ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 situates Danish colonialism inside a more general contemporary perspective and goes on to discuss the major works about Danish colonial history with particular reference to the understanding of the Danish presence in the colonial world. Focus here is on the two major post-imperial works about the colonial period in the tropics, Vore gamle tropekolonier [Our Old Tropical Colonies] (1953) and Thorkild Hansen’s slave trilogy (1967–70). Where the former is dominated by nostalgic hindsight even if it also allows a limited space for critical perspectives, Hansen’s trilogy represents the only major critical work on Danish colonialism. Both works are of course now historical and will be read both as an expression of a cultural-historical contextualisation at the time they were written, but also as colonial-historical readings raising questions about contemporary perspectives.
