Cutting colonial losses: imperial ideology in media coverage of the 1878 transfer of Saint Barthélemy in Sweden and France

ABSTRACT

During the last several decades, important new research has been published on the Swedish Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy, but this has almost exclusively focused on its early years, during the early modern period. By the time it was returned to France in 1878, its heyday was long past. Nevertheless, this article argues that press coverage of the island’s transfer to France in the 1870s provides a useful window into colonial mentalities during an era that constituted the apex of global imperialism, even as it marked the end of Sweden’s small tropical empire. What did Swedes think about imperialism in the 1870s, and how was Sweden’s role as a colonial power viewed from abroad? Investigating a representative sample of Swedish and French newspapers, this article argues that while the peaceful transfer of Sweden’s last formal colony during the high age of empire could be described as exceptional, this did not reflect exceptional humanitarian or anti-imperial attitudes in Sweden. Rather, Swedes subscribed to the contemporaneous European logic of successful colonialism as a source of national pride, but were eager to divest themselves of Saint Barthélemy since the island’s poverty was understood as a national humiliation within this same colonial discursive framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Saint Barthélemy
• popular imperialism
• Nordic colonialism

Introduction

In the midst of what Eric Hobsbawm has labelled the ‘Age of Empire’, which saw an unprecedented expansion of European colonial rule across the globe, Sweden freely gave up its only remaining formal colony, the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, in 1878.¹ After several failed attempts at selling it earlier in the century,² the small island was returned to France, from which it had been acquired in 1784. Besides coming at an unusual point in time, for a European country to give up its imperial pretentions by selling or giving away territory to another empire is also highly atypical. Only Denmark had a similar trajectory, selling its African and South Asian possessions to Britain and trying for much of the nineteenth century to sell the Danish West Indies (the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands) to the United States.³ This contrasts with the colonial wars that marked decolonization in the French and Dutch Empires, the defeat in a world war that brought the German and Japanese colonial empires to a sudden end, or the combination of anticolonial resistance and Britain’s desire to avoid financial and moral responsibility for its far-flung colonies that prompted British decolonization. Unless we count Iceland, whose independence took place under exceptional circumstances during World War II, neither Sweden nor Denmark ever granted their colonial territories independence. Either these were sold to other empires or else, in the case of Sápmi, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, they continue to be a part of Sweden and Denmark. What were the public reactions to Sweden’s unconventional move in 1878? What can the end of empire in Sweden tell us about Swedish attitudes towards European colonial expansion at its zenith?

Although it is well-known that Sweden sold Saint Barthélemy after deeming the island unprofitable, the topic has not been explored in detail. Saint Barthélemy’s early modern history has been considered its main historical interest, whether its role as a trading base during the Napoleonic and other European wars or the history of slavery on the island (abolished 1847). The last decades of Swedish rule are generally seen as a denouement.⁴ Of two texts that I have found that treat the return of Saint Barthélemy to France, neither satisfactorily explores its wider implications for the relationship between Sweden and European colonial ideology. A 2008 article by Hélène Servant in the Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe only makes use of French sources and focuses on the administrative and budgetary challenges of incorporating the island into the French administration of Guadeloupe after 1878.⁵ Georges Bourdin’s bilingual Histoire de St. Barthélemy from 1978 describes the return of the island in some detail, but focuses on high politics and diplomatic history, and contains certain factual errors and omissions.⁶ Most significantly for the purposes of this article, Bourdin erroneously states that Hugo Nisbeth, who was sent by the Swedish government on a fact-finding mission to Saint Barthélemy, only sent his conclusions to Swedish officials.⁷ As will be shown below, Nisbeth published often highly critical reports from his trip to Saint Barthélemy in the leading Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, triggering an intense public debate. The most substantial historical account of Saint Barthélemy’s return to France therefore completely ignores the publicity and discussion in the Swedish press that his letters in Aftonbladet engendered.

In focusing on media coverage of Saint Barthélemy, this study contributes to the sub-field of colonial history known as popular imperialism, which seeks to gauge the level of public knowledge of and support for imperialism in various colonial powers.⁸ In the context of Britain, historians like John M. MacKenzie and Bernard Porter have debated whether ‘ordinary’ Britons were aware of and supportive of the empire, or whether imperialism was exclusively the domain of political and commercial elites.⁹ This has clear implications for responsibility and claims for restitution, which has become a pressing issue in recent years as movements like Rhodes Must Fall have made colonial history increasingly visible and politicized in former colonial powers.¹⁰ MacKenzie argues that British popular culture was saturated with colonial imagery in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and other scholars have come to similar conclusions for France and other colonial metropoles, although public interest and attention seem to have waxed and waned in response to various crises.¹¹ The news media alone cannot definitively answer the question of historical public attitudes towards empire, but provide perhaps the best available indication of these. At the very least, they show what information was publicly available about imperial matters and in what terms these were discussed (or ignored). The work of MacKenzie and likeminded historians corresponds to a large extent with research that has shown that colonialism was perceived as a key source of national pride in countries around the world from at least the 1870s.¹² Countries were frequently evaluated based on their ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in colonial endeavours (often measured in economic terms). Occasionally, they were even classified in a hierarchy at which Britain typically was pre-eminent.¹³ In such an international environment, Sweden’s willing abandonment of Saint Barthélemy is noteworthy. In the absence of an extensive formal empire of their own, it is difficult to measure what late-nineteenth-century Swedes thought about imperialism in general, and the topic has received little scholarly attention.¹⁴

This article contends that the sale of Saint Barthélemy provides a useful, unusual window into nineteenth-century public opinion about Sweden as a colonial power, both in Sweden and abroad. How did Swedes understand the sale of Saint Barthélemy at the time? Was the transfer of Saint Barthélemy to France seen as a sigh of national weakness or shame at a time when the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ internationally was increasingly perceived as a key marker of national greatness? What attitudes towards France and Sweden as colonial powers did French press coverage of the transfer reflect? I will examine coverage of these events in both Swedish and French newspapers an attempt to shed light on these questions. In so doing, I will investigate the extent to which Sweden was influenced by the jingoistic colonial discourses that were becoming increasingly salient in much of the rest of Europe.¹⁵ This will help me to answer a larger and more important historiographical question: does the 1878 sale of Saint Barthélemy reflect ‘exceptional’ Swedish attitudes towards colonialism? In the conclusion, I will relate my findings to recent research on other aspects of Sweden’s relationship to modern colonialism.

Selection of historical newspapers and search methods

For this study, I have made use of keyword searches for relevant articles in digital historical newspaper databases, but this first required a selection of newspapers. Even for Swedish newspapers, which have a collective search engine through the Swedish Royal Library (tidningar.kb.se), a selection was necessary as there were 2,685 hits for the search ‘Barthélemy OR Barthelemy’ between 1 January 1876 and 31 December 1880 (the presence or absence of the accent on the ‘e’ dramatically affected the search results when taken separately). Based on the reference work Den svenska pressens historia, the most important daily newspapers in Stockholm in the 1870s, representing a wide spectrum of political leanings, were Aftonbladet (liberal), Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (the official organ of the Swedish state), Nya Dagligt Allehanda (conservative), Stockholms Dagblad (centrist) and Dagens Nyheter (aimed at a lower middle-class readership). In Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, and one with important historical maritime connections to, among other places, Saint Barthélemy, the more established Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning (in the opinion of the of media historian Eric Johannesson, Sweden’s nationally second most-important newspaper) competed with the newer and more popularly-oriented Göteborgs-Posten.¹⁶ As these seven papers still produced over 600 results, Stockholms Dagblad, Dagens Nyheter and Göteborgs-Posten were excluded from the sample, still leaving four of the country’s largest and most influential newspapers, and ones which represented a broad political spectrum. An even cursory view of the initial search results reveals that smaller local newspapers frequently reprinted articles from other newspapers, making this sample more widely relevant to the information spread throughout Sweden, even if these lesser newspapers also seem to have published less on Saint Barthélemy.

