Compared with the great seafaring European nations which, in early modern times, built their vast colonial empires and so set a lasting mark on the history of the globe, Scandinavian overseas possessions remained small and insignificant in extent as well as historical importance. This was to some extent due to the region’s rather backward economy, but must also be explained by its geographical position in the northernmost part of Europe. The long, cold winters often made the waters freeze over, thus hindering regular shipping for several months of the year. The Scandinavian contribution to the overall history of European overseas expansion is therefore bound to be a rather small one. On the other hand, the colonial experience of the Scandinavian nations is still part of the greater pattern and, at the same time, an exotic element in the history of Scandinavia. For these reasons the history deserves to be told.
Only in the mid-seventeenth century – two centuries after the Portuguese and Spanish discoveries had opened the overseas world to the Europeans – did the Scandinavians begin to show a serious interest in trying to acquire their own possessions on distant continents, where the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English had already long established themselves. The Scandinavians were not driven by a wish to make new discoveries – as had been the case in the Viking age – but simply wanted to have their share of the large profits from the colonial trade. Another strong incentive was the prevailing economic doctrine of mercantilism, that the state ought to be self-sufficient and have a positive balance of trade. To achieve those goals in an increasingly competitive world economy, the possession of overseas colonies was vital. This made the question of direct access to the lucrative oriental markets an important issue in early modern Scandinavian politics.
Early modern Scandinavia was dominated by two large state formations: the kingdom of Sweden, which also included Finland, and the twin monarchy of Denmark-Norway, ruled by the Danish royal house of Oldenborg.1
In geographical terms Sweden covered the northern and eastern part of the Scandinavian peninsula and – owing to her possession of Finland – encircled the Gulf of Bothnia down to the Gulf of Finland. Her only free access to the international trade routes was the narrow area around the mouth of the Göta River on the western coast of the Scandinavian peninsula where, eventually, the large commercial city of Gothenburg emerged. Otherwise, all Swedish shipping had to pass through the Sound – the narrow strait between Zealand and Scania – which, until 1658, remained a Danish waterway under the close control of the Danish navy.
Because of these geopolitical realities Sweden had no tradition of long-distance trade by ocean-going ships. Instead she had succeeded in building an economy mainly based on trade with eastern Europe across the Baltic Sea. However, these basic conditions changed in the mid-seventeenth century when Sweden, after a series of successful wars with Denmark, came into possession of the former Danish provinces on the Scandinavian peninsula – whereby the Sound was changed from a Danish strait into an international waterway – and, even more important, of the big commercial city of Bremen in northwestern Germany, which opened up international trade routes to direct Swedish access. Only now did it become realistic for the Swedish government to contemplate the acquisition of overseas colonies.
The other large state, Denmark-Norway, covered the territory of present-day Norway and Denmark proper, including the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Unlike the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians thus had free access to an open coastline stretching from the North Cape to the Elbe. Thanks to the warm Gulf Stream, the many natural harbours along this coastline were ice-free for most of the year, while the inner Danish waters and the Baltic Sea were often frozen over during the winter months, thus paralysing Swedish shipping for long periods. Denmark-Norway consequently had good natural conditions for navigation over long distances and could boast a proud naval tradition going back, indeed, to the Viking age.2
Back in the Middle Ages Denmark and Norway were separate kingdoms, but in 1380 the two nations were united under the Danish king. This union lasted until 1814, when Norway, as a consequence of the redrawing of the map of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, was forced to replace the union with Denmark with a union with Sweden. This lasted until 1905, when Norway finally achieved full independence after more than 500 years under foreign rulers.
When in 1380 Norway signed a treaty of union with Denmark, her far-flung possessions in the North Atlantic followed the motherland into the union and thus became part of the empire of the Danish king. These possessions included the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, which back in the Viking age had been colonized mainly by Norwegian emigrants. The descendants of the original settlers continued to recognize Norway as their motherland and, eventually, also the Danish king as their sovereign lord. When, in 1814, Norway left the union with Denmark, the North Atlantic colonies remained under Danish sovereignty, and – with the exception of Iceland – are still part of the Danish commonwealth today.3
Iceland definitively cut its ties with Denmark during the Second World War, in 1944, when the island was occupied by the British, while the Danish motherland was occupied by the Germans, and it thus became an independent republic after having enjoyed a semi-independent status since 1918. The Faeroe Islands were given the formal status of a Danish county in 1821 and thereby became an integrated part of Denmark. For this reason the islands were also included in the Danish democratic constitution of 1849. During the Second World War the Faeroe Islands, like Iceland, were occupied by the British. This de facto separation for five years from the motherland gave rise to a growing separatist movement among the Faeroese and motivated, in 1948, the introduction of a Home Rule arrangement granting the Faeroese people extensive autonomy within the framework of the Danish constitution. This is still the status of the Faeroe Islands in the Danish North Atlantic commonwealth.
