Gunlög Fur

Colonialism and Swedish History: Unthinkable Connections?

Historian Nils Ahnlund stirred a debate in 1937 by suggesting that Sweden was a weak and deficient coloniser. This outraged his listeners, who viewed seventeenth-century Sweden as a powerful nation. Such fault lines continue to suffuse characterisations of Sweden’s participation in global expansion. Suggesting that Sweden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a colonising power is controversial, but less so today than previously. Recently renewed interest in Sweden’s colonial past and present raises questions of scope and meaning. How have historians interpreted Swedish expansion, what is included, and what is the meaning of the re-evaluation occurring in contemporary scholarship? While often relating Sweden to a Nordic or European context, it remains common to insist on Swedish exceptionalism in terms of colonial experiences and elect not to discuss expansion into the north of the Scandinavian Peninsula or in the Baltic region in terms of colonialism. In general, postcolonial influences have tended to move the discussion from “no colonialism” to “post-colonialism” without ever stopping at a discussion of early modern Swedish involvement in colonial expansion and its consequences. This chapter investigates how Swedish colonial expansion has been dealt with in historical scholarship, but also discusses what historical and contemporary debates reveal about Sweden’s relationship to European modernity.

Colonial fantasies – American Indians, indigenous peoples, and a Swedish discourse of innocence

This article examines representations of American Indians in a Swedish family magazine from the 1860s/1870s, tying these ‘Indian stories’ to perceptions carried by emigrants to the Americas. It argues that these representations conveyed a certain notion of the colonial process that allowed Swedes to both participate in and disavow the more unsavoury aspects of what the magazine called ‘race wars’. An emerging discourse of innocence connected popular images with debates about emigration and scholarship in racial biology, which allowed both Swedes and Swedish-Americans to view themselves as modern and unconnected to the burdens of a colonial past.

Reading Margins: Colonial Encounters in Sápmi and Lenapehoking in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Reading Margins: Colonial Encounters in Sapmi and Lenapehoking in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries