This project aims to write the first global intellectual history of Denmark as a colonial state. Between the introduction of absolutism (1660) and its replacement by constitutional monarchy (1849), the Kingdom of Denmark established itself as a medium-sized colonial power with a global reach, from India to the West Indies, and from West Africa to the Arctic.
The project focuses on the years 1784-1807, a period unique in the colonial history of Denmark, and arguably much of the rest of the world. Not subject to revolutions itself, the Danish state took the opportunities offered by the revolutionary upheavals and resulting wars to attempt to reposition itself in the new global political, commercial, and intellectual order. This meant reconceptualising and reconstructing the Danish colonial state in global contexts, informed by new ideas of state, government, and economics.
This project undertakes the first systematic study of Danish colonialism in all its global locations: India, Africa, the Caribbean, and Greenland. It adopts a novel method drawing on global intellectual history and history of knowledge to analyse a series of reforms in Denmark and of colonial policies in the decades following the palace coup of 1784. It is first time that the reforms and colonial schemes across the Danish empire in the decades following 1780, as well as the public discussions of these, are systematically analysed, and as a whole.
Related publications and presentations
12.06.2024 “Human Rights, African Slavery, and Danish Colonialism”. Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond, Department of History, Lund University. A summary of the workshop can be read here.
05.04.2024 “Ownership of Bodies or Mastery Over Actions? Natural Law and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Denmark”. Body politic(s) – The body in early modern political thought, Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University.
“Danish Guinea – The Colony that Never Was?”, in European Colonial Failures, c. 1560-1800: Early Modern Polities, Overseas Interests, and Empire Building (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).
