CoDaCo · Constructing the Danish Colonial State in Global Contexts

Constructing the Danish Colonial State in Global Contexts

Scandinavian countries are often neglected in the history of colonialism and globalisation, and colonialism and globalisation in turn written out of these countries’ earlier history. Countries such as Denmark are often perceived as homogenous, confronting the global world only relatively recently. So, histories of Denmark are often written as national histories, with histories of colonialism added as addenda or supplementary topics. This has had important consequences for conceptions of our societies’ place in the world, how they got there, and for notions of national and civil belonging. While this picture is slowly changing, the history of Danish colonialism is still often seen as piecemeal, haphazard, and with little significance for Danish state building or intellectual history. Furthermore, in contrast to recent scholarship on the colonial and global history of other countries such as Britain, Spain, and France, Danish colonial history has largely been written from primarily economic administrative, and social perspectives with no regard for intellectual history. Conversely, Danish intellectual history has also had a predominantly domestic focus, with little regard for how colonialism shaped Danish intellectual history. Against this background, CoDaCo has aimed to write a first intellectual history of Danish colonialism. To do so, it has focused on a series of colonial reform plans (failed and successful) between 1784 and 1807: plantation colonies in West Africa, the abolition of the Danish slave trade, the colonisation of the Nicobar Islands, and reforms of the Greenland trade. Through in-depth analysis of contemporary published and archival sources for these colonial reforms, CoDaCo addressed three specific objectives: first, to describe the networks and locations in and through which knowledge of the Danish state and its colonies were formulated and circulated; second, to identify and analyse the political discourses and key concepts which motivated and informed the colonial reform projects; third, to explain how this knowledge and these discourses informed the conceptualisation and construction of Denmark as a colonial state.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union