Postcolonial Denmark: Beyond the Rot of Colonialism?

Abstract

Denmark is often omitted from accounts of former European overseas empires, a fate it shares with other European empires, not least the lesser powers, whether in terms of geographical scale or temporal extension, such as the German, the Italian and the Belgian. One typical example of the tendency to omission is Anthony Pagden's otherwise insightful article, 'Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe's Overseas Empires'. 1 While Pagden's title suggests a survey article of all the European empires, in the end it settles for mentioning only a few, discussing some aspects of the French, but inevitably, like the vast majority of other approaches in English dedicated to Europe's overseas empires, only dealing emphatically with the British. The British was, of course, the most extensive empire by far during the second modernity. 2 The problem lies in the implicit claim to cover the collective European imperial history through the British experience alone. This claim represents not merely an oversight, it quickly becomes an enormously problematic generalisation. Not only did the size and extension of the British empire set it apart from other European empires. The 'culture of empire' produced by its 'contact zones' 3 also differed from those of the other European nation-empires. The warning about misreading the British imperial history as representative of all imperial experience needs to be equally heeded when looking at other imperial contexts. Here, however, the warning relates to the singularity of national imperial experiences, which can become trapped by narratives of singularity. The actuality of this narrow trap is clear from the many national imperial histories producing their imperial experience as governed by an always

De-colonialism

“…This included the crownbacked inception of trading companies holding monopolies (Jensen 2008a), attempting to mimic the success of predecessors like the respective Dutch and English East India companies (Bregnsbo 2017b;Mentz 2017a). Throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, the Danish Kingdom managed to establish itself as a colonial power by acquiring possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, and on the coast of West Africa (Jensen 2015). Simultaneously, colonial logics and practices quickly came to bear in the relationship to Denmark-Norway's older North Atlantic possessions, as will be explained in more detail later.…”

“…However, this perception and self-image are mostly the result of historical developments taking place in the second half of the twentieth century, and they tend to obscure Danish history as a regional and global imperial power. As Lars Jensen (2015Jensen ( , 2018Jensen ( , 2019 and others (Burnett and Höglund 2019;Maurer et al 2010) have argued, Danish Colonialism remains understudied and underdiscussed, primarily with respect to challenging exceptionalist narratives about Denmark as a "benevolent" colonial power (Jensen 2018) by situating Danish colonialism within the global histories of European expansion, genocide, and racist subjugation. Further, discussions of Danish colonial history still too often shy away from critically dissecting this colonial pastin order to better understand its bearings on the presentwith the lenses and tools that scholarly fields like Postcolonial Studies, Decolonial Studies, or Whiteness Studies offer by diminishing their relevance for the Danish context or simply ignoring the insights they have produced.…”

“…In attempting to do so, it includes Denmark's colonial entanglements in the North Atlantic (Greenland, Iceland, Sapmi Lands and the Faroe Islands). Danish historiography has often treated Danish involvement in the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans (through its colonial possessions in Western Africa and the Caribbean), and the Danish involvement in the European colonization of Asia as "proper" colonialism, but looked at the relationship between Denmark and its possessions in the North Atlantic as being of a very different nature, if not noncolonial altogether (Jensen 2015). While it is true that there were important differences between the ways in which these domains related to the Danish metropole politically, economically, and culturally (Loftsdóttir 2019a), they were all part of the same imperial formation for several centuries and were in various ways tied into colonial relationships with the Danish mainland.…”

An alternative world: a perspective from the North on racism and migration

“…These processes involved the history of colonialism, which the Nordic countries in general have been seen as exempted from, in spite of participating in different ways in its brutality and dehumanisation, as scholars have carefully mapped. Denmark had, for example, colonies in the Caribbean and participated in the slave trade 25 and while Iceland lacked formal colonies (as it was under Danish rule until 1944), it participated in settler colonialism and the production of racist discourses. 26 Nordic actors benefited from imperialism in multiple ways, such as the Norwegian entrepreneurs in South Africa that were involved in international shipping.…”

Greenland and the Faroe Islands: Denmark’s autonomous territories from postcolonial perspectives

“…Spivak (L. Jensen 2016a, 50). Rather, our research for this article benefited from earlier work by Lars Jensen on postcolonialism in the Arctic (L. Jensen 2015;2016a;2016b;. This article is intended to make an modest contribution to the broad area of Arctic studies in particular, as well as to Scandinavian and postcolonial studies in general.…”