late 18th century led to the establishment of missionary societies focused on the Christianization of new lands, and they sought permission to establish missions in British possessions. Subsequently, the British administration did not provide much support for missionaries, using the confessional controversy to consolidate the power of the empire. Preaching was most effective among tribal and Dalit peoples. Missionaryism among Dalits caused serious discontent in society and contributed to the emergence of reform movements in Hinduism. In independent India, several states enacted "anti-forced conversion" laws to limit conversions to Christianity and Islam. The rise of Hindu nationalism, which viewed Christianity as an alien religion, proved to be a deterrent to the spread of Christianity. In the second half of the 20th century new trends in Christianity developed most rapidly: Pentecostal and non-denominational Protestant churches, as well as Catholic charismatic movements. The share of Christians in India's population has not changed much in the last 70 years. Conversions to Christianity have been offset by lower birth rates in Christian families. Christians now constitute about 2.6% of the country's population; Christianity has spread most widely in the states of the Northeast, where Christian denominations have actually been able to replace tribal religions and in Kerala, where Christianity took hold almost two thousand years ago.

Colonial labels and the imagined innocence of past times: Debating language and spatial representations of the Danish/Greenlandic relation

AbstractThis article examines struggles related to the recasting of the collective memory connected to Danish colonialism, through analyses of exhibitions in, and communication from, the Danish National Museum. By use of multimodal and semiotic landscape analysis, we show how the Danish National Museum works to reformulate the historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark in ways that avoid the colonizer's language and at the same time describe and construct complex relations of past and present. The analysis demonstrates how a temporal ambiguity is present in the museum exhibitions, not offering a conclusive understanding of the colonial period. At the same time, we show how the presence and absence of colonial language in public space is inscribed into temporal frames legitimizing or problematizing their status. (Semiotic landscape, colonialism, language and nation, temporality)*

The ‘Greenlandization’ of Care: Disability in Postcolonial Greenland, 1950s–1980s

Abstract When the former Danish colony Greenland obtained Home Rule in 1979, becoming an autonomous region within the Danish Realm, it faced the challenge of having to establish a comprehensive social welfare system. This article looks at disability care and its interrelations with post-colonialism and national identity formation, as previous practices of medical care and accommodation in Danish institutions were replaced with local solutions. Frame analysis reveals the outlines of the responsibilities of Danish experts for disabled Greenlanders under colonial rule and during the modernization period until 1979. The transition phase of the early 1980s was a central arena for Greenlandic national discourse wherein care responsibilities in welfare policies, disability care institutions, advocacy organizations and the media were framed and renegotiated. The ‘Greenlandization’ of disability care and the respective shift in responsibilities was a highly uneven process that continued to be suffused with Danish norms and practices.

Greenland (1940) as an Instance of Pickwickian ‘Cooperation’ Between King’s Ottawa and Roosevelt’s Washington

The German invasion of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, which is usually regarded as marking the end of the so-called Phoney War between Germany and the Allies, also led to a short-lived diplomatic stand-off between the United States and Canada. The tension stemmed primarily from misapprehensions in both North American countries over what should be done about Greenland, the Danish colony whose political and legal status had suddenly been placed in question by the German move. It soon subsided, but in the process it resulted in a pronounced overreaction by some on the US side of the dispute. The quarrel largely took place behind the scenes and has attracted relatively little attention from historians. In fact, although the US government mostly got its way at the expense of Canada, the Greenland episode was presented by Prime Minister Mackenzie King as an instance of diplomatic cooperation to the benefit of both countries – a view that has been repeated by later commentators. If the episode really did represent an instance of close cooperation between Canada and the United States, then it was only in a Pickwickian sense, that is, one in which the reality of the situation was very different from the roseate view offered by its apologists.

They ‘submitted themselves with their lands to his majesty … for ever and always’: natural law and Danish colonialism on the eighteenth-century Guinea Coast II

ABSTRACT Drawing on archival material from the Danish Guinea Company and central administration, this article discusses the uses of the discourse of the law of nature and nations in the Danish-Dutch war of 1776–1778 on the Guinea Coast and its aftermath. It shows how Danish and Dutch administrators drew on the law of nature and nations to justify their competing claims in the war, which in turn hinged on claims to territorial and sovereign rights on the coast, grounded on occupation, conquest, and subjection by treaty. It also shows how the discourse was further used to reconceptualise African political relations in the service of these claims in different ways by the Danish and the Dutch. Further, an ability to use natural jurisprudential discourse was important not just in pursuing present claims, but also in formulating evidence that could be used in later controversies. Finally, the article argues that the use of natural jurisprudential discourse on the coast encouraged European governments, especially the Danish, to pursue their territorial claims there as a basis for further colonisation.