Unlike in Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, the Nordic colonization of Greenland was weak and erratic due to the inhospitable climate and the long distance separating it from the motherland. After a short growth in the Viking Age, where the Nordic colonists even reached as far as Newfoundland, the Norse colonies in Greenland faded away and disappeared for several centuries, leaving the Arctic to the original Inuit culture. However, in the early eighteenth century Danish and Norwegian colonists and missionaries returned to Greenland, where they founded a number of settlements on the west coast. At the same time, they ran a fairly regular trading route between Greenland and the motherland with support from the government in Copenhagen. Only from this point, therefore, is it meaningful to speak of a real colonization of Greenland.
Even if communications with Greenland were poor and irregular, Denmark endeavoured to maintain her sovereignty over the Arctic island. These efforts were crowned with definite success when, in 1917, the United States officially recognized Danish sovereignty over Greenland as part of the treaty by which the Danish islands in the West Indies were ceded to the United States. Notwithstanding its geographical position in the western hemisphere, Greenland thus remained a Danish colony in spite of growing public pressure to the opposite effect in America.
Danish sovereignty over the island became temporarily weakened, however, when Greenland during the Second World War came to host American military bases. This arrangement followed from a treaty in 1941 between the US government and the Danish ambassador to Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, who in this matter acted independently of the government in German-occupied Denmark. The treaty was subsequently confirmed in 1945 by the Danish liberation government, and since then Denmark has allowed American military bases in Greenland, while the United States has, in return, recognized Danish sovereignty over the island.
Greenland’s ties to Denmark were further strengthened when, as a consequence of the revised Danish constitution of 1953, the island had its status as a colony changed to one where it was recognized as an integrated part of the Danish commonwealth in line with the Faeroe Islands. Since 1979 Greenland has enjoyed a Home Rule granting the population extensive autonomy: unlike Denmark proper and the Faeroe Islands, Greenland decided not to join the European Union. It is only fair to add, however, that Greenland’s economy is still heavily dependent on the annual block grants from Denmark and on the revenue from the American military bases that are still active in the area.
As early as the 1620s the Swedish government contemplated establishing a foothold overseas. However, Sweden’s growing engagement in European conflicts put the plans on standby for a while. Only in the late 1630s were they resumed on a realistic basis – in the shape of an attempt to establish a Swedish colony on the western bank of the Delaware River not far from the present-day city of Philadelphia.4
The originator of this idea was a Dutch businessman by the name of Peter Minuit. He had formerly been a leading figure in the neighbouring Dutch colony, New Netherlands, and had great experience in trading with the local natives. Having fallen out with his Dutch colleagues, he approached the Swedish government and succeeded in interesting its leading figures in a plan to establish a Swedish trading station at the mouth of the Delaware River that could take some of the lucrative fur trade away from the Dutch.
Financed by Swedish and Dutch capital and equipped with detailed instructions from the Swedish government, Minuit’s two ocean-going ships left Sweden in November 1637 in order to start a Swedish colony in the designated area. He reached his destination in March 1638 and at once founded a trading post, which he named Fort Christina after the reigning Swedish queen. The fort was built on the riverbank in the middle of an area bought from the locals. A Swedish colony – New Sweden – on the North American continent thus became a reality, and the Swedish government’s dream of getting a foothold overseas had come true.
However, the Swedish enterprise never became a success: it lasted only seventeen years and ended abruptly when, in 1655, Peter Stuyvesant – the governor in the neighbouring New Netherlands – finally decided to put an end to the rivalry by occupying the defenceless Swedish colony and annexing it to the Dutch possessions. Shortly afterwards, however, the Dutch colony in North America was itself occupied by the British and made a part of the British colonial empire. At the same time New Amsterdam, the main city in the area, had its name changed to New York.
