Introduction: The historiography of slavery in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, c. 1950-2016.

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue ‘Slavery, Servitude and Freedom in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, 1672–1848’, edited by Niklas Thode Jensen and Vibe Maria Martens, situates the five essays in the issue in the framework provided by previous research. It begins with a historiographical overview of research carried out since c. 1950 concerning Caribbean and Danish-Norwegian West Indian racial slavery, and continues to locate the essays within this field and its recent historiographical trends. The introduction ends with a brief overview of the history of the Danish-Norwegian and later the Danish West Indies to provide the general context for the five essays.

Keywords:

• historiography
• Danish-Norwegian West Indies
• history of slavery

As a chapter in the history of European expansion, Danish-Norwegian colonialism has received little attention, both internationally and in the national historiographies of Denmark and Norway.¹ This is also the case for the history of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, today the US Virgin Islands of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, despite increased efforts through the last three decades.² There are a number of reasons why the history of Danish (until 1814 Danish-Norwegian) engagement in the Caribbean has received relatively little attention. At one level the language barrier between the vast majority of archival records and much research written in the Danish language and the main Anglophone audience often result in a lack of common ground. Yet more profound differences in perspectives and understandings also shape the historiographical efforts of historians from Scandinavia and from the US Virgin Islands and other Caribbean societies.

In bringing together the five essays in this collection, which are all based on recent MA theses from the Department of History at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, it is the editors’ aim to contribute to the development of a shared understanding of the history of the US Virgin Islands in the period from the early Danish-Norwegian engagement with the islands until their sale to the USA. With the upcoming centennial in 2017, commemorating the sale to the USA in 1917, the timing is apt. The essays showcase the work of younger scholars researching new aspects of racial slavery, servitude and freedom in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies in the period 1672–1848; work which would not otherwise have become available to an Anglophone audience. They all focus on the Danish-Norwegian West Indies during slavery; a focus that testifies to the need for further engagement with the complex transition from slavery to freedom that has formed the history of the US Virgin Islands. Nevertheless, these essays also underline that the history of Danish-Norwegian West Indian society during slavery is still open to new and important research questions. In what remains of this introductory chapter, we will situate the five essays in the historiographical framework provided by previous research by first presenting a short historiographical overview of research concerning Caribbean and Danish-Norwegian West Indian racial slavery, and then locate the essays within this field and its recent historiographical trends. The chapter ends with a brief overview of the history of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies to provide the general context for the five essays.

Caribbean research concerning the history of slavery, c. 1950–2000s

During the 1960s and 1970s, the independence of British Caribbean colonies such as Jamaica (1962), Barbados and British Guyana (1966) and the influence of research on slavery, especially in the USA, meant that the volume of research on social and economic aspects of slavery in the Caribbean increased greatly. The interest centred itself on societal structures and the ability of enslaved people to resist and fight slavery, i.e. their agency. Due to the limited amount of source materials produced by the enslaved themselves, social historians adopted historical anthropology and quantitative methods from the social sciences, such as demography, to write a history ‘from below’.³ Researchers attempted to explain slavery as a system, viewed either from a sociological position in the theory of social classes or from an anthropological perspective as a special culture.⁴

The end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s saw a growing dissatisfaction with the dominant dualistic approach to the study of Caribbean slave societies, which contrasted the Euro-Caribbean part of colonial society with the Afro-Caribbean and portrayed slavery as primarily a system of Euro-Caribbean destruction of enslaved Africans and their culture. Instead, the historian Edward Braithwaite used concepts like ‘interculturation’ and ‘creolization’ to analyse the development of the slavery-based colonial societies that fused the different original ethnic, linguistic and cultural elements into new unique societies.⁵ Some years later, anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price developed these concepts further in their book An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (1976). Consequently, creolization is today a standard concept in the history of Caribbean slavery.⁶ Returning to the resistance motif, it was further nuanced in the 1990s with the addition of an element of accommodation and ‘negotiation’ of power.⁷

Historical investigations into the demography of Caribbean slavery were central to the study of these slave societies from the 1970s to the 1990s and they have often included questions about mortality and fertility but also about the diseases and health of the enslaved.⁸ However, since the 1980s, researchers using a qualitative approach have questioned the so-called ‘cliometric’ approach to history, i.e. historical investigations based on quantitative data and calculations such as demography and economics. They find that cliometrics make the human tragedy and destruction of slavery impersonal and rarely allow for the appreciation of the role of agency, interest and racial ideology in the shaping of Caribbean slave societies.⁹ In recent years, the attitude to this problem among leading scholars has been that quantitative and qualitative approaches cannot do without each other. The former needs the latter as a counterpoint and vice versa, and the most fruitful insights are gained by combining approaches.¹⁰

From the 1970s until the mid-1990s, slavery research followed the empirical and methodological lines characterizing the historical profession more broadly and moved from the general investigation of entire slave societies towards detailed investigations of single subjects in shorter periods. The subjects investigated have been, for instance, the slave trade, demography, family life, rebellion, maroonage, and women.¹¹ This apparent fragmentation of slavery research into single subjects and periods is probably due to a growing recognition that the local historical circumstances had a tremendous impact on the way in which the conflict and/or negotiation of power has taken place between various actors in different slavery-based societies. For instance, research concerning the British Caribbean has shown the importance of demography, ecology, climate and topography for the development of these slave societies.¹²