Toldbodens nye dronning - den danske kolonialismes im/materielle aftryk

Through the analysis of both the direct, the derived and the non-existing imprints of Danish colonialism, the article examines the collective memory of the Danish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. In 2017, 100 years have passed since Denmark sold its three Caribbean islands to the United States. Since then the collective memory of the Danish-West Indian past has evolved into a patriotic narrative where the Danish territorial loss is framed as a consequence of the noble abolition of the slave trade and thus turned into a moral victory. In this narrative the emphasis is placed on Danes as being the sole active agents of history. 
 A potentially new imprint, represented in the article by the proposed memorial statue Queen Mary, presents an alternative version of the past by highlighting the Black resistance and power. In this inversion of the colonial hierarchies of power and representation it is made clear how the cityscape of Copenhagen and the Danish historiography are constantly reproducing the patriotic narrative. Hence, the colonial past is present in Danish society today but in a way that coincides with the Danish culture and thus goes unnoticed.

‘An Undisputable Right … to Appropriate … the Propriety, and Dominium of this Coast’: Natural Law and Danish Colonialism on the Eighteenth-Century Guinea Coast I

ABSTRACT This article investigates the uses of the discourse of the law of nature and nations on the Guinea Coast of West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the archival material of the Danish West India-Guinea Company and other contemporary sources, the article shows how the law of nature and nations was a key discourse by which Europeans and Africans made claims against each other competing for trade and territories in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. It argues that it fulfilled this role for a number of reasons. It had become the chief European discourse for conceptualising rights, property, and jurisdiction, and which provided a standard putatively common to both Europe and the Guinea Coast. As such, it both validated the established ‘customs of the coast’ and at the same time inscribed Europeans and Africans on the Guinea Coast in a larger colonial intellectual, legal, and political order. In this, Africans were routinely described as subjects of the different European nations on the coast.

„I dette sataniske Evangelium“

Abstract During the Second World War, a few well-educated Greenlanders from the Danish colonies of Godthåb and Holsteinsborg expressed their sympathy for Nazi Germany. However, the background of the political turmoil within the Greenlandic elite remains largely unknown. This article presents the state of research and previously unknown sources on the Nazi riots in Greenland. In a subsequent step, potential motives for the movement will be discussed. So far, researchers have ruled out that Greenlanders were aware of the true nature of National Socialism. Instead, the scattered pro-German activities along Greenland’s West coast have been played down as spontaneous acts of provocation and mere political calculus. In fact, the Nazis’ ideology and war crimes were well known to the Greenlanders. In addition, German polar researchers made friends with Greenlandic journalists, teachers and catechists after the Nazi seizure of power. Last not least, the article will examine how Danish discrimination against Greenlanders contributed to the Greenlandic chauvinism displayed by a few members of the Inuit elite.

Gardens of the Coromandel Coast: Landscape Considerations of Commercial Agriculture in Tamil Nadu, South India

The plantation as a fusion of rural industry and commercial agriculture has become a shorthand for the the intensification of land-use, circulation of commodities, and the organization of labor concomitant with the modern world. While not the only place where plantations existed, the Atlantic is the context in which most archaeological research has taken place leaving untested certain assumptions about the development of the plantation. and the regions which informed its varied materializations in the modern world. By extending the the methods and approaches employed by archaeologists studying plantations to South India, we decenter plantation narratives and show how Indian Ocean commercial agriculture and rural industry also enabled the modern world. This article reports on results from the first phase of the Colonial Tharangambadi Archaeological Survey (CTAS). The goal of CTAS was to document changing settlement patterns, settlement organization, and material assemblage through a systematic landscape survey in the former Danish colonial enclave, Tranquebar (Tharangambadi). Specifically, we documented one South Indian settlement formation devoted to commercial agriculture called “gardens,” which has origins in the sixth century CE, or earlier, and how they were used outside the town’s walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We argue that from historically distinctive agrarian facilities geared to commercial production, these plantation-like rural industries developed quite broadly using vulnerable labor to produce plant commodities in high volume for international markets. The particularities of plantation studies are enriched by considerations of parallel developments under similar conditions, as illustrated by India’s lesser-known Danish colony.