As a far more populous country, France naturally had a much vaster press, with a large number of daily newspapers competing in the increasingly free and unregulated environment of the Third Republic after 1871. It is harder than in the Swedish case to isolate an obvious cluster of leading newspapers, but based on a guide created by the Bibliothèque nationale de la France (BNF) and its digital subsidiary Gallica, I have chosen the following large French dailies representing different political positions: Le Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires (conservative), Le Petit journal (popular, sensationalist) and Le Temps (liberal, ‘unofficial organ of French diplomacy’).¹⁷ I have supplemented these with two French colonial Caribbean newspapers, L’Écho de la Guadeloupe: Journal des intérêts coloniaux and Les Antilles (Martinique), which were likely more interested in news about Saint Barthélemy than their mainland counterparts. Though the BNF catalogues hundreds of historical Caribbean newspapers, their coverage in Gallica is highly incomplete during the period under study.¹⁸ L’Écho de la Guadeloupe was the only newspaper available for the entire period 1876–1880, but numerous issues were missing from the online archive, especially during 1878 and 1879. I therefore have supplemented this newspaper with Les Antilles from Martinique, which is only available in Gallica between 1876 and 1879, but which has more digitized issues for those years. This last newspaper frequently reprinted articles from L’Écho de la Guadeloupe, helping to fill gaps in the archive. The two Caribbean newspapers are less representative of French public discourse and chosen in large part for reasons of availability, but still provide useful information that supplements the more representative sample of the three major hexagonal newspapers.

‘The Wretched Colony’¹⁹: the sale of Saint Barthélemy in the Swedish Press

Widespread pessimism about Saint Barthélemy’s future

‘Everyone who has lately heard the island of Saint Barthélemy mentioned is certainly also familiar with the extreme poverty there which only the motherland can help alleviate’.²⁰ This citation, taken from a public appeal signed by a number of Swedish socialites and Edla Ulrich, sister to the island’s governor Bror Ulrich, seems to capture the prevailing mood surrounding Sweden’s colony in the 1870s. Though the possession was distant and small, with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants, its destitution was frequently discussed in the Swedish press and no attempt seems to have been made to hide its problems. The island lacked a natural source of fresh water needed for agriculture, and its economy was dependent on the popularity of its free port, Gustavia, during European wars that had made Sweden’s neutrality useful and lucrative. By the 1870s, such wars were long a thing of the past, and the island had become reliant on direct subsidies from Sweden. Nevertheless, its small population suffered from penury.

Frustrated by the inaction of the Swedish Parliament, leading women, and some men, from Sweden’s high society took it upon themselves to engage in private fundraising for an orphanage. In 1876, they wrote appeals in major newspapers, including the one cited above, and held a ‘bazar’ or rummage sale that succeeded in raising 14,250 kronor.²¹ The royal family made a large donation from their private funds.²² Even Gauthier’s Zoological Menagerie advertised that it would donate one day’s profits to ‘the needy on the island of St. Barthélemy’.²³ Clearly this reflected a sense of collective responsibility for the Swedish island’s destitution, described in yet another appeal as ‘the, in the eyes of many, motherland’s moral connection, [and obligation] to offer an outstretched hand to the little colony that is so dependent on it’.²⁴ Using one of his royal prerogatives, the King also initiated a national collection (rikskollekt) in the Church of Sweden to support the orphanage,²⁵ spreading the news of Saint Barthélemy’s destitution to nearly all churchgoing Swedes.

Far from trying to paint a rosy, nationalistic picture of this distant outpost, the Swedish press did not mince words in describing the poverty and overall ‘wretchedness’ of Saint Barthélemy. In 1876, Saint Barthélemy’s ‘heart-wrenching wretchedness’ was reported in Aftonbladet, and even the official Post- och Inrikes Tidningar referred openly to the island’s ‘current deep deterioration’.²⁶ After a devastating hurricane swept over the island, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning wrote that ‘the poor, already starved inhabitants have been deprived of the few debris of what was left’.²⁷ Governor Ulrich’s official report, which was not much more optimistic in tone, was printed in Post- och Inrikes Tidningar and reprinted in many other newspapers.²⁸ Even the inability of the Swedish government to recruit a doctor to work on Saint Barthélemy reflected the island’s miserable situation. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar was obliged to announce, again and again, the vacancy, and report, again and again, that there were no applicants.²⁹ ‘The colony will consequently lack all form of medical treatment within a few months’, lamented Nya Dagligt Allehanda in 1876, and Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning similarly wrote the following year that ‘The poor island can’t get a doctor’.³⁰ Things were in fact so bad that Saint Barthélemy became a kind of slang for a failed geopolitical experiment. A writer in Aftonbladet could complain in 1876 that Härjedalen, in the face of neglected infrastructure and communications, ‘is a kind of Barthélemy within our own borders, but a Barthélemy that could gain an importance and a value a hundredfold as large as the little island in the West Indies’.³¹ In 1880, after the island’s return to France, an advocate of improving the defences of Gotland warned that that island could become ‘another St. Barthélemy if it isn’t defended’.³²

According to the same socialites that worked to fundraise for the orphanage, a number of schemes for raising the island out of poverty had in previous years been presented in Stockholm’s newspapers, but ‘these hopes have nevertheless been dashed’.³³ One such scheme that was proposed in 1876, sending ‘several poor female weavers from Marks Härad’ to teach the population a useful trade, seems to have come to nothing, notwithstanding its clearly unambitious scale.³⁴ Many Swedes were frustrated at the endless planning that never led to any changes; something drastic needed to be done about Saint Barthélemy, but what this was could apparently not be agreed upon. Doubtless prompted to take action by this dire situation, the Finance Department, which was responsible for Saint Barthélemy, hired notable newspaperman Hugo Nisbeth to travel to the island on a fact-finding mission and propose solutions to what was becoming an increasingly embarrassing colonial fiasco.³⁵

Hugo Nisbeth’s fact-finding mission

Hugo Nisbeth (1837–1887), who is today best known for his feud with August Strindberg after the latter’s publication of a satirical caricature of Nisbeth in Det Nya Riket (1882), was for many years an important figure in the Swedish press, both as a writer and publisher. He had previously travelled extensively in the United States, authoring Två år i Amerika: En reseskildring (1874).³⁶ At the time he was appointed to his new mission, he was already serving as a special correspondent for Aftonbladet, covering the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia (1876). Despite his new semi-official capacity, Nisbeth continued to send long accounts of his travels to Aftonbladet during his entire time in Saint Barthélemy, presenting conditions on the island in a dramatic, journalistic way often marked by excoriating criticism.

Prior to his arrival, Nisbeth was clearly tickled by his assignment, and expressed unbridled patriotic excitement at getting to visit Sweden’s famed lone colony, even as he showed a clear awareness of its bad reputation:

… we will not stop until our scouting eyes can rest upon a tiny island, small in area and significance, but which nevertheless lies close to our hearts. Why? Oh, that question is easy to answer; if only you would be so good as to hold up the telescope to your eye, you will find the answer at the top of a long pole. For it is flapping there – the Swedish flag. And here, on Barthélemy, we will rest a while before observing the island, in order to help, if we together can do so in any way, and if not, in order to weep with the afflicted.³⁷

Reporting from the boat to the island, ‘a little, little, piece of Swedish territory’ in the west Atlantic, Nisbeth marvelled at the broad spectrum of skin tones among the passengers, and the fact that they were 'compatriots' [landsmän].³⁸ Nisbeth’s enthusiasm was dispelled not long after he set foot on the island, however.

