ABSTRACT
Sweden acquired the West Indian island of Saint Barthélemy as part of a Treaty signed by King Gustav III and the French King on 1 July 1784. It was the realisation of long-standing Swedish ambitions to place the country on the map of the European colonial powers in the Atlantic world. 1 Previous plans to establish a Swedish plantation colony either on one of the lesser islands or on the South American mainland – Tobago, Puerto Rico or Barima – had hitherto failed as neither the Spanish nor the French rulers were inclined to transfer their sovereignty rights over the areas to the Swedish Crown. 2 In addition, several Swedish merchant houses endeavoured to participate in Atlantic trade, some of them even in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and there were the utopian ideas by the philanthropic and Swedenborgian circle around Carl Bernhard Wadström to establish a settler colony in West Africa, 3 but none of these projects were successful and the Atlantic world remained closed for Swedish vessels until the latter half of the eighteenth century. The American War of Independence, however, changed the situation. Sweden was the first non-belligerent nation to recognise the independence of the former British North American colonies. The main ambition was to open a new market for the export of Swedish iron in North America, while Göteborg was projected to become the main entrepôt for the North American export trade to the Baltic and Russia. If direct trade between Sweden and North America could not be established, an island in the Caribbean could serve as an outlet for Swedish, Caribbean and North American products. 4