Since the 1990s, the study of racial slavery in the Caribbean has seen further specialization and attempts to deepen the understanding of how slavery was established, reproduced and transformed. A strong tradition of political, social and economic history is still present within the field. Nevertheless, some research trends stand out.¹³ The focus on slave resistance continues to occupy historians of the Caribbean islands. More general accounts, such as Michael Craton’s Testing the Chains. Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (1982)¹⁴, have been followed by works that attempted to unearth the histories of specific revolutions and rebellions, such as Emilia Viotti da Costa’s fine account of the slave rebellion in Demerara in 1823. The importance of the revolution on St. Domingue (1791–1804) has also been underscored by a number of new studies into the development, dynamics and implications of the establishment of Haiti in 1804 by scholars such as Malick W. Ghachem and Laurent Dubois.¹⁵ Such research has aimed at generating a finer understanding of the tense worlds and struggles that engaged masters and slaves in particular localities while also unearthing how uprisings of the enslaved were shaped by and shaped the imperial contexts in which they unfolded.¹⁶

Moreover, Caribbean history has been more strongly integrated into the broader field of Atlantic history. This development has facilitated not only a dialogue with historians of the slave societies in the mainland Americas but also with historians of pre-colonial Africa; a dialogue that has contributed to an intensified engagement with and desire to nuance our understanding of the multiple ways Africans contributed to the development of Circum-Caribbean cultures through processes of creolization. Works by James H. Sweet, Paul E. Lovejoy and John K. Thornton have drawn on the new quantitative data about the organisation and structure of the transatlantic slave trade (first available on CD-ROM and presently accessible at www.slavevoyages.org) to argue for a more prolonged process of creolization than the one hypothesized by Mintz and Price in 1976.¹⁷

Thirdly, the historiography of the Caribbean slave and post-emancipation societies has also seen a sustained effort go beyond the structural and functional elements found in works that aimed at explaining slavery-as-a-system. Inspired by and contributing to broader poststructuralist trends in the humanities, most importantly postcolonial historiography, historians of the Caribbean have turned their interests to the way in which racial ideologies were shaped during slavery and in the post-emancipation period and came to undergird Caribbean identity practices. Recent work has focused on how African Caribbean spirituality emerged through practices of resistance to and negotiation with dominant Christian beliefs as well as the racial ideologies marking Caribbean societies.¹⁸ Likewise, a number of scholars, such as Hilary Beckles, Bernard Moitt, Jennifer Morgan and Doris Garraway, have demonstrated how processes of race formation intersected in important ways with questions about gender and sexuality in the Caribbean, both during and after slavery.¹⁹

Historical research concerning the Danish West Indies, c. 1950–2016

Historical writing concerning the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, including research into slavery on these islands, differs from research into slavery in other areas of the Caribbean by being separated into two parts: a Danish-language part and an English-language part. This division reflects the particular historical trajectory of Denmark.

First, geopolitical developments in the European part of the Danish Empire in the 19th century, in particular the loss of the southern duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg in 1864, have contributed to the development of a peculiar national narrative that focuses on smallness, cultural homogeneity and peacefulness. This narrative leaves little room for a proper account of the involvement of the Danish state and Danes in slavery, slave trade and colonisation. Furthermore, Denmark did not experience significant post-war migration from its former Caribbean possessions, as did Britain, France and the Netherlands. With few descendants from the former Caribbean colonies living in Denmark, no political demand for a more sustained integration of Danish Caribbean history into the history of the European parts of the Danish (and Norwegian) state has emerged. Consequently, the attention of the public to Danish colonial history has been uneven, to say the least, which is also reflected in the fact that no research centres or departments in Denmark are specifically devoted to the field. This lack of institutional framework means that research initiatives instead depend on the interest of individual historians.²⁰ Nevertheless, Denmark is presently witnessing more intense public debates about the implications of its colonial past for contemporary life-ways and politics.²¹ Indeed, a recurrent debate about the need for an official recognition of Denmark’s historical role as a slave trading and slaveholding nation highlights that these questions are contested and important for contemporary conceptions of Denmark’s political development.

The language barrier and the different perspectives emerging from contemporary politics in Denmark and the US Virgin Islands have been and still seem to be impediments to both the investigation of and the dialogue about the history of the islands. At a concrete level, Anglophone researchers are often unable to read Danish and therefore unable to access the majority of the source material which is in Danish and housed in Danish archives.²² In this respect, Danish researchers are usually better off as they can employ sources in English, yet few have published their findings in English. However, at a more profound level, the tenuous links between Danish and US Virgin Islands historians, or at least between their ways of writing history, have also influenced the kind of questions asked and the narratives that are established. At least until the 1980s, and some would argue that this is still the case, Danish researchers have showed an inclination towards a somewhat nationalist approach to Danish colonial history and to Danish-Norwegian West Indian history in particular.²³ Indeed, Norwegian historians have hardly engaged with the history of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies at all. A telling symptom of this awkward understanding of Denmark-Norway’s Caribbean possessions is the persistent comparison of the three islands with minor islands in Denmark, such as Møn and Ærø. Obviously, this comparison is meant as a translation of the Caribbean historical experience to what is predominately a Danish audience. It is a comparison, however, that tends to obscure the fact that Denmark-Norway’s Caribbean possessions were densely populated, extremely productive, heavily capitalized, violent and racially divided in ways that these other areas in Denmark were not. Indeed, such a translation may be obscuring, more than clarifying, the particular role played by the Caribbean colonies in Danish-Norwegian imperial history.