‘Poor Gustavia, your glory days are over!’ lamented Nisbeth upon learning that the island, which had once had a jeweller and a newspaper, now did not even have a blacksmith.³⁹ Employing American journalistic techniques for which he was a pioneer in Sweden,⁴⁰ Nisbeth interviewed Governor Ulrich several weeks into his stay. Ulrich did not seek to contest the obvious decline of the island, but rather expressed his frustration that none of the enormous sums that Saint Barthélemy had contributed to the metropole in its heyday had been put in a trust to ensure the island’s future welfare. Though the colony had required an annual subsidy for some time, Swedish politicians were wrong to complain, he felt, since over the course of its entire history Saint Barthélemy had contributed more than it had cost. For his part, Nisbeth argued that one should not dwell too much on history, but rather on the current conditions of the island, since ‘the reasons for the previous prosperity will never return’.⁴¹ In the absence of more European wars that would make a neutral trading port attractive, Saint Barthélemy could never hope to match its earlier significance.

After several weeks on the island, Nisbeth’s long reports suddenly shifted in tone from elegiac to bitterly ironic. Nisbeth decided at this point that the island’s problems were not principally the result of natural disasters or changing trade patterns, but of spectacular local mismanagement. Employing his sharp wit to the fullest, Nisbeth decried the ridiculously large bureaucratic apparatus boasted by this tiny island with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants:

St. Barthélemy is governed with much pomp and circumstance! There is a government council, there is a finance council, there is a judicial bureau, a council notary bureau, a notary public bureau, a government secretary bureau, a ship appraisal bureau [skeppsmätarexpedition], a customs office, a fortification officer bureau and possibly still something more, which in my haste I cannot remember. There are thus enough bodies to govern several hundred thousand well-born people with, and whatever the inhabitants of Barthélemy complain about, they shouldn’t reasonably be able to be able to complain over lacking ‘government’.⁴²

Not only is this absurdly excessive bureaucracy silly, for Nisbeth it is profoundly wasteful and represents a significant burden on local residents. The many administrative positions, he argues, are effectively sinecures, while other crucial investments, like health care, are extremely underfunded.⁴³ In fact, Nisbeth had exaggerated the facts of the Swedish administration: in reality, by the 1870s, many of the administrative posts he mentions were either defunct or held concurrently by the same individuals.⁴⁴ Somewhat belatedly, after his first critical articles had been published, Nisbeth lamely writes that it is not the current governor’s fault, but in mentioning Ulrich’s ‘frequently recurring bouts of sickness’, he strongly calls the governor’s leadership into question. At the same time, Nisbeth states unambiguously that Saint Barthélemy’s woes are not the fault of the Swedish king or parliament, but rather the local administration. In fact, rejecting Ulrich’s argument about the failure of the Swedish state to create a kind of rainy-day fund for Saint Barthélemy during its heyday, Nisbeth bluntly argues that Sweden owes the colony nothing.⁴⁵

His harshest criticism is reserved for the Gustav III Battery, Gustavia’s ancient and crumbling defences. For Nisbeth, the manning of the fortification, with its pathetic, rusty cannons, is a ludicrous charade. The battery supposedly defends a port that few ships ever visit, while there are ample other locations around the island where hostile troops could be landed. In the unlikely event of war, this expensive military farce ‘would neither contribute to saving our martial honour nor to saving the island’.⁴⁶ Instead, as the Dutch in neighbouring Sint Maarten had done some time ago, the defences should be scrapped in order to save money and avoid making Sweden a laughingstock. Only half-jokingly, Nisbeth argued that in the unlikely event that Sweden went to war with another Caribbean colonial power, ‘it would be, regarding the so-called Barthélemy Question, the best that could happen to the island, to be conquered in this way and for Sweden in this way to get rid of it’.⁴⁷

By his last article, written in October 1876, but published in Aftonbladet on 22 January 1877, Nisbeth had started to take the idea of getting rid of Saint Barthélemy more seriously. Once it had stopped being profitable after the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden ought to have returned the island to France, he argued. This would not have resulted in any national shame, ‘since when a, from a political perspective, less significant country “goes colonial”, especially in parts of the world where it has no [strategic] interests to preserve, it should be in order to draw a monetary benefit’. France, with its other outposts in the Caribbean and far different geostrategic interests, could better justify paying for an unprofitable colony. Moreover, the island’s inhabitants were not so loyal to Sweden as many commentators pretended, holding a personal loyalty to the Swedish king, but being more culturally connected to France. Nisbeth did not believe that such a cession of territory was likely, however, and conducted an investigation of potential ways the colony could be made self-sufficient again, concluding in a report to the Finance Ministry that tobacco plantations would be Saint Barthélemy’s best hope.⁴⁸

Nisbeth’s writings seem to have been decisive for the fate of Saint Barthélemy. As an editorial in Aftonbladet argued on 21 March 1877, Nisbeth’s article series had once again put Saint Barthélemy on the public agenda. Nisbeth’s findings were reprinted or summarized in newspapers across Sweden, and despite his harsh, unofficial tone, his mission was universally praised. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning reprinted most of Nisbeth’s articles from Aftonbladet, and lauded Nisbeth for exposing ‘misrule … of the most deplorable kind’. Enraged by this new information, the paper called for the entire colonial administration to be fired:

The charade with the fortification and the garrison, which are making a laughingstock of the Swedish flag, must cease … . the state-run office of governor must be abolished and the governor replaced by a practical man, preferably a fair and capable businessman or agriculturalist … ⁴⁹

A long discussion was also conducted in Aftonbladet, whose editors took up the return of Saint Barthélemy to France as one of two serious solutions to the ‘Barthélemy Question’, the other being agriculture, primarily tobacco as Nisbeth had argued.⁵⁰ Agreeing with Nisbeth, the editorial argued that as Sweden had no other interests in the Caribbean, it could give away the island ‘without shame’, so long as it made arrangements for the future well-being of its present inhabitants.⁵¹

Opening a fascinating window into Swedish views of other colonial powers, the author or authors conducted a detailed run-through of which other countries would be best suited to taking ownership of Saint Barthélemy. Given that the population was overwhelmingly comprised of French-speaking Catholics, as well as the proximity of France’s colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the Aftonbladet editorial believed that returning the island to France was the logical first choice. The United States, Britain and Russia were also good second- and third choices. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Denmark, on the other hand, were considered too minor players to do a better job with the island than Sweden had. Most notably, the article vehemently argued against turning over Saint Barthélemy to Germany. Although the author or authors did not doubt that Germany would make good use of the island’s resources, they feared that German rule would be terrible for the island’s culturally French population, for whom Germans doubtless would have little love. Such a wanton act would be ‘unchivalrous’.⁵² Dreaming that Sweden would be able to choose among a crowded field of interested buyers may have allowed the author or authors of the editorial to rescue some degree of national pride, but at the time of writing, in March 1877, this was still merely a fantasy. Indeed, the second part of the article, printed a week later, discussed what was considered the more likely option of continued Swedish rule.⁵³ These media prognoses notwithstanding, it seems likely that Nisbeth’s articles hastened diplomatic action behind the scenes to at long last negotiate the abandonment of the island to another power, even though this would not come to public attention until the fall.

