ABSTRACT

The Scandinavian Early Modern World explores the early modern colonialism, globalization, and modernity in Scandinavia, along with its colonies, and its role in the shaping of the modern world.

Scandinavians played an active role in early modern globalization and were present as traders, as colonialists, and as consumers in competition and collaboration with indigenous agents and other colonial actors in America, Africa, and India. This story is rarely told. The joint study of history, historical landscape, and material culture, from a Scandinavian vantage point, provides for a comprehensive and original interpretation of the birth of globalization and modernity. New perspectives and data are presented, deepening and challenging our knowledge of the long seventeenth century. In-depth analysis of case studies, encompassing four continents and their material entanglement, makes this book a unique contribution to historical archaeology.

The Scandinavian Early Modern World aims at students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, and history, alike, taking interest in the global connections of the long seventeenth century and the role of Scandinavia in that process.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Local matters, global things: Scandinavia and the birth of the global world

chapter 2|29 pages

At sea to distant waters

Silver, spices, whales, and the making of a Scandinavian, Arctic, and Indian world

chapter 4|43 pages

The alluring North

Tying Northern Scandinavia to the global world

chapter 5|37 pages

In America and back

Connecting the Atlantic

chapter 6|37 pages

On the Gold Coast

Material, political, and social entanglement between West Africa and Scandinavia

chapter 7|22 pages

People and colonial spaces

The Caribbean and Scandinavia revisited

chapter 8|13 pages

Toxic modernity

Connecting past and present