There are several explanations for the failure of this Swedish enterprise. First, Sweden was a latecomer in America compared with the Dutch and the British. When the Swedes arrived, British colonial communities had long been established in New England as well as in Maryland and Virginia to the south, and for several decades the Dutch had been operating in the intervening area southwest of Manhattan. For this reason it was difficult for the tiny Swedish colony to build up a permanent trading business with the Native Americans without finding itself at loggerheads with well-established British and Dutch interests. Second, the Swedish colony remained a small minority in the colonial environment. By 1650 nearly 44,000 British colonists were living on the eastern coast of America, while the Dutch population amounted to more than 4,000. The number of Swedish colonists was only 185, and it was obvious that those few people were bound to live at the mercy of the British and Dutch majority – and this mercy ended, as mentioned, in 1655.
Third, communications with the Swedish motherland were severely limited. All in all only eleven ships arrived from Sweden during the years 1638–55 – that is, less than one per year. By the time they put in to port, many of the crew and passengers had died as a result of the unhealthy conditions on board. This modest traffic can be ascribed to the fact that Sweden was heavily engaged in the European wars, but the inevitable outcome was that the colonists for long periods felt that they had been deserted by the motherland. Alone they were not able to mount serious resistance when the final Dutch offensive was launched.
The history of New Sweden turned out to be only a brief intermezzo, but the Swedish presence in the area nevertheless left lasting traces. The area was long afterwards regarded as culturally Swedish. Even at the end of the eighteenth century more than 1,200 people there still had some knowledge of Swedish, and Swedish priests sent over from the motherland continued to serve in the six Swedish congregations right until the founding of the independent United States of America. Only in 1789 did the Swedish state Church reach the conclusion that no more priests need be sent to America, and eventually the descendants of the New Sweden colonists therefore became fully integrated into the greater English-speaking community.
The Swedish attempt to gain a permanent foothold in West Africa in order to get a share in the rapidly increasing slave trade to America also met with only qualified success. Initiatives to that effect were discussed in government circles in the 1620s, but they had to be postponed for two decades because of the Swedish engagement in the Thirty Years’ War. Plans were not resumed until after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which gave Sweden control over Bremen-Verden and thus free access to the open seas.5
Resumption of the African project was due to Louis de Geer, a Dutch-born industrial tycoon who had become a naturalized Swedish citizen. At his own expense, but protected by a privilege granted by the Swedish government, in December 1648 he equipped two ships to be sent to West Africa in order to establish a permanent Swedish trading station in the name of the Swedish queen.
The expedition was a success, and in 1650 its leader, Henrik Carlof, as a representative of Louis de Geer, made a formal agreement with the local king of Fetu, according to which the Swedes bought a strip of land around a locality called Cape Coast and were allowed to establish a trading post there. Subsequently the Swedes built a number of other trading forts along the coast, both east and west of Cape Coast, in fierce competition with the already existing British and Dutch slave forts in the area. The Swedes prevailed until 1663 where, finally, they had to give up after a series of military raids alternately from the British and the Dutch, who were also fighting each other during the Navigation Wars. In this way Sweden had to pay the price for the warfare between the two leading sea powers in African waters. It was the end of Sweden’s attempt at becoming a permanent player in the transatlantic slave trade.
Sweden’s most long-lived overseas possession was the diminutive island of Saint Bethélemy near Guadeloupe in the French West Indies. However, it only came into Swedish hands late in the day in the history of European expansion. In 1784 the Swedish king, during a stay in Paris, signed a treaty according to which France handed over the uninhabited island to Sweden in return for trading privileges in Gothenburg.6
The following year a single Swedish man-of-war called at the small island, whose only attraction was a good natural harbour. During the stay, which lasted for several months, the crew constructed the first houses in what would later become a busy harbour-city and baptized it Gustavia in honour of the Swedish king, Gustav III. Over the following years the settlement grew steadily and eventually became a notable commercial town. It reached its peak during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, when it served as a neutral free harbour for the warring parties, and for a short period even became one of Sweden’s biggest cities, temporarily prospering from the flourishing trade under the neutral Swedish flag.
However, Saint Bethélemy’s time of greatness came to an abrupt end when the Napoleonic Wars terminated. The death-blow came in 1831 when Britain reopened her ports in the Caribbean to American shipping. This step made the Swedish harbour superfluous, and its key role as a port of transit was at an end. From having been an asset to Sweden for several golden decades around 1800, the island turned into a liability, and – to make things even worse – it was hit by a number of devastating hurricanes, which eradicated the last remnants of its commercial infrastructure. Taking the measure of these sad facts, the Swedish government decided in 1878 to return the island to its original owner, France. For Sweden the era of overseas enterprise was definitively concluded.
Like many other European princes, the Danish king Christian IV (1588–1648) kept an eye on the overseas activities of the Dutch and the British, watching with envy the huge profits from the Asian trade that poured into commercial capitals like Amsterdam and London. In his heart the self-confident Danish king was convinced that he could emulate the success of the Western sea powers. The question was just which route the Danes should take to get direct access to the lucrative Asian market without falling into open conflict with the well-established trading nations. Of course, the optimal solution was to find an alternative route to India from the traditional one round the southern tip of Africa, and such considerations gave rise to the idea of trying to find a northern route round the American or the Asian continent. From a Danish point of view this would have the further advantage that such routes would cross the North Atlantic, where the Danish king claimed sovereignty. Earlier Dutch attempts, however, had clearly demonstrated that the northeast passage north of Russia was no option. Therefore, the Danish government instead decided to try to find out whether there existed a northwestern alternative north of the American continent.7
In order to answer this question an expedition was equipped in 1618–19 and an experienced Norwegian sea captain, Jens Munk, recruited as leader. He had at his disposal a frigate, a smaller vessel and a crew of sixty-four men. In the summer of 1619 the expedition left Copenhagen, bound for the recently discovered Hudson Bay to explore its interior and perhaps find a route leading to Asia.
However, the mission proved impossible and ended in tragedy. Two hard winters in the ice-cold Arctic climate killed no fewer than sixty-one members of the crew, and after heroic efforts Jens Munk and his last two surviving fellow seamen managed to make the small vessel ready for a transatlantic navigation – the frigate had to be left behind. Following two months of dangerous and exhausting navigation across the Atlantic they finally hit the Norwegian coast in the summer of 1621. In the light of this trial all further projects for opening a northwest passage were put on ice. The only remaining option was the well-tested route south of Africa and across the Indian Ocean.
The prelude to the Danish attempt at reaching India via the traditional route had a slight touch of comedy attached to it: it all began with a confidence trick by an enterprising Dutch businessman and – as it turned out – adventurer named Marcelis de Boshouwer.
Boshouwer had for many years done business in India, and, during a visit to Copenhagen in the autumn in 1617, he asked for an audience with King Christian IV, claiming to represent the emperor of Ceylon, the Rajah Senarat of Kandy. Allegedly on behalf of this potentate he presented to the king a proposal for a formal treaty between Ceylon and Denmark, by which the Danes would be granted a monopoly for twelve years on all European trade with Ceylon and allowed a number of trading posts in the island.
Obviously captivated by the Dutchman’s eloquence and fascinated by the staggering perspectives it opened, the king put his signature to the treaty and ordered the equipping of a naval force of four big ships to leave for Ceylon at short notice. The expedition was put under the command of the twenty-four-year-old admiral Ove Giedde, and money for the enterprise was provided by the newly established East India Company, which had the king as its greatest shareholder. The expedition left Copenhagen in November 1618 bound for Ceylon and, after a voyage of 535 days, it reached the island on 16 May 1620.
Here a surprise was waiting: the rajah of Kandy flatly denied knowing anything at all about the treaty, and the entire expedition threatened to end in total failure, the sad result of a Dutch adventurer’s lively imagination. Admiral Giedde, however, was not that easy to knock out. Having failed with the rajah, he managed afterwards to make an agreement with another local prince, the nayak of Tanjore (Thanjavur). On behalf of the Danish king he bought from him a strip of coastland on the southeastern coast of the Indian subcontinent with the right to build a fort, which he named Dansborg. This was the beginning of the Danish colony of Tranquebar.
At that time Tranquebar was only a small fishing village surrounded by a few square miles of hinterland. However, it was well situated to exploit the current conflicts between the Portuguese and Dutch tradesmen in the region which opened excellent opportunities for trading under the neutral Danish flag. Consequently, over the next twenty years Tranquebar developed into a busy commercial centre well protected by the guns of Fort Dansborg, and at regular intervals rich shiploads of Asian products were also sent back to Copenhagen to the great satisfaction of the shareholders in the East India Company.
However, owing to the almost permanent state of war between Denmark and Sweden in the mid-seventeenth century the Danish government was unable to provide ships to be sent to faraway Tranquebar. Indeed, the lines of communication were actually cut off for nearly thirty years. They were only re-established when, in 1669, a Danish fleet again cast anchor in the harbour. To his great relief the commanding officer found that the colony – under a brave and enterprising commandant at Fort Dansborg – had indeed survived the long separation and was even in better shape than thirty years before. The Danish foothold in India, in other words, remained intact and proved in the long run to be an important asset when, towards the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to Denmark’s neutral position in the worldwide showdowns between the great powers, Danish trade with Asia reached its peak.
In 1755 the original Danish stronghold in Tranquebar was supplemented by a second one in Bengal: a small locality called Serampore on the western bank of the Hugli River near British Calcutta. In 1756 also a small and isolated group of islands, the Nicobars, were added to the Danish possessions and renamed the Frederik Islands after the Danish king. The new trading post at Serampore rapidly developed into an important centre for the Danish Asian trade, while the Nicobars remained a disappointment: because of the malaria-infected climate they proved uninhabitable and never came to play a role in the Danish trading network.
From this far-flung Indian network of trading stations, enormous riches were brought back to Copenhagen. Huge new warehouses along the waterfront bore witness to the fact that Asian trade over a few decades at the end of the eighteenth century had turned the sleepy Danish capital into a city of the world and its staid merchant class into a rich, cosmopolitan elite.
This spectacular boom, however, was based on one fragile precondition: Denmark’s ability to remain neutral in the great showdown between Britain and Napoleon Bonaparte’s France. Thanks to the country’s neutral status Danish merchant ships were chartered in great numbers by the warring parties to transport goods that would otherwise be in danger of getting arrested by the opposite side, and the payments for this risky business were very high. The neutral position of Denmark came to an abrupt end when, in 1807, the British – out of fear that the large Danish navy would fall into the hands of Napoleon – decided to act pre-emptively. In the late summer a British expeditionary force attacked Copenhagen, and after several days of shelling the Danish government surrendered its navy to the British and, at the same time, entered into a war with them which lasted until 1814. After this any further basis for maintaining even a small measure of Danish long-distance shipping was gone.8
During the war the Danish possessions in India were occupied by the British. They were returned at the end, but it soon became obvious that Denmark was no longer capable of maintaining regular shipping to the distant outposts. The Danish government lost interest in them and, after languishing in isolation, they were finally sold to the British East India Company in 1845 – except for the Nicobars, which the latter did not want to buy. Those islands were therefore ceded for free to Britain in 1868, after which British authorities for some years had tried to force the Danish government to intervene against the Malaysian pirates who operated from the islands. They were afterwards used as places of deportation for criminals from British India.
Such was the end of Danish colonial enterprise in India. The Danish presence there was never strong, but has nevertheless left a few permanent traces. The old Danish Fort Dansborg in Tranquebar has now been renovated with Danish funds, and the area still houses a number of Christian congregations founded back in the early eighteenth century by Danish Pietist missionaries. In Serampore – now an integrated part of metropolitan Kolkata – is situated the first Christian university of India. It was founded in 1793 by Baptist missionaries who found a haven for their activity in the small Danish enclave.
Like many other European nations Denmark tried to win her share of the booming slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for that purpose, as we have seen, it was necessary to get a foothold in West Africa, where the black slaves were gathered before being shipped to the Americas.
In 1661 the Danish African Company succeeded for the first time in gaining a small foothold on the coast of Guinea, but only after many troubles and setbacks did representatives of the Danish government in 1694 obtain permission to establish themselves permanently with a slave fort, which they named Christiansborg after the Danish king. On the whole, however, the Danish presence was unsafe and heavily dependent on the ongoing political game between the local African tribes in the area and the bigger European agents in the slave business. Accordingly, for most of the time Danish profits were modest, but during the good years in the late eighteenth century the Danes actually succeeded in considerably expanding their sphere of influence and founding four additional forts on the coast west of the mouth of the Volta River.
In the wake of the French Revolution, with its new focus on human rights, popular opinion all over Europe turned increasingly against the slave trade. Against this background, in 1803 Denmark passed a law banning trade in slaves, and the forts in Africa became worthless overnight. They thus turned into an economic liability for the trading companies and the state finances. They went into decay and were largely ignored by the parties concerned, until, in 1850, they were handed over to the British for a symbolic payment. The British accepted the bargain only because they wanted to prevent the French from buying them. All in all, the slender Danish presence in West Africa thus remained an unimportant intermezzo, which left only a few traces in Denmark proper and only a few Danish place-names in present-day Ghana.