Disappointment and national honour

The Swedish government was, with good reason, apparently concerned that its efforts to get rid of Saint Barthélemy might be in vain, and so refrained from publicizing its intentions. This secrecy was to lead to a great deal of confusion in the Swedish and, as we will see later, French press, but did not stop the story from breaking. In early August 1877, Nya Dagligt Allehanda reported a scoop from Göteborgs-Posten that the Swedish government had ‘for some time’ been engaged in negotiations with France regarding the transfer of ownership of Saint Barthélemy. It added, however, that attempts to sell the colony in previous decades, including to the United States, had been in vain, despite the ‘moderate’ conditions suggested by Sweden.⁵⁴

Several weeks later, an incredibly bitter article about the decision appeared in Nya Dagligt Allehanda, apparently from the paper’s editors. Echoing Governor Ulrich’s opinion, the editorial argued that overall, the island had contributed more than it had cost. Even in recent years, the metropolitan subsidy for the island’s upkeep was really not such a large price to pay, it argued, believing the government was just using the financial situation as an excuse to get out of colonial politics. Saint Barthélemy should not have to suffer for decades of Swedish neglect: ‘It can be assumed that if Sweden had earlier acquired and succeeded in retaining colonies, their administration would not have turned out worse for us than for most other colonial powers’.⁵⁵ However, Sweden had instead chosen an inward-looking, short-term politics that had no patience for long-term investments. Saint Barthélemy, the article predicted sullenly, would be Sweden’s last colony – it had missed its chance for prominence on the world stage. The poor state in which Sweden left the colony after decades of misrule was, in the author or authors’ opinion, a national ‘humiliation’, only somewhat mitigated by the fact that at least the country now had chosen to return it to France, and not another power that would not take as good care of it. ‘It is unquestionably bad … that we, after many vain attempts to be rid of the island, now give it over like a rundown poorhouse’.⁵⁶ The day after this diatribe was printed, Nya Dagligt Allehanda sheepishly issued a correction: the decision to return Saint Barthélemy to France had not in fact been concluded, and the population had not yet been polled on their wishes.

Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning was less hasty, reporting several weeks later that no decision had been made, but that negotiations between France and Sweden over Saint Barthélemy’s future were ongoing. Quite unlike the editorial in Nya Dagligt Allehanda, the reporter of this news giddily wrote that France might not be the ‘lone suitor to the poor West Indian beauty’, but that other colonial powers were rumoured to have expressed an interest:

So it could happen, what no one had expected, that we in the end will be compensated for all of the expenses that this, for us, worthless dependency has cost the Swedish government since 1784. It would not be the first example we have of the smaller countries being able to take advantage of the envy or mutual distrust of the great powers.⁵⁷

Such optimism would soon prove unfounded, however, when it became clear that not only were the great powers not waiting in line to take over Saint Barthélemy, but France had succeeded in haggling down the amount they would reimburse Sweden from 100,000 to 80,000 Francs.⁵⁸ In contrast to its earlier eagerness, Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning wrote indignantly in late October that one should not speak of the payment from France as a ‘purchase sum’ [köpesumma], but rather as ‘compensation for the Swedish state’s property on the island, but in no way the island itself’. As a respectable country, Sweden did not sell its territory or people.⁵⁹

The same newspaper also printed a longer editorial the same month that lamented how things had turned out with ‘Sweden’s “only colony”’ in a similar way to the earlier article in Nya Dagligt Allehanda, though perhaps with less bitterness: ‘The matter was one of necessity, and yet what has now been concluded gives a melancholy impression’.⁶⁰ The island could well have been prosperous, but was now ruined by ‘nothing less than neglect, or rather misrule’. Echoing Nisbeth’s articles, the editorial blamed the excess of bureaucrats that had squandered the colony’s resources, and yet ‘among that entire group of Swedish officials a practical and competent man, who had an understanding of the island’s welfare and the capacity do something about it, could not be found’.⁶¹ Once again describing Saint Barthélemy’s administration as a stain on Sweden’s national honour, the editorial continued, ‘May it be a comfort that the neglected child was nonetheless never abused, so that our country’s old good standing in its treatment of subjected provinces has at least on that point not been brought to shame’.⁶²

As these articles demonstrate, there was a fair amount of bitterness in some quarters about what was seen as a lost opportunity for Sweden to find national glory through colonization. In an age when ‘colonial aptitude’ was frequently taken as a measure of national character and success, it was embarrassing that Sweden had done such a poor job administering Saint Barthélemy, even if this could be explained by its small size and the absence of other, nearby Swedish colonies. Nevertheless, neither of the aforementioned editorials advocated for Sweden to retain the lonely colony; even among its foremost supporters, Saint Barthélemy was viewed as a lost cause. Nor do such editorials seem to have been very common – with these exceptions, in the newspapers under investigation, the various stages of the negotiations and treaty ratification between Sweden and France were duly, but drily, reported. Often the entire text of various agreements and the final treaty were printed in full without commentary. The official Post- och Inrikes Tidningar finally got around to reporting that a territorial transfer was underway in October.⁶³ The way in which the colony was turned over to France does, however, reveal that the desire to avoid staining Sweden’s reputation and complete the transfer with a modicum of dignity were strong in official quarters.

‘Now it’s over – Thank God!’: the referendum and the transfer ceremony

While the actual fact of Saint Barthélemy’s return to France in early 1878 is generally the only item deemed worthy of inclusion in most existing historical accounts, the way in which the transfer was effected reveals a great deal about how Sweden tried to retain dignity and legitimacy as it bowed out of an intensifying European colonial race. Three points are particularly interesting: the referendum that was held in Saint Barthélemy in August 1877, the creation of a charitable foundation for Saint Barthélemy with the money received from France and the transfer ceremony on 15 March 1878, in which the island was officially handed over.

Evidently sensitive to criticism about having botched its administration of the colony, the Swedish government made a referendum on the island the centrepiece of its efforts to legitimize Saint Barthélemy’s transfer to France. The result of the August 1877 referendum was sensational: the voters unanimously voted to re-join France, save for one dissenting voice. The unambiguous will of the people thusly expressed was frequently mentioned in the Swedish and French press.⁶⁴ While somewhat embarrassing for Sweden and its king, who could be perceived as having been summarily rejected, the referendum was nevertheless proudly presented as a symbol of the king’s paternal care for his subjects. The Kingdom of Sweden would never cut off a territory and its subjects against their will. Saint Barthélemy might have been neglected and experienced a major decline during the previous decades of Swedish rule, but now Sweden could partially redeem its reputation by taking the opinion of its residents into account. This was generally how the referendum was depicted in the press, but there were nevertheless some conflicting accounts later on. In a letter from a correspondent on the Swedish frigate Vanadis published in January 1878, Aftonbladet reported that the referendum was in fact less unanimous than commonly believed. According to this account, many of the island’s Protestants, representing much of the colony’s social elite, were against the transfer, but understood that in so voting, they would accomplish little more than antagonizing their inevitable future rulers. They therefore chose to not take part in the referendum. The article also names the lone dissenter who did vote: Wellington Sicard.⁶⁵

