Slavery as legacy - tracing linage, heirs and fortunes rom British Guyana to Sweden in the long nineteenth-century

At the forefront of this project is the issue of the legacy of slavery, and how it can be explored across established historiographies of separate empires, and states.

Doing so I will draw on the case of the Swede Jonas Filéen who, when he died in Demerara, British Guyana) in 1822, left behind three plantations and more than 900 enslaved workers. The total value of his estate was roughly £300,000.

News of the huge fortune spellbound the Swedish public, it was fictionalized by Jonas Love Almqvist, one of Sweden’s most prominent authors, and evoked fantasies of other lost fortunes.

Meanwhile, as the legacy reached Sweden after a long and complicated negotiation spearheaded by members of the Swedish government, part of it was donated to different public institutions.

The purpose of this project is to situate Filéen’s legacy in the different contexts in which it was amassed, transferred, negotiated, distributed, debated, and fictionalized.

In doing so the project aims to open up new ways to think about the legacy of slavery in Sweden as part of a broader Atlantic history.

Working in an interdisciplinary manner the results from the project will generate multiple examples of how this happened which can complement and problematize existing histories.