Insinuations: Framing a New Understanding of Colonialism

Abstract

Colonialism matters. Defined following Osterhammel (1995) as a system of domination, processes of colonialism emerge in this volume as implicated in even the smallest of individual actions in the early modern world. Colonialism has long been employed as the framework for understanding the process of establishing settler societies, but for many of the authors in this collection, colonialism also encompasses a range of more ambiguous if undeniably asymmetrical power relations between the Swedish and the Saami, or the Swedish and the forest Finns, or the peoples of Denmark and Greenland. Here the authors are overtly challenging accepted narratives that downplay the colonial character of these regional relationships. Particularly confounding accepted models of colonial relations is the case of Iceland, as critically explored by Gavin Lucas and Angelos Parigoris (Chap. 6), and by Kristin Loftsdóttir and Gísli Pálsson (Chap. 3). Even the Swedish ironworker labouring at the forge was an active participant in a colonial system, as the iron bars he produced to order were shipped to Africa and exchanged for human lives. Swedish iron was also shipped to Birmingham and transformed into guns sent to Africa to facilitate enslavement, arriving in a wooden box made by a European joiner that would later be repurposed as a coffin by a West African craftsman, as considered by Chris Evans and Gören Rydén (Chap. 4) and Holger Weiss (Chap. 14). As this volume eloquently demonstrates, nowhere, and no one, was untouched by the forces of colonialism in the early modern world. Welcome or not, recognised or not, colonialism insinuated itself into everyday lives.