Greenland and Denmark: Arctic Secessionism in a Global Powerplay

Greenland, the biggest island in the world inhabited predominantly by Inuits, was a Danish colony before 1953 and has since then been a part of the Danish realm with a gradually increasing autonomy. Some 2/3 of its population favor a complete secession, but the heavy dependence upon Danish budget subsidies is the main challenge. The Chinese government and companies have since 2005 maintained a close dialogue with Greenland as an entry point to the Arctic and a rich base of natural resources (including rare earth elements), though there has not been major investments yet. The U.S. have lately tried to halt this cooperation for the reasons of foreign, security and resource policy, and to put Greenland under a tighter American control. President Trump’s purchase offer in 2019 was the most publicized initiative. Denmark, despite its close alliance with the United States, is worried by either American or Chinese involvement and tries to become a good patron for Greenland to prevent its secession. Meanwhile, the Greenlandic authorities confirm their political will to struggle for a complete independence from Denmark. The article suggests three medium-term scenarios, with Greenland remaining in an gradually looser union with Denmark, moving into the U.S. domain and acquiring a full statehood with a subsequent competition of great powers. Whatever the outcome, Russia shall monitor the development closely and play an active role in the Arctic, not taking a part in the US-China rivalry.

A “Syncretism of Piety”: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle

AbstractThis essay reexamines the network centered on the Boston Congregational minister and theologian Cotton Mather, the great Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke, several of the latter's associates in Halle and London, and Halle-sponsored Lutheran missionaries in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. It pursues the question what this network (which existed from circa 1710 into the 1730s) reveals about how the idea of a “Protestant religion” evolved as a theological construct and how “Protestantism” as a category of religious identity came to have meaning and resonance across denominational and linguistic divides. Through the Boston-Halle-Tranquebar exchange, the essay argues, “awakened souls” from Anglo-American Reformed and German Lutheran churches converged toward a conservative but dogmatically minimalistic understanding of the Christian religion that combined an intensely Christocentric, biblicist, and experiential piety with an activist-missionary and eschatological orientation—a package which was now equated with being truly “Protestant” or “protestantisch,” respectively. This reflects how the historical development of “Protestantism” intersected with larger philosophical and theological debates about “religion” and the different “religions” of humanity that involved Enlightenment thinkers as much as awakened Christians. The distinct version of “the Protestant religion” that first developed among the correspondents of this network would continue to evolve through the transatlantic awakenings of the eighteenth century and remain influential into the nineteenth century.

Contract labor migration as an agent of revolutionary change in the Danish West Indies

ABSTRACT The following article examines the post-emancipation labor contract migration (1848–1917) from the eastern Caribbean islands to the Danish West Indies. This migration was intended to fill a labor vacuum caused by the emancipation of slaves in 1848. The migrant laborers technically had fewer restrictions than slaves did, but the planter class used the restrictive Labor Act of 1849 at their disposal to have total control over the laborers. During this period, the positions of the planter and laboring classes became polarized. The former wanted total control of labor, while the latter wanted fair treatment in the contractual labor engagements. The result was that the labor class, with their festering problems, formed a strong camaraderie among themselves. Migrant and native challenged their working and living conditions. Their dissatisfaction eventually manifested in riots, locally known as Fireburn or Fyah Bun, which resulted in the destruction of property and the loss of life. The riots, however, changed local working conditions and eventually accelerated the decline of Danish colonialism on St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas. These revolutionary events and agents of change created a new platform for how labor relations would be conducted in the Danish West Indies – a platform that was created from the position of the laboring class.

From abolition of the slave trade to protection of immigrants: Danish colonialism, German missionaries, and the development of ideas of humanitarian governance from the early eighteenth to the nineteenth century

ABSTRACT The focus of the essay is the emergence in the eighteenth century of discourses of abolition in the context of bonded labour and the trade in slaves from India. It relates this to the development in forms of unfree labour from slavery to indenture, and to the travels of abolitionism from the Indian Ocean world into that of the Atlantic. The study examines multinational dimensions of this early history of abolition and discusses more particularly how missionary enterprises based in Danish colonies in India contributed to the development of ideas of education, enlightenment, and natural rights that fed into emerging discourses of abolitionism. Further, the essay links eighteenth-century debates around abolition to discourses of protection and humanitarianism that became prominent in the last half of the nineteenth century in the context of imperialist competition and campaigns against the illegal slave trade.

