Sources on 'Swedish colonial amnesia'

(Originally posted elsewhere on 10 July 2022.)

First, some general sources. Then, three excerpts on Swedish involvement in Caribbean slavery and contemporary obscuring of that history.

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Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation: Nordic Possessions in the Atlantic World during the Era of the Slave Trade. Edited by Holger Weiss. 2015.

Fredrik Thomasson. “Thirty-Two Lashes at Quatre Piquets: Slave Laws and Justice in the Swedish Colony of St. Barthelemy ca. 1800.” Ports of Globalisation, Places of Creolisation […]. 2015.

Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena. Edited by Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin. 2014.

Lill-Ann Korber. “Sweden and St. Barthelemy: Exceptionalisms, Whiteness, and the Disappearance of Slavery from Colonial History.” Scandinavian Studies. 2019.

“The Happiest People on Earth? Scandinavian Narratives of Guilt and Discontent.” Edited by Andrew Nestingen, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, and Peter Simonsen. Special issue of Scandinavian Studies. 2017.

Afro-Nordic Landscapes, Equality, and Race in Northern Europe. Edited by Michael McEachrane. 2014.

Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others, and National Identities. Edited by Kristin Loftsdottir and Lars Jensen. 2012.

Antonio Lafeunte and Nuria Valverde. “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics.” Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. 2004.

Bruno Cousin and Sebastian Chauvin. “Islanders, Immigrants and Millionaires: The Dynamics of Upper-Class Segregation in St. Barts, French West Indies.” Geographies of the Super-Rich. Edited by Iain Hay. 2013.

Hugo Reinert. “Notes from a Projected Sacrifice Zone.” ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies. 2018.

Hugo Reinert. “About a Stone.” Environmental Humanities. 2016.

Ylva Habel. “Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism? Teaching While Black.” Education in the Black Diaspora: Perspectives, Challenges, and Prospects. Edited by Kassie Freeman and Ethan Johnson. 2012.

Gunlog Fur. “Colonialism and Swedish History: Unthinkable Connections?” Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity […]. 2014.

Lill-Ann Korber. “Traveling to ‘Caribbean Sweden’: St. Barthelemy as Tourist and Tax Paradise.” Rethinking Scandinavia: CSS Publications Web Quarterly 2018.

Fredrik Thomasson. “The Caribbean Scorpion: The Saint-Barthelemy Archive and Swedish Colonial Amnesia.” Small Axe. 2020.

Yolande Lavoie, Carolyn Fick, and Francine M. Mayer. “A Particular Study of Slavery in the Caribbean Island of Saint Barthelemy: 1648-1846.” Caribbean Studies 28. 1995.

Holger Weiss. “A Divided Space: Subjects and Others in the Swedish West Indies during the Late-Eighteenth Century.” Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World: Provincial Cosmopolitans. Edited by Goran Ryden. 2013.

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Excerpt 1:

Sweden became a slaveholding nation when it acquired its only Caribbean colony, Saint-Barthélemy – a.k.a. St. Barths or St. Barts – from France in 1784. When the island was retroceded in 1878, the records created during ninety-four years of Swedish Caribbean rule were left behind and are now held in France. Examining the history of this archive that stands as a metaphor for Swedish colonial amnesia, […] the reluctance in Sweden to recognize a past […] goes against a self-image untainted by slavery and colonialism. […] [There is now] a project that aims to open the archive to a larger audience […]. Saint-Barthelemy was retroceded back to France in 1878, at which point the entire archive that had been created by Swedish civil servants during the ninety-four years’ possession was left on the island. The FSB’s 327 volumes (approximately 130 linear feet and three hundred thousand pages) provide, despite disorder and lacunae, a comprehensive picture of Swedish rule and slavery in the Caribbean.

Text by: Fredrik Thomasson, “The Caribbean Scorpion: The Saint-Barthelemy Archive and Swedish Colonial Amnesia,” Small Axe (July 2020). [Emphasis mine.]

