Slavery, Abolition and Archipelagic Connections in the Swedish Caribbean

Surveys and datasets of the trans-Atlantic slave trade do not include Swedish slave trade and colonial history.

Yet, when Sweden acquired the Antillean island Saint Barthélemy in 1784 it became a slaving nation that traded and smuggled captive Africans and punished the enslaved population using draconic slave laws until the abolition of Swedish slavery in 1847. The project is the first investigation of new sources and it situates Swedish colonialism in the Caribbean archipelago.

By shifting the emphasis of the previous historiography from the European colonizers to building knowledge on the enslaved and free Afro-Caribbean majority population the project shows how the Swedish Caribbean society only can be understood in a larger setting where single-nation historical narratives have little explanatory power.

Five subprojects creates new knowledge that will build a critical mass of data on hitherto unstudied facets of Swedish Caribbean history: slave law and justice, slave trade, abolition of slavery, colonial demography, and colonial governance.

The project uses the Swedish governmental colonial archive held in France that for the first time has been made accessible in the PI’s preceding project.

By scholarly publications and the creation of datasets covering legislation, biographies of the majority Black population, slave trade data etc. – and publishing them online in both project-owned databases and by contributing to major international datasets – it develops new methods within digital Caribbean and colonial history.

The Caribbean intergovernmental organization CARICOM has included Sweden in its claims for reparations for “genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid” and the project builds a firm basis to evaluate Swedish participation in Caribbean slavery and colonialism.