The Danish possessions in India and Africa were not colonies in the normal sense, but rather trading posts, always at the mercy of local powers and the great seafaring nations. However, the three small tropical islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix in the Caribbean, just east of Puerto Rico, were proper colonies and became, to some extent, also a settlement area for Danish emigrants.
The uninhabited rocky island of Saint Thomas was invaded by the Danish West India Company in 1672. The company was attracted by the fine natural harbour which gave a good refuge to its ships. Formally the island belonged to the king of Spain who, however, had his hands full with other matters and therefore silently accepted the Danish occupation. In 1718 the company laid hands on the neighbouring ownerless island of Saint John, and in 1733 it bought the larger island of Saint Croix from the French. The small Danish empire in the Caribbean was thus complete. Until 1755 the three islands remained the private property of the company, but after its bankruptcy the same year they officially became Danish state property under a royally appointed governor-general and with a permanent military garrison.
The economy of the islands was based on the production of cane sugar. The hard work on the plantations was done by a large number of black slaves imported from West Africa under the close surveillance of white managers and planters. It was a labour-intensive process and the slave population soon surpassed the number of whites several times over. In 1754 the proportion of whites to blacks was one to eight, and during the economic boom of the late eighteenth century the black population increased further. The white population formed a small elite that generally led a comfortable life as colonial masters.
In good years – that is, years without devastating hurricanes and with adequate rainfall – the plantations produced a considerable surplus of raw sugar that was shipped back to Denmark for refining. In the late eighteenth century this traffic brought so much wealth to the motherland that the merchant Niels Ryberg in a letter to the king found it appropriate to describe the three islands as ‘the finest jewel in Your Majesty’s crown.’
However, as the new century dawned the sun was already setting on this adventure – for several reasons. First, the general ban on the import of black slaves in 1803 gave rise to a general scarcity of labour which caused wages to rise. Second, the war with Britain (1807–14) dramatically reduced Danish shipping capacity, causing a steep rise in freight rates. Finally, the introduction of beet sugar into the European market meant that cane sugar was no longer competitive.
In the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, the formerly busy sugar mills in the islands went into slow decay and the population decreased, while the Danish state’s expenses were steadily increasing. In short, the basis for maintaining the Danish tropical colonies no longer existed. Against this background Denmark started negotiations about a sale of the islands and, after a complicated diplomatic process and a referendum in Denmark, the three small islands were, by a military ceremony on 31 March 1917, handed over to the United States for a sum of US$25 million.
The Danish presence in the three islands in the Caribbean did indeed stretch over more than two centuries, but today the remnants of the Danish activities are visible only to very keen observers: a few houses in Danish architectural styles and a few place-names. That the Danish era actually left so few traces is mainly due to the fact that the Danish settler population never became particularly numerous. As already mentioned, the black population dominated in numbers from the very beginning, and even the smaller white community had a strong cosmopolitan character. The languages commonly spoken in this community were English and Dutch, seldom Danish. Only the military garrison and the officers in the civil administration were as a rule Danish, and they did not usually stay for long. The Danes who chose to remain in the islands after the transfer of the colonies to the United States rapidly became assimilated into the majority population and became an integrated part of the new American culture. Conversely, a small number of liberated slaves chose to move to Denmark, where, at first, they formed a small but very visible group in the native white population. After a few generations, however, this group, too, became a fully integrated part of the Danish population.
The colonial enterprise of the Scandinavian countries remained, from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its end in the twentieth century, a marginal phenomenon in the sense that – compared with the great colonial powers – their overseas activities took place over a much shorter span of years and never resulted in making a permanent political or cultural imprint in the affected areas. It was, at the same time, a niche phenomenon in the sense that the Scandinavians had only the freedom of action that the great powers allowed them. Their initiatives succeeded only when the leading nations were restricted in their own activities by wars against each other. Significantly enough, the Scandinavian countries achieved their greatest overseas successes in the late seventeenth century, when Britain and the Netherlands were at war, and in the late eighteenth century, when Britain and France fought each other all over the world. When, in 1815, more peaceful conditions were re-established, they spelled doom for the colonial adventures of Scandinavia.
But, however much of a sideshow, the overseas experience of the Scandinavian countries has nevertheless added an exotic flavour to their long history – a history that might otherwise seem rather bound to the temperate North and the narrow Baltic region. Thus, the history of the Scandinavian overseas enterprise may be a reminder that Scandinavia, like all other places on the globe, has always been an integrated part of the greater world and heavily dependent on it – for good and for evil.