Consequently, two partially overlapping circuits of research have emerged concerning the history of the islands, which means that the inhabitants of the US Virgin Islands are cut off from part of their past, while the population in Denmark still maintains an often simplified and somewhat romantic idea of the Danish West Indian past. However, since the late 1980s a number of English translations of central Danish- and German-language sources, plus detailed English-language bibliographies and catalogues of Danish-Norwegian West Indian archival material in Denmark, have contributed significantly to making the history more accessible to the population of the islands and Anglophone readers in general.²⁴

The development of Danish research into Danish-Norwegian West Indian history for the period up to emancipation in 1848 has followed the main currents in international historical research, albeit occasionally with some delay.²⁵ The broadest and most comprehensive Danish-language account of Danish-Norwegian West Indian history is still Vore gamle tropekolonier (Our Old Tropical Colonies), edited by historian Johannes Brøndsted and published in 1952–1953.²⁶ Even though there were alternative interpretations of Caribbean history, such as C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)²⁷ and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery (1944)²⁸, the Danish historians contributing to this series adopted the perspective dominating the mainstream history of other European empires. They set out to describe the Danish-Norwegian West Indies from the viewpoint of the colonial power. Thus, the focus is on administrative issues, institutions, legislation, trade and economy. The conditions of the enslaved people and the free Afro-Caribbeans are dealt with in separate sections without much reference to the rest of the narrative. As a result, enslaved and free Afro-Caribbeans appear to be passive victims of European oppression without having any agency of their own. Some of the authors, for instance Fridlev Skrubbeltrang, responsible for the volume covering the period 1848–1880, adopted a thoroughly racist language, encapsulating Africans and their descendants in their supposedly predetermined biological features.²⁹

In the 1960s and 1970s, most Danish historians continued to focus on economic and commercial history. In so far as they reflected upon their approach, they argued that the main trust of their practice was to reach conclusions by inducing them from systematically collected empirical data.³⁰ For instance, historian Svend E. Green-Pedersen made important contributions with his research in the 1970s concerning aspects of the islands’ economy, the demography of the enslaved population, the slave trade and the abolition of the trade.³¹ These approaches borrowed from the social sciences and relied heavily on quantitative methods. With Green-Pedersen, the enslaved became the focus of historical research, though the proper object of the investigation was the character of the market in slaves; that is, the transatlantic slave trading system, in which Africans were primarily considered as enslaved goods. This research agenda, like earlier research, paid little attention to the way enslaved people navigated their conditions in Africa, during their Atlantic crossing, and in the rough world of Danish-Norwegian West Indian slavery.

Parallel to the questions asked by Green-Petersen and others, new initiatives went in the direction of cultural history, although still in a traditional national form. For instance in 1960, the Royal Danish Academy of Art undertook a number of investigations into the architectural history of townhouses built on the islands during Danish-Norwegian times. One of the participants, Inge Mejer Antonsen, in the following years published several articles on paintings, furniture, and interiors from the Euro-Caribbean upper class on the islands.³² Though replete with readings of cultural artefacts, Antonsen’s pieces did little to contextualize the connections between material culture and the processes of enslavement and racialization that shaped Danish-Norwegian West Indian society. In any case, Antonsen’s contributions did not significantly alter the tenor of Danish West Indian historiography. In 1980, the successor of Vore gamle tropekolonier was published as part of the series Danmarks Historie – uden for Danmark (The History of Denmark – outside Denmark). However, in the volume concerning the West Indies, Kolonierne i Vestindien, Ove Hornby continued the tradition of earlier Danish colonial history by focusing on the economy and administration with little interest shown in the enslaved people. On this basis, it is safe to conclude that until 1980 Danish historians predominantly engaged with the Danish-Norwegian West Indies from a Danish imperial perspective.³³

Since the 1980s, however, research has followed a somewhat different trajectory. An ever increasing and more important part of historical research concerning the Danish-Norwegian West Indies has come from US researchers based on the islands themselves or in universities on the North American mainland. In the 1970s and 1980s, historical research became dominated by trained historians based in the Caribbean and also in the US Virgin Islands, such as Isaac Dookhan and Neville Hall.³⁴ Hall in particular contributed greatly to research into slavery in areas that had not been touched upon previously. He addressed issues concerning the social control of the enslaved, the culture of the enslaved and their resistance to the Euro-Caribbean regime. Contrary to many of his predecessors, Hall was able to read Danish and therefore had access to the extensive Danish-language source material.³⁵ In the 1990s, Arnold Highfield, George Tyson, Svend Holsoe and Elizabeth Rezende brought forward this tradition. The first two in particular have contributed a number of books and, most importantly, a series of English translations of key historical sources in Danish.³⁶

From a somewhat different perspective, but with a similar understanding of the important role played by racial slavery in shaping the history of the US Virgin Islands, the mid-1980s and 1990s also saw important contributions from Karen Fog Olwig.³⁷ One example of her work is the book Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St John: Three Centuries of Afro-Caribbean Life (1985). In her approach and presentation, Olwig was strongly inspired by historical research in the USA, and by extension in the Caribbean, in particular the analytical framework developed by Mintz and Price. From an anthropological-historical perspective, she has criticised traditional Danish historical research on the Danish-Norwegian West Indies following Vore gamle tropekolonier for not considering the possibility that the enslaved people might have taken action against their oppressors; that they had an agency of their own.³⁸

Parallel to Olwig’s new approach, research carried out with more traditional approaches since the 1980s have also made important contributions to the history of the enslaved people. In the field of enslaved demography, Hans Christian Johansen has used quantitative methods to show that, just as in most other Caribbean sugar-growing societies, the enslaved population in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies was not able to maintain a stable population through reproduction.³⁹ Also in the 1980s, the same demographic-quantitative approach was used in a number of historical MA theses from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, by, for instance, Jesper Bering Asmussen and Peter Hoxcer Jensen.⁴⁰ From the 1980s onwards, Poul E. Olsen and Erik Gøbel have, respectively, examined subjects like legislation concerning the enslaved, administration and customs, and shipping, slave trade and the triangular trade.⁴¹ From the 1990s, Per Nielsen joined them with contributions on enslaved individuals, naval activities and architectural history.⁴² Nevertheless, it is still possible to argue that these contributions have neglected a sustained interrogation of the way their particular themes were shaped by the dominance of racial slavery in the Caribbean.

From around the turn of the millennium Danish historical research concerning the Danish-Norwegian West Indies has been growing steadily. An important reason has been the Danish National Archives’ (Rigsarkivet) thorough re-cataloguing, repacking and refurbishing of the so-called West Indian Local Archives, which took place from 1999 to 2001.⁴³ An important result of this work was Erik Gøbel’s A Guide to Sources for the History of the Danish West Indies (U.S. Virgin Islands), 1671–1917. The possibilities created by the re-cataloguing sparked off new research in MA theses by a number of Danish history students. Some, including the authors of this introduction, have later completed doctoral dissertations focusing on previously little-explored aspects of the life of the enslaved population in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies; namely their testimonies in the courts, creolization in the Moravian mission and the health care system surrounding the enslaved.⁴⁴ Another initiative based on the re-cataloguing was the ‘St. Croix African Roots Project’ (SCARP), a large demographic database of all Afro-Caribbean inhabitants on St. Croix during the era of Danish-Norwegian rule (1733–1917), created by a consortium headed by George Tyson.⁴⁵ Several of the essays in this issue have utilised data from this project.

As a continuation of the re-cataloguing, the Danish National Archives have, since 2013, been undertaking a large project to improve the accessibility of the records from the Danish-Norwegian West Indies by digitally scanning all its records concerning the colony and developing an online portal for searching the collection and communicating the history of the colony in English and Danish. The records will become available to the public in the beginning of 2017 as part of the commemoration of the centennial of the transfer of the Danish West Indies to the USA in 1917.⁴⁶ This resource will, for the foreseeable future, remain the natural point of departure for new research into the extensive archival resources regarding Danish-Norwegian West Indian history.

Since the turn of the millennium, the majority of scholarly research into the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, be it Caribbean or Danish in origin, has continued along established lines. Time-honoured subjects like personal history,⁴⁷ architecture,⁴⁸ historical archaeology,⁴⁹ photographic documentation,⁵⁰ education⁵¹ and various kinds of local history are still common. Established scholars in the field, such as Gøbel, Highfield, Holsoe, Jensen, Nielsen, Olsen, Rezende, Sebro, Simonsen and Tyson, continue to contribute valuable new research in their fields of expertise.⁵² At the same time, US historian Jon F. Sensbach has revived the older topic of the history of the Moravian mission in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies with his acclaimed biography of the life of Rebecca Freundlich, a free woman of colour. It has underlined the importance of the Moravian mission in understanding the particular significance of Pietist Christianity in the worlds of enslaved and free in the colony and the wider Atlantic world.⁵³

In addition, the field has seen (or is about to see) work exploring the post-emancipation period, such as Rasmus Sielemann’s doctoral dissertation Natures of Conduct, Governmentality and the Danish West Indies (2015) and the dissertation project by Pernille Østergaard Hansen on the Danes who decided to stay in the US Virgin Islands after the transfer in 1917.⁵⁴

Recent research efforts appear to question whether the history of Denmark and its colonies can be reasonably divided into the neat spatial units marking earlier research. Indeed, historians have begun to explore how West Indian (for some, more broadly colonial) connections have shaped Danish history. This focus on Denmark’s Caribbean entanglements is present in Per Nielsen’s book about West Indian migrants in Denmark in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and in the work of Astrid Nonbo Andersen on the politics of memory and reparations in Denmark. A current research project by Louise Sebro on the way colonial ties shaped identities and social networks in Denmark from the early 17th to the early 19th century explores the way colonial experiences influenced social practices in metropolitan Denmark. Likewise, the dissertation project developed by Kristoffer Edelgaard Christiansen, exploring strategies of government across the Danish-Norwegian colonial empire, appears to be questioning the standard geographical units marking much earlier research.⁵⁵

