ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the address the image of benevolent Danish colonialism, as presented by various actors over several centuries, which contribute to a larger discourse on Danish exceptionalism. In the early eighteenth century, Poul Egede, the son of the first missionary to the Greenlanders, Hans Egede sets the scene for Danish self-promotion as a benevolent and caring colonial power. Poul Egede's moral condemnation of those who sell their own people exonerates the Danish slave trade, which was the sixth or seventh largest in the world at the time. Determining the Danish colonisation as humane means seeing it as non-violent in a subjective sense. Thomsen is critiquing the claims to the Danish self-perception as humane colonisers per se, and revealing ulterior motives behind such a self-presentation. Within the objective violence enacted by the Danish colonisers on the Greenlandic population, race holds a privileged position.