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Excerpt 2:

Jeppe Mulich’s In a Sea of Empires fosters our understanding of the complicated and multilayered place of the Caribbean in historical imagination. The book explores the Leeward Islands, an archipelago of small islands in the northeastern Caribbean, in particular the British Virgin Islands (Antigua and St. Christopher), the Danish Virgin Islands (St. Thomas and St. Croix), and the Swedish St. Barthélemy (France colonized the island in 1648 and sold it to Sweden in 1784 before gaining it back in 1878). These islands shared many features: they had a highly polyglot and diverse population, the majority of which was enslaved; they were home to a higher share of free people of African descent than larger plantation islands; their expansive coasts and rocky terrains made them more suited for maritime trade while other colonies relied on large-scale agricultural plantation production […]. Adopting a micro-regional perspective, Mulich frames the book around the concept of “inter-imperial region,” [...] defined as “a geographical area inhabited by multiple polities, with a particularly high density of relations and interactions between and across the formal boundaries of these polities” (p. 16). [...] The book brings this ground-level perspective to little-studied smaller imperial powers in the Atlantic world such as Sweden and Denmark-Norway. [...]

Text above by: Vanessa Mongey, “Review of Mulich, Jeppe, In a Sea of Empires: Networks and Crossings in the Revolutionary Caribbean,” H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. Published online September 2021. [Emphasis mine.]

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Excerpt 3:

St. Barthelemy’s history is deeply embedded in the settlement and economic history of the Caribbean. […] References to Indigenous peoples are made in the form of the island’s Arawak name, Ouanalao, in the coat of arms, […] and of brand names […]. With the arrival of the Swedish in the 1780s, the island gained from the transatlantic […] slave trade. Under King Gustav III, the harbor town of Gustavia was erected […]. [T]he port benefited from wars in Europe […] and from Sweden’s neutral position among belligerents […]. [B]etween 1800 and 1815, one-third of the altogether 2,000-3,000 enslaved workers on the island had been born in Africa […], 10 percent had been born into slavery on the island […]. Sweden transferred the island back to France in 1878. The island then depended mainly on a subsistence economy again […] until the 1950s, when members of the Rockefeller family and the adventurer, entrepreneur, and later mayor of the island […] identified the island’s potential for the establishment of private estates and luxury tourism resorts. Luxury tourism, the real estate business, and connected services have since become the undisputed main source of revenue […].

[T]he island’s “Europeanness” and whiteness [might seem] to be some of the most surprising […] aspects of the shared past of St. Barthelemy and Sweden. […] The naturalization of whiteness and the downplaying of the relevance of slavery and of Indigenous presence and their manifold legacies are two features that have characterized the Swedish self-understanding of the country’s colonial history. […] In her overview of Swedish historiography related to colonialism, Gunlog Fur describes Scandinavia’s uneasy relationship with the history of colonialism: Engagement with colonialism proper appears limited and distant in time, and this “indirect” form of Scandinavian involvement in colonial expansion allows room for claims of innocence in confrontations with colonial histories. Seemingly untainted by colonialism’s heritage, the Scandinavian countries throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first successfully maintained positions as champions of minority rights and mediators in global politics. (2014,18) […] Fur suggests that Sweden has skipped a phase of scrutinizing its own involvement in colonialism and transatlantic enslavement […]. Another elliptical narrative concerns the celebration of abolition, often in the form of European abolitionist “heroes” […]. Studies comprise, among other aspects, [Swedish] overseas colonialism and enslavement; the treatment of minorities and Indigenous peoples; the history of Swedish race biology, ideology, and the institutionalization of eugenics; as well as the assumed conflation of national belonging and whiteness […].

Text above by: Lill-Ann Korber, “Sweden and St. Barthelemy: Exceptionalisms, Whiteness, and the Disappearance of Slavery from Colonial History,” Scandinavian Studies (Spring/Summer 2019).