This concern with what we might call ‘entanglement’, i.e. networks, flows and interactions of people and objects across the Atlantic and beyond, thus seems to connect some of the newer research into and incorporating US Virgin Islands history; although researchers do not always agree on the proper ways to understand the scale and importance of the links they establish. This development within Danish colonial history follows recent trends in global and transnational history by adopting an approach that connects research fields and geographical areas instead of separating them. As such, it might be understood as a move away from the increasing fragmentation of historical research of the Caribbean and the Danish-Norwegian West Indies seen during the last three decades. This fragmentation carries the danger of losing the broader perspective, which is particularly dangerous for research into highly international and ‘entangled’ historical societies like the Caribbean. However, the new focus on integrating the spatial units of the Danish-Norwegian empire runs the risk of re-establishing Denmark, understood as the European parts of the empire, as the central object of historical inquiry. This, however, is not a risk run by the essays presented in this issue.

Presentation of the five essays: individual focuses and common trends

The five essays in this special issue investigate previously little-explored aspects of racial slavery, servitude and freedom in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, from the first permanent settlement of the island of St. Thomas in 1672 to emancipation in 1848. The pivotal theme is the development of racial slavery. Through the period 1672–1848, slavery became the foundation of the racially divided Danish-Norwegian West Indian society; the brutal core around which virtually everything else revolved. The essay by Lasse Bendtsen sits right at the core of the slave system, as he investigates the domestic slave trade in the island of St. Croix in 1764–1848. Utilizing data on more than 10,000 slave sales he reveals, amongst other things, that the closing of the transatlantic slave trade did not lead to rising slave prices in the short term, and that Crucian slaveholders participated in the domestic slave market, although not as professional slave traders. The essay by Vibe Martens is also at the core of Danish-Norwegian West Indian slave society, as she investigates the group of so-called Royal Slaves, i.e. enslaved people owned by the king, in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, c. 1792–1848. Her essay traces the demographic development of the group and examines their standard of living and level of skills in search of their particular group identity. Also contributing to our understanding of the way racial slavery developed in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies is the essay by Mirjam Hvid. She explores the Danish indentured servants and convict labourers in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, c. 1671–1755, in search of the intentions and realities behind this early form of bonded labour. It is an essay that helps underline that race always had to be made; it was never a fixed structure, but always a question of continuous reproduction. This important point is also made by the two final essays, by Marie Veisegaard Olsen and Signe Haubroe Flygare. Olsen’s essay deals with the sexual relationships and working lives of free Afro-Caribbean women in the town of Christiansted, St. Croix, c.1780–1820, in order to explore how these women were affected by contemporary discourses of race and gender. Similarly, Flygare investigates the free Afro-Caribbean men in the militia unit, the ‘Free Negro Company’ in Christiansted, c. 1768–1816, in order to identify the social strategies and practices employed by its members to assert their rights in a racially structured Danish-Norwegian West Indian society.

Taken together, the five essays show central points in the development of slavery in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. From an early society in which racial ideologies were emerging and competing with other ways of thinking about difference, and where enslaved Africans and indentured servants were at times despised in similar ways (Hvid), to a society divided by status (Bendtsen and Martens), but also by the distinction between white and black, two only partly overlapping structures which left the free Afro-Caribbeans in a difficult limbo (Olsen and Flygare). Turning to commonalities and differences between the approaches, the five essays can initially be situated in a continuum ranging from demographic and economic approaches (Bendtsen) via social history (Martens and Hvid) to a more constructivist interest in discourses and practices (Olsen and Flygare). However, despite these differences, it is notable that they all focus on groups of people, not individuals or concepts. This approach lends itself well to quantitative analyses, and though such analyses are not equally prominent in all the essays, the quantitative aspect is visible in all of them. As mentioned, the quantitative approach is classical in the field of slave studies going back to the 1970s, yet in the essays the groups investigated are smaller, following the general historiographical trend towards detailed investigations of single subjects in shorter periods. The basic reason for the quantitative approach is still, as back in the 1970s, that the majority of archival material available was recorded by Euro-Caribbean male administrators and planters and seldom allow us to establish an account of the more subjective experiences of the enslaved, the indentured servants or the free Afro-Caribbean women and men. Another focus the essays have in common is agency, yet again the agency of groups rather than of individuals, as is evident in the essays by Martens, Olsen and Flygare. This focus is also characteristic of slave studies going back to the 1970s. Finally, all the essays employ to a greater or lesser extent comparative international perspectives on their topics. This is significant because the many languages of the Caribbean have always been an inherent obstacle to research in the area. As mentioned, one of the basic ideas of this collection is to break down such linguistic barriers.

In conclusion, the five essays in this special issue can be situated firmly within the continuum of classical approaches in Danish-Norwegian West Indian historiography while also paying attention to newer developments within the broader Caribbean historiography. Nonetheless, they all investigate previously unexplored subjects of central importance to the understanding of slavery, servitude and freedom in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. Thus, they demonstrate that there are still plenty of unexplored research subjects in the vast archives of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies.