In February, Nya Dagligt Allehanda reprinted an indignant article from the Economiste français defending the legitimacy of the referendum, a defence which is nevertheless highly revealing of its democratic limitations. The French author of this article was responding to protests in the American press against the transfer on the grounds of the Monroe Doctrine and the supposed illegitimacy of the referendum. Did the United States ask the Indians their opinion before the annexation of Alaska? the author retorted. It might be true, the author admitted, that of Saint Barthélemy’s 2,374 residents, only 617 were men between 15 and 60 years of age. This would make for just under 500 persons who were entitled to vote. (The article does not explain this discrepancy of more than 100 adult male voters, although it likely relates to property requirements for suffrage.) Of these, 350 voted for the return of Saint Barthélemy to France, but for the author ‘70% of the vote [if one takes the percentage of eligible voters and not the percentage of those who actually voted] is more than enough, in our opinion, to constitute a majority’.⁶⁶ This is the only mention I have found in the newspapers examined here of the number of people who actually cast a ballot. In general, the referendum seems to have succeeded in granting the transfer a high degree of legitimacy in the press. In his speech opening the Swedish Parliament in 1878, the king was thus able to report that he had signed the transfer treaty ‘with the consent of St. Barthélemy’s population’.⁶⁷

In another move to preserve ‘the dignity of the realm’, consistent with the aforementioned position of Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, the island was not sold but ‘returned’, and the money received from France as compensation for crown property on the Saint Barthélemy was not kept but rather placed in a charitable trust. This was, at the express desire of the king, to benefit ‘a hospital or other welfare institution for the public good’.⁶⁸ The official reason for this was the king’s ‘wish that the colony might preserve some continuing memory of that period of nearly a century when it belonged to the Swedish crown’.⁶⁹ It seems to have mattered to the crown that Swedish rule be remembered fondly, and the donation could be seen as an attempt to mitigate some of the national embarrassment of the colony’s impoverishment at the time of transfer.

Finally, the transfer ceremony was reported at length in all of the Swedish newspapers analysed here and also reveals a great deal about how Swedish officials and the press viewed the end of Sweden’s last experiment with formal colonization. The ceremony was designed to emphasize the friendship between Sweden and France and preserve Sweden’s dignity as a worthy European power. As reported by the official Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, three French ships arrived on 15 March 1878 carrying the governor of Guadeloupe, the colony to which Saint Barthélemy was to be administratively attached. The ships and the Gustav III Battery exchanged formal salutes, and the landing French delegation undertook a formal procession through the streets of Gustavia. French Governor Gabriel Couturier and outgoing Swedish Governor Ulrich gave speeches about the friendship between their great nations, and Couturier awarded Ulrich the Officer’s Cross of the French Legion of Honour.⁷⁰ The governors then each signed the official papers transferring ownership of the colony. This ceremony was followed by more salutes from the French and Swedish cannons, and the Swedish flag was lowered and the French one was raised over the island, symbolically consummating the transfer. A royal proclamation from the Swedish king was read and distributed around the town, a French bishop who had accompanied the delegation said a Te Deum mass, and Ulrich hosted a banquet. Couturier did not stay long on the island, departing the morning of the eighteenth.⁷¹ As this officially publicized account makes clear, even though Sweden had failed as a colonial power in the Caribbean, the transfer ceremony was meant to demonstrate that the country was capable of performing expected diplomatic rituals and host French officials in a dignified way. The two sides mirrored each other as closely as possible to indicate that the transfer was one between nominal equals in the international order: each side gave booming salutes, prominently displayed their flag and had their respective governor give a speech.

Other, non-official Swedish newspapers gave more richly detailed and somewhat less flattering accounts of the ceremony. Aftonbladet described the reactions of the different parties during the festivities in an account marked by continuing bitterness over the outcome of the referendum:

The men carried their resentment well enough and among them only a few teary eyes could be seen. They didn’t deserve any empathy anyway, neither they, who didn’t vote at all, nor they, who claimed to have been led astray to vote for France against their will. But the women, the wretched, tearstained women, who in their West Indian idle dream life almost solely existed in the world of feelings and fantasies, no one has asked them about their sympathies, they haven’t voted, they could only cry and dress in mourning. What a heart-wrenching contrast between glittering bayonets, gold-embellished uniforms and thundering military music on the street right across from tearstained female eyes, mourning clothes and half-suppressed cries of protest in the windows! A French officer noted in surprise, that the whole thing was closer to Alsace-Lorraine’s transfer to Germany than the jubilation that he had expected to witness.⁷²

This description of despair and resentment among the island’s Swedish elite contrasts markedly with both the recurring account of the near-unanimous referendum throughout the Swedish press and the assertion in the Revue des deux Mondes, translated and reprinted in Nya Dagligt Allehanda, that the transfer was celebrated by the entire population of Saint Barthélemy without tears or regrets.⁷³ The comparison with Alsace-Lorraine is particularly striking, as it both compares the peaceful transfer of Saint Barthélemy to the violent conquest of French territory and undercuts the image of French grandeur otherwise presented on this occasion by reminding readers of France’s still fresh international humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War. Aftonbladet continued by reporting that after the lowering of the Swedish flag, ‘it was close to being ripped to shreds by the people, who with tears and cries of sorrow crowded forth to kiss it’.⁷⁴ The author of this article clearly felt a need for Swedish rule to be missed, even if these sentiments are not corroborated by the other press accounts. Needless to say, these melodramatic descriptions must be taken with a grain of salt, but they are nonetheless a fascinating reflection of the bitterness felt by at least some metropolitan Swedes at the loss of their colony.

As with its earlier account of the island’s shortcomings under Swedish rule, Aftonbladet did not hold back from undercutting the intended stateliness of the ceremony with additional salacious details. The paper was particularly vicious in its attack on the French bishop’s Te Deum:

the organ struggled to get him to sing in tune, while the choir attempted to put him in the wrong key. The tone-deaf singing, the constant shooting of the cannons set up under the church windows, the soldiers’ motions, the trumpet fanfares and the hundreds of candles in the choir smoking in the 30-degree heat all contributed to making this whole Te Deum unpleasant, unlike the beautiful ceremonies one is accustomed to witnessing in Catholic churches.⁷⁵

A month later, Aftonbladet translated excerpts of French reporting on the transfer ceremony from the local paper L’Écho de la Guadeloupe, which revealed a major faux pas on the Swedish side conveniently left out of the official report in Post- och Inrikestidningar, regarding Couturier’s presentation of the French Legion of Honour to Governor Ulrich:

The old sea dog [Ulrich], who is deeply moved by this honour, because his government did not give him a corresponding assignment with regards to the French governor, stood for several moments completely speechless and could only with effort master his turbulent emotions in order to thank the president of the republic and his representative for the honour bestowed on him.⁷⁶

In the late nineteenth century, medals, orders and decorations were a crucial component of international relations, which Cindy McCreery has dubbed ‘ornamental diplomacy’, often used to smooth over disputes or even to secure loyalty.⁷⁷ Neglecting to present the French governor with a comparable Swedish order to the Legion of Honour was a major gaffe that upset the otherwise carefully planned balance of the ceremony and only reinforced the feeling of French superiority and Swedish ineptitude on the world stage.

Though patriotic in tone and probably exaggerating the sorrow of the residents of Saint Barthélemy at their severance from Sweden, the Swedish press did not try to cover up Sweden’s failures, even as it bitterly deplored them. Despite the resentment at those responsible for the colony’s problems and resulting tarnishing of Sweden’s reputation, there was little opposition to what was almost universally viewed as the inevitability of the island’s eventual transfer to France. The likelihood of revitalizing Saint Barthélemy under Swedish auspices was considered too low, and its continued ownership by Sweden was only an embarrassment. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, previously so critical of Swedish misrule, merely wrote after its report of the transfer ceremony, ‘And so the little island has ceased to belong to Sweden! It couldn’t have been done otherwise, and yet one cannot suppress a feeling of melancholy now that it is done’.⁷⁸ Even in the same article as its maudlin depiction of ‘tearstained female eyes’, Aftonbladet summed up what must have been a widespread sense of relief: ‘Now it’s over – Thank God!’.⁷⁹

Returning to the fold: the reacquisition of Saint Barthélemy in the French press

As might be expected in the world’s second-largest empire, the acquisition of a 25-square-kilometre island in the Caribbean was not a major news item in the French press. Nevertheless, the coverage it did receive complements Swedish accounts and is revealing of various French attitudes towards its growing second colonial empire in the 1870s. The following analysis of French press coverage of the return of Saint Barthélemy to France reveals that the island’s annexation, while not terribly important in itself, was used as a rhetorical resource by various French political voices in a larger conversation about the future of the Third Republic and its empire.

