GLI SVEDESI A SAINT-BARTHÉLEMY TRA ECONOMIA SCHIAVISTA E CODICE NERO VON ROSENSTEIN (SEC. XVIII-XIX) (original) (raw)
Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sweden too, in the wake of the great European powers, attempted to build a colonial empire. Guided on the Atlantic routes by the expert hands of Dutch merchants, the Swedes founded in Delaware their first settled possession in the New World, Fort Christina (1638). The colonial drive led the Swedes to enter the great circuit of the slave trade, building several fortifications to hold slaves departing for the New World on the coast of modern-day Ghana. In the 1650s, the Swedes lost these outposts to the Danes and Dutch. Swedish imperial ambitions would remain silent until the end of the eighteenth century. In 1784, in exchange for some grants given to the French in the port of Gothenburg, King Gustav III received the possibility of colonizing the island of Saint-Barthélemy. The Swedes attempted to turn this small island, not far from the Greater Antilles, into a hub in the Caribbean trade and slave dealing between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To manage a colony partly founded on the exploitation of slave labour, the Swedish authorities also resorted to the promulgation of slave laws, also known as Black Codes. A clear example is the Von Rosenstein Code, enacted in 1787.
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The Swedish colony St Barthélemy, established in 1785 and under Swedish rule until 1878, was an attractive island for neutral transit trade and for a large number of free people of color, many of whom became naturalized Swedish subjects. As subjects under the Swedish crown, they sought political rights through petitions, stressing their place within the colonial system. Free people of color were also connected to the Greater Caribbean and the mobility of the free port allowed for inter-colonial networks. The Swedish Governor Johan Norderling compared the activity of free people of color in the Swedish colony with other colonies, as well as Haiti and the USA. For him, free people of color throughout the Caribbean were grouped as belonging to the same community. Thus, the examples of activity in other colonies exemplified the dangers of further political rights in the Swedish colony. He also used the Caribbean network to communicate with other French, Spanish, and Dutch governors about a revolutionary plot planned by free people of color. Yet despite being nodal points within a network for planning subversive plots, St Barthélemy was not a particularly radical space in terms of independence or antislavery, but rather a space facilitating subversive actions between empires.
Our Side of the Water: Political Culture in the Swedish colony of St Barthélemy 1800–1825
The small island of St Barthélemy was a Swedish colony 1784–1878 and saw its greatest population growth and trade during the turn of the nineteenth century. This was because of Gustavia, the Swedish founded free port, which attracted mariners from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Their goal was to become Swedish subjects, as Swedish neutrality provided a benefit during the various wars at this time between France, Great Britain and the United States. As these mariners changed their national allegiance from their country of origin to Sweden, questions about their political rights emerged. This conflict, as well as many other local and global issues, was discussed in various mediums. I have examined petitions, the newspaper The Report of Saint Bartholomew and discusses within the council, to create an understanding of how political expression was formed by the population, as well as controlled by Swedish administrators. This analysis has been performed through an intersectional framework considering gender, race and ethnicity. My study shows that while most native and naturalized Swedes believed in input from the population, they had different perceptions of what the purpose of this input was. The Swedish administration saw the political participation of the naturalized population as purely advisory, without any obligation to perform their wishes, which the population resented and protested. Gender played a significant role in the formation of political expression, as masculinity was essential to the identity of white men and free men of colour as political subjects. Yet ethnicity, in terms of place of birth, had no significant impact among the free population's political identity, although it did render them politically unreliable in the eye of nation Swedish administration.
SLAVERY AND SLAVE CODES IN OVERSEAS EMPIRES
Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking , 2020
The paper proposed aims to analyze the slavery legislation born between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the so-called Black Codes laws-enacted in all the greatest colonial powers of the Old Continent-which regulated life and transportation of slaves in the colonies. Spain, Portugal, England and France, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, created legislative codes dedicated to the slave's management in the colonies, which regulated all aspects of their life: from religion to marriage, from cohabitation to imprisonment, from crimes to corporal punishment. Particularly widespread in the Caribbean colonies of the seventeenth century, these slave laws were soon in force in almost all American colonies of European monarchies, forming the legal basis on which the slave societies of the European empires were founded. In the wake of the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French slave codes, even states that had a marginal role in the process of overseas colonization enacted similar slave codes. It was the case, for example, of Denmark and Sweden that in the management of some of their ultramarine possessions adopted slave codes inspired by those of the greatest colonizing powers.
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The Atlantic Slave Trade to 1650
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