The Danish West Indies, 1665–1917: a brief overview

The first Danish-Norwegian attempt to gain a foothold in the Caribbean was on the island of St. Thomas in 1665. It was not successful, but in 1672 the Royal Danish West Indian Company (Det Kongelige Octroyerede Danske Vestindiske Compagnie) succeeded in permanently occupying the island. The purpose was to follow the example of other western European nations and establish a colony to produce lucrative West Indian goods like coffee, tobacco, indigo, cotton and sugar. Accordingly, the island was quickly divided into plantations. The knowhow required for plantation production came with English, French and especially Dutch immigrants and the enslaved Africans they brought with them. Together their presence made the Danish-Norwegian West Indian society international from the very beginning.⁵⁶

The Danish-Norwegian presence in the Caribbean was tightly linked to the imperial wars of the 18th century. The first decades from colonisation to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was characterized by a lack of leadership and failing connections with Denmark-Norway. However, the wartime conditions meant an upturn in neutral Danish-Norwegian trade on St. Thomas and its main port Charlotte Amalie. When peace returned, the positive trends were replaced by a recession back to a more normal level, a pattern that was to repeat itself several times in the history of the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. In 1718, the Danish West Indian Company occupied the neighbouring island of St. John (or as it was called then, St. Jan), which was also laid out for plantations and settled by planters and slaves from St. Thomas. The expansion continued until 1733, when one of the most extensive slave rebellions seen in the western hemisphere took place on St. John. The rebels held the island for five months. In the same year, the company bought the nearby island of St. Croix from France. St Croix, or Santa Cruz, was also laid out for plantations, and the towns of Christiansted and Frederiksted were established, but since neither venture capital nor inhabitants could be attracted from Denmark-Norway, immigrant planters from the British West Indies came to dominate this island.⁵⁷

Plantation agriculture was quickly dominated by the production of sugar, but other crops like cotton, indigo and various foodstuffs were also grown. At the same time the workforce, which had initially included indentured servants and convicts from Denmark, gradually became completely dominated by enslaved people imported from Africa.⁵⁸ In 1755 the three islands were inhabited by 14,877 enslaved individuals; in 1797 the number had risen to 32,213 and in 1846, shortly before emancipation, the number had decreased to 21,990.⁵⁹ As the enslaved died faster than they could reproduce, it was necessary to keep importing enslaved people through the transatlantic slave trade in order to maintain the sugar production. Of the approximately 12 million enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic by various nations, about 1% were on Danish-Norwegian ships.⁶⁰ Many of the enslaved transported on Danish-Norwegian ships came from the Danish-Norwegian forts on the Gold Coast in what is today Ghana;yet even more came from other areas along the West African littoral, from Senegambia in the north to Angola in the south.⁶¹

In 1755, the Danish-Norwegian Crown bought the three Danish-Norwegian West Indian islands from the company and initiated a profound change in the administrative system. The following year saw the beginning of The Seven Years War (1756–1763), which again created a boom in Danish-Norwegian West Indian trade. The reason was that Britain’s enemies, France, Spain and the Netherlands, sent their West Indian goods via front men in the Danish-Norwegian West Indian harbours to avoid the British trade embargo. From the Danish-Norwegian West Indies the cargoes were shipped under escort by Danish-Norwegian naval vessels via Copenhagen to the European markets. When the war ended, so did the lucrative trade and a peace depression followed. However, the pattern repeated itself with even greater profits during the American War of Independence (1775–1783), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1801) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). Yet, this profitable exploitation of Denmark-Norway’s neutrality had its price. During the French Revolutionary Wars, the relationship between Denmark-Norway and Britain grew increasingly tense, and a few days before the culmination in the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, the Danish-Norwegian West Indies were occupied by Britain. The war ended in 1801, but not until the beginning of 1802 did Denmark-Norway regain the islands.⁶² The outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, however, caused Britain to occupy the Danish-Norwegian West Indies again in 1807 when Denmark-Norway allied itself with Bonaparte. Only after the end of the war in 1815 did the islands return to Denmark (Norway became independent in 1814).⁶³

Of greater importance to the enslaved majority of the population in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies was the year 1803. This was when the Danish-Norwegian ban against the import of enslaved people took effect after a 10-year grace period in accordance with the abolition law of 1792. However, it was still legal to trade enslaved people internally in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies. The prohibition was caused by humanist and abolitionist movements and by political and economic considerations, since the British parliament had long been discussing a similar ban. This was eventually implemented in 1807. The prohibition of the slave trade contributed to a changing configuration of government in the colony. Planters and colonial administrators were forced to begin to consider how they could preserve the health and lives of enslaved men, women and children.