Just as in Sweden, the initial negotiations were not made public right away in France, although the contents of the treaties were later reported in detail. Le Temps complained that it had first heard of the decision through a British newspaper.⁸⁰ Even later, the French government did not seem particularly interested in advertising the acquisition, but the transfer was picked up with some enthusiasm by the press. Several introduced Saint Barthélemy with a historical background and a geographical description, reminding readers that the colony had once been a French possession and that its cession to Sweden was part of a trade deal between friendly nations.⁸¹

Sometimes these reports gave a surprisingly rosy picture of the island’s natural resources and economic prospects. Le Temps initially overestimated the population by a factor of five and wrote of good prospects for sugar, tobacco and cotton cultivation on the island – ‘only water is lacking’.⁸² Le Petit journal, one of the period’s most widely circulating French newspapers, reported that ‘the island of Saint-Barthélemy is fertile, in spite of lacking watercourses; it produces sugar, indigo, coffee, and easily feeds the 2,400 inhabitants that it possesses today’.⁸³ Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires described Gustavia as one of the region’s most important ports.⁸⁴ Even a certain M. Le Dentu, a resident of Guadeloupe who actually visited the island and wrote a report for the local paper L’Écho de la Guadeloupe, described Saint Barthélemy in almost utopian terms. Saint Barthélemy might lack fresh water, but a system of rainwater cisterns easily provided for the island’s needs. ‘The character of the inhabitants is completely mild and peaceful; crime is unknown, violations and infractions extremely rare; neither gendarmes nor policemen exist on the island’. Le Dentu believed public health was good, despite the lack of a doctor on the island, and ‘The morality of all the steps on the social ladder is very high, marriage is held in honour and illegitimate births are completely exceptional’.⁸⁵ Given the overwhelmingly negative view of Saint Barthélemy that dominated the contemporaneous Swedish press, it is perhaps surprising that the colony’s new masters viewed it so positively.

Politically, too, there was virtually no opposition to its reannexation in the French parliament: the resolution was adopted by the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 425 to 8, and unanimously by the Senate.⁸⁶ One senator raised concerns about Saint Barthélemy being burdensome to the budget of Guadeloupe, to which it was to be administratively joined, but these concerns appear to have been easily allayed by the assurance of the Minister of the Navy that such expenses would be covered by the colonial budget.⁸⁷

Although there was virtually no opposition to the transfer, French politicians and pundits seized on the rhetorical opportunity presented by the reacquisition of Saint Barthélemy to further their political aims. The Guadeloupian deputy Étienne Théodore Mondésir Lacascade (1841–1906), representing the Union républicaine, used the occasion to call for greater democratic freedoms and rights in France’s colonies:

The small colony of Saint-Barthélemy thirsts, like Guadeloupe, to which it will be annexed, for public liberties; it possesses, since many years ago, universal suffrage. I hope that the government of the 14th of December, through the modifications brought to the colonial regime, will permit the populations attached to France to not experience even a shadow of regret and will show them the Republic as the salvation and the redemption of the colonies just as much as for France … The Revolution was undertaken for the colonies as for the Metropole.⁸⁸

Lacascade also dramatically thanked God that whereas in 1784, ‘one monarch had ceded this French population to another monarch’, European legal norms had progressed to the point that the current transfer was not decided without holding a democratic referendum.⁸⁹ More practically, as the French parliament also took up a postal treaty with Sweden at the same time as the transfer, Lacascade complained that it was ‘irksome’ that Saint Barthélemy would suffer from poorer postal rates after its annexation, calling for a reform of colonial mail rules.⁹⁰ Thus, the reannexation of Saint Barthélemy was taken as an opportunity to reaffirm the democratic values of the still-young Third Republic and challenge its parliament to press forward with still greater democratic reforms in its colonies.

As in the Swedish press, the referendum was central to the discussion of the transfer in French newspapers. All of them pointed out the ardent wish of the population to re-join Saint Barthélemy’s former motherland, so that even if the papers had not been so optimistic about the island’s prospects, helping out these ‘abandoned’ Frenchmen was considered a patriotic duty. For example, Le Petit journal wrote that,

in the course of its so checkered history, the island of Saint-Barthélemy has constantly remained French in its customs, in its language and in the relations which it has never ceased to hold with our colonies in the West Indies. So much so that, when the population was consulted on the treaty of the month of August 1877, it declared itself for returning to its original fatherland [patrie primitive] unanimously minus one sole vote.⁹¹

While the left-wing deputy Lacascade took the referendum as a triumph of democratic norms, L’Écho de la Guadeloupe took a more conservative line, emphasizing the fact that not only the Governor of Guadeloupe but its bishop represented France at the transfer ceremony:

It is therefore under the aegis of the Religion that France has wanted to present itself to a population that has thanks to Catholicism conserved such a profound attachment for the motherland [la mère-patrie] during close to a century of separation; is this not a brilliant proof of the benefits that result for a nation of the fertile alliance of the Church and the State?⁹²

According to this article, the bishop agreed, arguing that the reacquisition of Saint Barthélemy was an expression both ‘of patriotism and of the faith’, and celebrating a special mass ‘to cement by the blood of the eternal victim [Jesus Christ] the henceforth indestructible alliance between Saint-Barthélemy and the French people’.⁹³ The people of Saint Barthélemy had earned this happy reunion through the steadfastness of their faith:

Saint-Barthélemy has maintained for the metropole as for the religion of its fathers a most tender and filial veneration, and a people that knows to draw on this twofold spring is always worthy of the love of the Church and the protection of France.⁹⁴

As these passages show, even when in complete agreement over the desirability of the reannexation of Saint Barthélemy, different political forces within the Third French Republic used the occasion to promote their divergent views for the future empire, whether secular and republican or conservative and Catholic. The inhabitants of Saint Barthélemy were unquestionably French, but what this Frenchness consisted of was very much open to interpretation.

In summary, although quoting the same treaties and giving very similar accounts of the transfer ceremony, and even citing many of the same sources, the French press had a very different take on the change in ownership of Saint Barthélemy than the Swedish news media. The omnipresent discourse of poverty and misfortune that surrounded the island in the Swedish press was almost completely absent in French coverage, which was mostly positive about the island’s prospects. The French, it seemed, understood that little Sweden was not up to the task of successful colonization, but had great confidence in their own colonial aptitude. The French accounts diverged in political flavour, but universally agreed that this was to be celebrated as a moment of national pride, even if a relatively minor one. Le Petit journal summed up the French position nicely:

The territories acquired are only of a mediocre size, and the population, as we have seen, doesn’t exceed that of a simple village. But little or much, near or far, it is France that is expanding. Let us therefore warmly welcome the newcomers or rather, the new returnees into the great French family!⁹⁵

Swedish colonial exceptionalism?

