Abstract
In recent decades, histories of European colonial expansion have moved beyond the Iberian, French, Dutch and British contexts to include Northern European powers such as Denmark, Sweden and Prussia as well as states without direct colonial ties. Florian Jungmann and Martin Krieger's edited volume, Dänemark als globaler Akteur, joins this growing scholarship by examining Denmark's global role from the 1600s to the present through transnational and multidisciplinary lenses. Blending historical, ethnographical, archaeological, anthropological, and architectural approaches – with chapters ranging from panoramic treatments on centuries-long developments to more narrowly focused case studies – the volume presents a valuable overview of the history of the Danish colonial empire while also engaging with its contemporary legacies.
The volume is organised into five parts: the first addresses structures and actors; the second, the North Atlantic colonies; the third, the Indian colonies; the fourth, Danish possessions in Ghana; and the fifth, the Danish West Indies. A brief introduction by the editors points to a Danish reluctance to confront its colonial past in ways that find resonances in postcolonial societies, before it articulates the aims of the volume. Then follows Michael Bregnsbo's helpful overview of the geographical, typological and historical contours of the Danish colonial holdings, as well as a timeline for Danish decolonisation. As readers learn, the Danish Crown variably claimed sovereignty over territories that included Norway, parts of Sweden, the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the counties of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst, as well as the islands of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and tropical colonies and trade stations in the Caribbean, Africa and India. The remaining 12 chapters examine a wide array of topics, including labour, natural history, knowledge production, geopolitics, settlement patterns and colonial architecture. No single thematic throughline is foregrounded in volume, yet three tend to run through most of the chapters: the pervasive nature of foreign involvement in the Danish colonial empire; the impact of greater powers on the Danish colonies and particularly British maritime dominance; and the question of Danish responsibility towards its former colonies.
Officially, Danish colonial territories were ruled from the capital of Copenhagen. However, a strong presence of foreign involvement undergirded the rise, maintenance and fall of the Danish colonies. In her fascinating comparative analysis, Vivien Specht examines the impact of cameralism on colonisation attempts in the Nicobar Islands and on the Jutland Heath in the 1760s, demonstrating not just the influence of Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi but also of German settlers from Odenwald in southwest Germany and Moravian missionaries in these projects. Similarly, chapters by S. Jeyaseela Stephen (on Tranquebar) and Simon Rastén (on Serampore) show how missionaries from Halle and Herrnhut shaped Danish settlements in India alongside indigenous populations, with Serampore emerging as a multilingual, religiously diverse hub. Ulrich van der Heyden's study of Pomeranian-born Heinrich Ludwig von Schimmelmann, governor-general of the Danish West Indies, highlights the participation of non-Danish administrators. Several chapters underscore how this foreign presence benefited not just the Danish Crown but also external elites. Danish participation in the transatlantic slave trade, Jungmann's chapter on ‘court and chamber Moors’ reflects, allowed German nobility to acquire enslaved African servants – markers of elite status in early modern Europe. Tobias Delfs’ chapter on the interlinkages between missionary work and natural history demonstrates the ways in which German missionaries used the Danish colonies in India to collect samples, languages and curiosities, joining up with European scientific networks. As these studies disclose, Denmark could therefore function as a proxy colonial power for German-speaking polities lacking overseas colonies of their own.
Greater powers and particularly British maritime influences on the Danish colonial empire loom large across the volume. Krieger's chapter on the long-term history of Danish claims to Greenland and Anna Agnarsdóttir's chapter on Joseph Banks’ influence on Britain's policy towards Iceland during the Napoleonic Wars demonstrate the often fragile Danish hold on the North Atlantic colonies. Britain, as several contributions note, occupied or blockaded Danish colonies in the Napoleonic period, including Iceland, holdings in India and in the Danish West Indies. Britain was also deeply entangled in the history of Danish decolonisation, purchasing the Danish holdings in India and West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, while the United States acquired the Danish West Indies (now US Virgin Islands) in 1917.
Denmark's loss of Norway to Sweden (1814), the Duchies to Prussia (1864) and the sale of most of its overseas colonies by the early twentieth century transformed what was once a sizeable global colonial empire into a small nation-state. The editors suggest that this territorial and demographic diminishment contributed to the longstanding disinterest in the Danish colonial past in Denmark, at least until recently. In contrast, the volume shows how societies formerly colonised by the Danish Crown are more attentive to the legacies of their colonial pasts. In Ghana, as Wazi Apoh and Benedicta Gokah's chapter reveals, the material traces from plantations and forts left by the Danish along Ghana's East Coast are tied closely to local cultures of remembrance. Ulla Lunn's chapter – the only one on the Danish West Indies – examines historic buildings and their construction, and current challenges of preservation and remembrance. Lunn also raises the crucial question of who should bear the financial burdens of such preservation work.
Given the ambition to provide an overview of Denmark as a global actor across four centuries along with specific case studies, some omissions are inevitable. Nonetheless, there is surprisingly little discussion of the Danish Crown's broader political and economic policies. Questions of how Denmark sought to act globally and what strategies it pursued are not addressed. Moreover, few chapters engage Danish archives, and many rely primarily on secondary literature. Experts may therefore take an interest in only select chapters. These limitations aside, the volume is a useful entry point for readers unfamiliar with the Danish colonial empire from its seventeenth-century beginnings to its decline. Equally significant, it underscores the continued resonance of this history today, both in postcolonial societies and in ongoing debates about memory, responsibility and historical accountability.