During the years 1815–1820, the prosperity in the now Danish West Indies reached its zenith. The price of sugar on the world markets was still as high as it had been during the wars, which benefited the planters immensely;⁶⁴ however, many of the planters had generated massive debts, which they could only pay instalments on if the income from sugar remained high. Consequently, the drastic fall in sugar prices in the 1820s sent many planters into bankruptcy, and a number of plantations reverted to the Danish state as the planters’ main creditor. The economic situation improved somewhat towards the end of the 1830s and in the 1840s, yet at the same time the soil on the main sugar-producing island of St. Croix started to show signs of exhaustion and decreasing yields. Furthermore, there was an increasing shortage of labour because the mortality in the enslaved population remained slightly higher than the fertility.⁶⁵

In the years between 1848 and the sale of the islands to the USA in 1917 conditions did not improve. Emigration and high mortality, combined with declining world market prices on sugar, contributed to the growing tensions among the islands’ social and economic groups. Following emancipation in 1848, the Danish West Indian government introduced harsh labour and vagrancy laws that aimed at securing sufficient labour for the plantations, but, despite attempts to import workers from other Caribbean islands and India, the shortage of labour became chronic. Instead, the result of the labour regime was widespread protest and strike in 1878, during the so-called Fireburn insurrection. The events of 1878 paved the way for reforms of the labour regulations, but sugar production continued to decrease and made for a permanent deficit on the colonial finances. The Danish government began to view the islands as an economic burden and considered potential buyers. In 1917, Denmark sold the islands to the USA and they became the US Virgin Islands.⁶⁵⁶⁶⁶⁶

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niklas Thode Jensen

Niklas Thode Jensen (b. 1973) is an Archivist at the Danish National Archives, Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a PhD from the Saxo Institute, Department of History at the University of Copenhagen and has held a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His research focuses on the history of science and medicine in the former Danish colonies in India and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among his publications are The Tranquebarian Society: Science, enlightenment and useful knowledge in the Danish-Norwegian East Indies, 1768–1813 (Scand. Jour. Hist, vol. 40,4, 2015) and For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848 (Copenhagen, 2012). Address: Rigsdagsgaarden 9 DK-1218 Copenhagen, Denmark. [e-mail: [email protected]]

Gunvor Simonsen

Gunvor Simonsen (b. 1971) is Associate Professor of history at the SAXO Institute, Department of History at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of the Danish Atlantic world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among her publications are Belonging in Africa: Frederik Svane and Christian Protten on the Gold Coast in the Eighteenth Century (Itinerario, vol. 39, 1, 2015) and Northern Europe and the Atlantic World (Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2011).

Notes

1 Brimnes, Ipsen, and Simonsen, ‘Letter from the Guest Editors’, 5.

2 Historically, the islands have been referred to as the Danish West Indies, even though they belonged to the double monarchy of Denmark-Norway in 1672–1814. In 1814, Norway became independent from Denmark and consequently the islands were rightly the Danish West Indies in 1814–1917.

3 Miller, ‘Historical Approaches to Slavery’, 394–5.

4 The most influential books with this approach are Curtin, Two Jamaicas; Hall, Free Jamaica; Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands; Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery; Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery.

5 Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society.

6 Scarano, ‘Slavery and Emancipation’, 263.

7 Palmié, Slave Cultures, xvii–xviii, xx–xxi.

8 Miller, ‘Historical Approaches to Slavery’, 394.

9 Fogel and Engerman’s controversial book Time on the Cross (1974) has been made the scare example of the cliometric method.

10 Dorsey, Slave Traffic, 10–11.

11 Scarano, ‘Slavery and Emancipation’, 264–5.

12 Palmié, Slave Cultures, xx–xxi.

13 Barros, Diptee, and Trotman, Beyond Fragmentation.

14 Craton, Testing the Chains.

15 Ghachem, The Old Regime; Dubois, Avengers of the New World; Gaspar and Geggus, A Turbulent Time.

16 Costa, Growns of Glory.

17 Sweet, Recreating Africa; Lovejoy, Identity in the Shadow; Thornton, A Cultural History. See also http://www.slavevoyages.org/about/history (accessed 29 May 2016).

18 Brown, ‘Spiritual Terror’; Brown, The Reaper’s Garden; Paton and Forde, Obeah and Other Powers; Paton, The Cultural Politics of Obeah.

19 Beckles, Centering Woman; Moitt, Women and Slavery; Morgan, Laboring Women; Garraway, The Libertine Colony; Scully and Paton, Gender and Slave Emancipation.

20 Simonsen, ‘Northern Europe and the Atlantic World’.

21 See, for instance, Bjørn, ‘Danmarks kolonihistorie skal frem i lyset’; Kulager, ‘Fortrænger Danmark sin historie’; Blüdnikow, ‘Danmarks sorte kapitel’.

22 See, for instance, Higman, ‘Danish West Indian Slavery’, 1.

23 See, for instance, Olwig, ‘Narrating deglobalization’, 207–22.

24 Oldendorp, C.G.A. Oldendorp’s history; Highfield and Tyson, Slavery in the Danish West Indies; Haagensen, Description of the Island; Highfield, Observations; Highfield, J. L. Carstens’ St. Thomas; Schmidt, Various Remarks; Gøbel, A Guide to Sources; Highfield, Hans West’s Accounts.

25 On the general historiography of Caribbean slavery, see, for instance, Scarano, ‘Slavery and Emancipation’, 233–5; Higman, ‘Introduction’, 16; Miller, ‘Historical Approaches to Slavery’, 394–5.

26 Hoxcer Jensen et al., Dansk kolonihistorie, 10–12, 29–30.

27 James, The Black Jacobins.

28 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.