Seroprevalence of avian influenza in Baltic common eiders (Somateria mollissima) and pink-footed geese (Anser brachyrhynchus)

Blood plasma was collected during 2016–2018 from healthy incubating eiders (Somateria molissima, n = 183) in three Danish colonies, and healthy migrating pink-footed geese (Anser brachyrhynchus, n = 427) at their spring roost in Central Norway (Svalbard breeding population) and their novel flyway through the Finnish Baltic Sea (Russian breeding population). These species and flyways altogether represent terrestrial, brackish and marine ecosystems spanning from the Western to the Eastern and Northern part of the Baltic Sea. Plasma of these species was analysed for seroprevalence of specific avian influenza A (AI) antibodies to obtain information on circulating AI serotypes and exposure. Overall, antibody prevalence was 55% for the eiders and 47% for the pink-footed geese. Of AI-antibody seropositive birds, 12% (22/183) of the eiders and 3% (12/427) of the pink-footed geese had been exposed to AI of the potentially zoonotic serotypes H5 and/or H7 virus. AI seropositive samples selected at random (n = 33) showed a low frequency of serotypes H1, H6 and H9. Future projects should aim at sampling and isolating AI virus to characterize dominant serotypes and virus strains (PCR). This will increase our understanding of how AI exposure may affect health, breeding and population viability of Baltic common eiders and pink-footed geese as well as the potential spill-over to humans (zoonotic potential).

Pietistische Konkurrenz und Naturgeschichte: Die Südasienmission der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Dänisch-Englisch-Hallesche Mission (1755–1802)

Pietistische Konkurrenz und Naturgeschichte: Die Südasienmission der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Dänisch-Englisch-Hallesche Mission (1755–1802)

Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire by Johan Heinsen

Reviewed by: Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire by Johan Heinsen Marcus Rediker Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, sailors, and a dissonant empire By Johan Heinsen. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. On the evening of 19 January 1683 a group of sailors and convicts huddled up in quiet, urgent conversation on the dark lower deck of the Havmanden, a vessel owned by the Danish West India and Guinea Company, bound for the small island colony of St. Thomas in the Caribbean. For weeks the men had been exchanging stories about the imperious captain of the ship, the Dutchman Jan Blom, and the haughty Jørgan Iversen, once the iron-fisted governor of St. Thomas, now on his way to resume the post. Blom was known for his lavish dinners in the captain’s cabin, which sickened the growling stomachs of those down below. Iversen was denounced as a “soul-seller” who profited off the bodies of the poor. Tensions on the ship had reached a breaking point and the time for decisive action had arrived. The following day the mutineers smashed open Blom’s cabin door and shot him as he tried to escape, threw Iversen overboard, and killed six others loyal to their power. A motley crew of Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Irish and English sailors and convicts took charge of the ship and imagined a different social order of the ship and a new destiny for themselves as pirates. After an anarchic voyage of two and a half months, during which another uprising exploded from the lower deck, the mutineers wrecked the Havmanden on the coast of Sweden in late March 1683. Danish authorities captured the rebels and carried them back to Copenhagen, where, four months later, they tortured and executed nine of them before a crowd of thousands. The mutineers’ grand plan failed but their actions nonetheless had huge consequences, explains Johan Heinsen in this excellent history from below: their revolt proved to be a turning point in the history of empire. Struggle from below must now be reckoned a major cause of the relative failure of Danish colonialism. Drawing upon a deep and rich body of sources, Heinsen explores this mutiny and its consequences in a complex, sophisticated way. The first half of the book, “The Noises of Mutiny,” probes the process of mutiny and its genesis in storytelling. The second half, “A Social History of Dissonance,” situates the mutiny in a “wider context of lower class traditions and struggles” among sailors and convicts (18). Heinsen combines the methods of social history (a la Natalie Zemon Davis), cultural anthropology (Victor Turner’s “ritual process”), microhistory (Carlo Ginzburg) and even a kind of sociolinguistics (reminiscent of Dell Hymes). He then anchors all in a larger framework most fully realized by the great Herman Melville, who demonstrated through his novels that a tall ship was an entire social world unto itself. Heinsen succeeds in writing a history of those on the lower deck Danish authorities described, accurately for once, as a “multitude of indomitable people” (125). The history is dissonant because the harsh, clashing sounds of the struggle aboard the Havmanden were irreconcilable in their own day and remain so in ours. The most creative part of Heinsen’s approach is his analysis of the soundscape of the ship. Heinsen “listens” to his archival sources with extraordinary intensity, using what he calls “slow meditation” over the traces of “broken oaths, unruly tongues and disobedient utterances” (177, 14). He regards stories as “dark matter” that affects everything nearby even when it cannot be directly observed (14). He detects and amplifies reverberations in the sources to recover the lost voices of sailors and convicts who told stories, spread rumors, bonded with each other and changed the course of history. This is not abstract, idealist discourse analysis but rather a materialist accounting of speech as action, in conflict, creating and subverting the “aural order” of the ship (81). Heinsen has conceptualized and reconstructed the hidden history of sonic class struggle in genuinely creative ways. Written with grace and power, Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World deserves a wide readership among all scholars and readers...