As a number of researchers have argued, a discourse of exceptionalism has long been employed by the Swedish government and other organizations to argue that unlike other European countries, Sweden was either untainted by a historical colonial legacy or, to the limited extent that it was a colonial power, was an exceptionally enlightened one that treated ‘the natives’ well.⁹⁶ While ample new research has proven that Swedish involvement in colonialism was not so insignificant as these apologists would have it, this has tended to examine Swedish colonial actions and collaborations, rather than mentalities.⁹⁷ It is of course difficult to accurately measure popular sentiments before the advent of public opinion polls, but the above investigation of press coverage of the transfer of Saint Barthélemy in 1878 offers some interesting evidence on how Swedes viewed empire in the late nineteenth century.

On the one hand, Sweden willingly and peacefully gave up its only colony at a historical juncture that was marked by increasingly aggressive expansionism by other European powers. This article has demonstrated that this did not happen quietly, but received ample public attention in Sweden, and to some extent, in France. As we have seen, the return of Saint Barthélemy to France was widely understood as marking the end of Sweden’s colonial empire, and at least some Swedish commentators at the time believed (correctly) that the island would be Sweden’s last formal colony. Unlike many other colonial transfers during the period, Sweden did not exchange Saint Barthélemy for land elsewhere, and had no serious prospects of obtaining a new colony in the foreseeable future. Moreover, there seems to have been very little opposition to the move. Although the Swedish press published some bitter editorials that lamented Saint Barthélemy as a squandered opportunity, there seems to have been a consensus by the mid-1870s that both Sweden and the island were better off parting ways. This was legitimized with a referendum of the inhabitants of Saint Barthélemy (however imperfect in practice) and both Oscar II and the Swedish press frequently expressed concern for their future welfare.

Nevertheless, none of this necessarily indicates that either the Swedish state or most Swedes rejected the colonialist, expansionist ideology that pervaded Europe at this time. Indeed, the sources described above contain evidence that many in Sweden subscribed to this worldview even while not believing it to be strategic to continue ruling Saint Barthélemy. Most importantly, all of the sources examined above are coloured by the notion that successful colonial rule is a matter of national prestige and honour. Though not seeking to hide the shortcomings of Swedish rule, newspaper editorialists expressed outrage that on-site administrative incompetence and the failure of Riksdagen to adequately address the problem had compromised Sweden’s image abroad. As shown above, the language used to express these viewpoints invariably involved notions of Sweden’s national honour, shame, chivalry, ‘making a laughingstock of the Swedish flag’ and so on. Such a situation was apparently intolerable for many in an age marked by National Romanticism, and the emphatic ‘Thank God!’ expressed by Aftonbladet upon the colony’s transfer primarily expressed a sense of relief that Sweden would no longer have to suffer national humiliation from its failed colonial experiment. The difficulty of facing the dishonour of colonial failure is also evident in the many excuses for Saint Barthélemy’s impoverishment: the personal incompetence of the governor and colonial administrators, the absence of other, nearby Swedish colonies that would create a sort of colonial ‘critical mass’, the disinterest of successive Swedish governments, natural disasters, and so on. There was implicit agreement that, under other circumstances, Sweden could have been a successful colonizer; the failure of Saint Barthélemy did not reflect deficiencies in Swedish national character, but rather bad luck.

The reporting on the referendum over the island’s future and the elaborate transfer ceremony staged by the Swedish authorities also strongly indicate that Sweden saw its international prestige as closely tied to its perceived ‘colonial aptitude’. Sweden attempted to present itself as the formal equal of France, and deviations from this image were either ignored or deplored in the Swedish press. Likely apocryphal stories of the locals’ grief and shows of lasting loyalty to Sweden were also aired in the Swedish press to assuage wounded pride. Although the Swedish government was eager to be rid of Saint Barthélemy, this was clearly not because Swedes did not subscribe to the same ideology connecting colonialism and national greatness that underpinned contemporaneous European expansion in other empires.

These findings complement previous research on Sweden’s participation in the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference (to stake out European claims to Africa) that indicates that Sweden’s elites imbibed the period’s European colonial ideology in spite of belonging to a small, now colony-less country. As David Nilsson has demonstrated, Sweden (or more accurately, the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway) was a full, if marginal, participant in the conference, apparently in the hopes of gaining trading privileges in western Africa, moving closer to Germany and remaining relevant in European power politics.⁹⁸ The Swedes in Berlin expressed a strong desire to work towards ending slavery in the Congo basin (one of the ostensible aims of European imperialism there), but their motion to indicate this explicitly in the Berlin General Act was unsuccessful.⁹⁹ The correspondence of King Oscar II, the same monarch who oversaw the transfer of Saint Barthélemy, reveals that he was one of the many influential Europeans who were taken in by Belgian King Leopold II’s humanitarian rhetoric with which he masked his greed for colonial riches.¹⁰⁰ Oscar II wrote a warm reply to Leopold II’s overtures, stating that the Belgian King’s ‘civilizing work is pursued with an admirable perseverance’ and ‘serve[d] the cause of humankind’.¹⁰¹ Even if Sweden was apparently not interested in acquiring territory in Africa, it was eager to serve in the colonial ‘civilizing mission’, and numerous Swedish mercenaries, engineers and missionaries worked in the Congo to this end.¹⁰² It seems unlikely that Oscar II had a major change of heart or came to view European imperialism in a dramatically different way between the sale of Saint Barthélemy and the Berlin Conference – rather both reflected a combination of rational self-interest and prevailing European colonial ideology. As this article has shown, the attitudes towards the sale of Saint Barthélemy expressed in the Swedish press reflected a similar worldview to that of Sweden’s sovereign.

As the examination of French newspapers’ coverage of the transfer of Saint Barthélemy has shown, the French often had a rosier view of the island’s economic prospects than the largely embittered Swedes, but the underlying colonial ideologies were largely the same. While the Swedish press frequently emphasized the country’s duty towards its distant citizens [landsmän], French editorialists and politicians similarly spoke of a French obligation towards the island’s population on the basis of their ethnic Frenchness (whether by virtue of language, culture, religion, or all three). Leaving them to their fate would be dishonourable. And even if the small island was far less significant in a vast and growing empire than as the sole formal colony in a minor one, the French press still celebrated the small increase in the territory of France, and there was virtually no opposition to the annexation. Thus, discourses national pride and the glory of colonization, or the shame of colonial failure, coloured the media landscape in both France and Sweden on the occasion of Saint Barthélemy’s transfer. This was not a coincidence – as the above analysis has shown, there was an extensive transimperial exchange between the countries’ newspapers, with each frequently reprinting articles from the other. Some Swedish papers even occasionally printed news in French for an international readership.

The timing of Sweden’s formal decolonization (if it can be called that) might have been exceptional, coinciding as it did with the jingoistic age of imperial expansion for much of the rest of Europe, but the transfer of Saint Barthélemy did not reflect a profoundly different worldview or attitude towards colonialism among Swedish policymakers. Sweden was simply cutting its losses, not taking a stand.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

John L. Hennessey

John L. Hennessey is a research fellow in the history of ideas and sciences, Lund University. His dissertation, Rule by Association: Japan in the Global Trans-Imperial Culture, 1868-1912 (Linnaeus University, 2018), was shortlisted for the 2019 ICAS Dissertation Prize in Asian studies and received an honorable mention for the 2020 Walter Markov Prize in global history. His research interests include modern colonial history, nationalism, history education and scientific racism.

Notes

1. Hobsbawm, Age of Empire.

2. Hellström, “ … åt alla christliga förvanter …,” 184. These earlier attempts came to public attention already at the time of Saint Barthélemy’s return in the late 1870s. See, for example, Post- och Inrikestidningar, March 18, 1878; Nya Dagligt Allehanda, March 19, 1878.