29 Simonsen, ‘Nye og gamle perspektiver’, 4–5; Skrubbeltrang, ‘Dansk Vestindien 1848–1880’, 159.

30 Hoxcer Jensen et al., Dansk kolonihistorie, 29–30.

31 Higman, ‘Danish West Indian Slavery’, 9.

32 Bredsdorff, ‘Kunstakademiets studier’, 405–13; Antonsen, ‘Møbler og boligkultur’, 187–93.

33 Hoxcer Jensen et al., Dansk kolonihistorie, 11–15.

34 Rouse-Jones, ‘Historiography of the Leeward Islands’, 540.

35 Higman, ‘Danish West Indian Slavery’, 8–12.

36 Concerning the English translations, see above. Other important books are: Tyson and Highfield, The Danish West Indian Slave Trade; Tyson and Highfield, The Kamina Folk; Tyson, Bondmen and Freedmen; Highfield and Tyson, Negotiating Enslavement.

37 Rouse-Jones, ‘Historiography of the Leeward Islands’, 542.

38 Simonsen, ‘Nye og gamle perspektiver’, 7.

39 Higman, ‘Danish West Indian Slavery’, 9.

40 Asmussen, Slavedemografi. Hoxcer Jensen, From Serfdom to Fireburn.

41 For instance Olsen, ‘De dansk-vestindiske øer’; Olsen, ‘Slavery and the Law’; Olsen, ‘I alle Maader’; Gøbel, ‘Danish Trade to the West Indies’; Gøbel, Det danske slavehandelsforbud; Gøbel, ‘The Danish Edict’.

42 See, for instance, Nielsen, Flåden og Dansk Vestindien; Nielsen, ‘Slaver og frie indbyggere’; Nielsen, ‘Et pakhus’; Nielsen, ‘Enslaved Africans in Denmark’.

43 Gøbel, A Guide to Sources, 60.

44 Simonsen, Slave Stories; Sebro, Mellem afrikaner og kreol; Jensen, For slavernes sundhed.

45 http://stx.visharoots.org/scarp.html (accessed 29 May 2016).

46 http://www.virgin-islands-history.org/en/ (accessed 29 May 2016).

47 For instance, contributions by Olsen and Highfield in Highfield and Tyson, Negotiating Enslavement.

48 Dahl and de Fine Licht, Kunstakademiets vestindienstudier.

49 See, for instance, Lenik, ‘Considering Multiscalar Approaches’; Kellar, The Construction; Sichler, Historic Period Foodways.

50 Rezende and Walbom, St. Croix, Historic Photos.

51 Johansen, Skoler i palmernes skygge.

52 See Gøbel, Vestindisk-guineisk Kompagni; Highfield and Tyson, Negotiating Enslavement; Jensen, ‘Safeguarding Slaves’; Jensen, ‘“…For the Benefit of the Planters’; Jensen, For the Health of the Enslaved; Sebro, ‘The 1733 Slave Revolt’; Sebro, ‘Freedom, Autonomy and Independence’; Simonsen, ‘Magic, Obeah and Law’.

53 Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival. Other recent contributions to Moravian history in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies are, for instance, Richards, ‘Distant Garden’; Blouet, ‘Transitions in Moravian Burial’.

54 Sielemann, ‘Natures of Conduct’; the dissertation project of Pernille Østergaard Hansen at the European University Institute, Florence (Italy), (Re)producing a postcolonial diaspora space in the Caribbean. The Danes who stayed on the U.S. Virgin Islands, 1917–1945, is briefly described at http://www.eui.eu/DepartmentsAndCentres/HistoryAndCivilization/People/Researchers/2011-2012.aspx (accessed 29 May 2016).

55 Nonbo Andersen, ‘“We Have Reconquered the Islands”’; Nielsen, Fru Jensen; the postdoctoral research project of Louise Sebro at the Danish National Museum, Kolonitilknytning som social identitet: Selviscenesættelse blandt rejsende og hjemmeblivende med tilknytning til de dansk-norske kolonier 1680–1930, is briefly described at http://natmus.dk/footermenu/organisation/forskning-og-formidling/nyere-tid-og-verdens-kulturer/etnografisk-samling/kolonitilknytning-som-social-identitet/ (accessed 29 May 2016); the dissertation project of Kristoffer Edelgaard Christensen at the Department of History at the University of Lund, An Empire between ‘East’ and ‘West’ – Global Governmentalities of Subalternity in the Colonial and European World of Denmark, c. 1780–1849, is briefly described at http://www.hist.lu.se/en/person/KristofferEdelgaardChristensen (accessed 29 May 2016).

56 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 31–8.

57 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 47–61, 65–7, 75–87, 101–6.

58 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 41, 76.

59 Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies, 5.

60 http://www.slavevoyages.org/about/history (accessed 29 May 2016).

61 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 127, 184.

62 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 110–16, 145–6, 151–4, 157–8, 204–11.

63 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 180–9, 255–61.

64 Sveistrup, Bidrag til de tidligere, 79.

65 Vibæk, ‘Dansk Vestindien, 1755–1848’, 312–29.

66 Hornby, ‘Kolonierne i Vestindien’, 278–9, 283–4, 289–93, 380–3.