3. The Danish West Indies were finally sold to the United States in 1917 after a convoluted diplomatic process.

4. Jan Arvid Hellström’s almost encyclopaedic “ … åt alla christliga förvanter …” devotes less than a page to the subject (p. 184). Most recent major studies of Saint Barthélemy do not even extend to 1878. For example, Thomasson, Svarta S:t Barthélemy; Pålsson, “Our Side of the Water”; Wilson, “Commerce in Disguise”; Hildebrand, “Den Svenska kolonin S:t Barthélemy”. An exception is an article that discusses the implications of the 1878 transfer for the Swedish colonial archives from Saint Barthélemy. Thomasson, “Caribbean Scorpion”.

5. Servant, “La retrocession de Saint-Barthélemy”.

6. Bourdin, Histoire de St. Barthélemy, 293–334. As a bilingual work with the left-hand pages in French and the right in English translation, this section covers approximately twenty pages. Besides the error mentioned in the main text, Bourdin incorrectly states that the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 took place in 1878 (311) and makes an unsubstantiated claim that the annexation of Saint Barthélemy was used to test German opposition to the expansion of French territory after the Franco-Prussian War (301).

7. “The conclusions of its delegate [Hugo Nisbeth] were directed only to its government”. Bourdin, Histoire de St. Barthélemy, 297.

8. See Hennessey, “By Jingo!”; Hennessey, “Imperial Ardour or Apathy?”.

9. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire; Porter, Absent-Minded Imperialists.

10. See Lotem, Memory of Colonialism.

11. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire; MacKenzie, Culture and Imperialism; MacKenzie, European Empires and the People; Girardet, L’idée colonial; Young, Japan’s Total Empire; Owen, “Facts are Sacred”.

12. See, for example, Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea.

13. See Hennessey, “Contextualizing Colonial Connections”; Wagner, “Private Colonialism,” 91.

14. Gunlög Fur describes Swedish attitudes towards Native Americans in Fur, “Indians and Immigrants”.

15. See, for example, the contributions in MacKenzie, European Empires and the People.

16. Johannesson, “Med det nya på väg”.

17. ’Les principaux quotidiens’.

18. ’Presse locale ancienne’.

19. St. Barthélemy is described as ’den arma kolonien’ in Aftonbladet 13 January 1876.

20. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, January 8, 1876. All translations from Swedish and French are the author’s own unless otherwise noted.

21. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, January 8, February 4, March 22, April 22, 1876; Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, April 21, 1876; Aftonbladet, January 13, 1876.

22. Aftonbladet, January 13, 1876; Nya Dagligt Allehanda, September 25, 1876.

23. Aftonbladet, February 15, 1876.

24. Aftonbladet, February 3, 1876.

25. Ibid.

26. Aftonbladet, January 13, 1876; Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, February 1, 1876.

27. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, October 21, 1876.

28. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, September 12, 1876; Nya Dagligt Allehanda, October 21, 1876.

29. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, July 31, 1876; October 16, 1876; March 10, 1877.

30. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, May 16, 1876; Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, March 17, 1877.

31. Aftonbladet, September 23, 1876.

32. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, April 13, 1880.

33. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, February 4, 1876.

34. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, February 1, 1876.

35. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, February 24, 1877.

36. Oscarsson, “A. F. Hugo Nisbeth,” 65.

37. Aftonbladet, April 27, 1876. Emphasis in the original.

38. Aftonbladet, November 8, 1876. Emphasis in the original.

39. Aftonbladet, November 10, 1876.

40. Oscarsson, “A. F. Hugo Nisbeth”.

41. Aftonbladet, December 13, 1876. Emphasis in the original.

42. Aftonbladet, January 18, 1877.

43. Aftonbladet, December 30, 1876.

44. Hellström, “ … åt alla christliga förvanter …,” 191.

45. Aftonbladet, January 22, 1876.

46. Aftonbladet, December 30, 1876.

47. Ibid.

48. Aftonbladet, January 22, 1877; Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, February 24, 1877.

49. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, March 8, 1877.

50. Aftonbladet, March 21, 29, 1877.

51. Ibid.

52. Aftonbladet, March 21, 1877.

53. Aftonbladet, March 29, 1877.

54. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, August 4, 1877.

55. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, August 30, 1877.

56. Ibid.

57. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, August 19, 1877.

58. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, March 18, 1878.

59. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, October 24, 1877. Emphasis in the original.

60. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, October 12, 1877.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, October 11, 1877.

64. For example, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, October 11, 1877; Aftonbladet, October 12, 1877; Le Journal des Débats politiques et littéraires, October 22, 1877.

65. Aftonbladet, January 29, 1878. In her reminisces about the transfer of the island fifty years later, Governor Ulrich’s daughter Sigrid described Sicard as a ’mulatto’ who was “an enlightened and worthy man, among other things owner of several sailing ships, the “Govenor Ulrich” and the “Anna Ulrich” and the supporting pillar [stödpelare] for the Methodist congregation’. She also claims that the near-unanimous referendum was due to propaganda spread by the local Catholic priest that to vote against the transfer would be a grave sin, and that many women in St. Barthélemy were frustrated that they were ineligible to vote. Sigrid Ulrich, “När Svenska flaggan ströks på S:t Barthélemy”, Svenska Dagbladet, March 11, 1928.

66. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, February 18, 1878.

67. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, January 17, 1878.

68. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, March 18, 1878.

69. Ibid.

70. Governor Couturier’s speech is reproduced in Servant, “La retrocession de Saint-Barthélemy,” 77–8.

71. Post- och Inrikes Tidningar, April 16, 1878.

72. Aftonbladet, April 17, 1878.

73. Nya Dagligt Allehanda, March 21, 1879.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

76. Aftonbladet, May 24, 1878.

77. McCreery, “Orders from Disorder?”.

78. Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, April 17, 1878.

79. Aftonbladet, April 17, 1878.

80. Le Temps, June 15, 1877.

81. Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, December 2, 1877; Le Temps, October 23, 1877.

82. Le Temps, June 15, 1877.

83. Le Petit journal, April 19, 1878.

84. Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, October 22, 1877.

85. L’Écho de la Guadeloupe, March 29, 1878, reprinted in Les Antilles [Martinique], April 3, 1878.

86. Le Temps, January 24, March 1, 1878.

87. Le Journal des débats politiques et litteraires, March 1, 1878; Le Temps, March 2, 1878.

88. Le Temps, January 24, 1878. On Lacascade, see “Etienne, Théodore, Mondésir Lacascade”.

89. Ibid.

90. Le Temps, January 16, 1878.

91. Le Petit journal, April 19, 1878.

92. L’Écho de la Guadeloupe, reprinted in Les Antilles, March 27, 1878.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Le Petit journal, April 19, 1878.

96. See, for example, Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History”; Höglund and Andersson Burnett, “Nordic Colonialisms,” 1–2; Ipsen and Fur, “Introduction”.

97. See, for example, Fur and Hennessey, Svensk kolonialism; Höglund and Andersson Burnett, “Nordic Colonialisms”; Naum and Nordin, Scandinavian Colonialism.

98. Nilsson, “Sweden-Norway at the Berlin Conference”.

99. Ibid., 29.

100. On Leopold II’s charm, see Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost.

101. Oscar II to Leopold II (draft), January 4, 1885, cited and translated in Nilsson, “Sweden-Norway at the Berlin Conference,” 26.

102. Ibid., 5; Forsgren, “I den europeiska civilisationens tjänst”.