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The Scandinavian Early Modern World explores the early modern colonialism, globalization, and modernity in Scandinavia, along with its colonies, and its role in the shaping of the modern world. Itaims at students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology and history, alike.
In Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians present case studies that focus on the scope and impact of Scandinavian colonial expansion in the North, Africa, Asia and America as well as within Scandinavia itsself. They discuss early modern thinking and theories made valid and developed in early modern Scandinavia that justified and propagated participation in colonial expansion. The volume demonstrates a broad and comprehensive spectrum of archaeological, anthropological and historical research, which engages with a variation of themes relevant for the understanding of Danish and Swedish col...
Historical archaeology studies once relied upon a binary view of colonialism: colonizers and colonized, the colonial period and the postcolonial period. The contributors to this volume scrutinize imperialism and expansionism through an alternative lens that rejects simple dualities and explores the variously gendered, racialized, and occupied peoples of a multitude of faiths, desires, associations, and constraints. Colonialism is not a phase in the chronology of a people but a continuous phenomenon that spans the Old and New Worlds. Most important, the contributors argue that its impacts—and, in some instances, even the same processes set in place by the likes of Columbus—are ongoing. Inciting a critical examination of the lasting consequences of ancient and modern colonialism on descendant communities, this wide-ranging volume includes essays on Roman Britain, slavery in Brazil, and contemporary Native Americans. In its efforts to define the scope of colonialism and the comparability of its features, this collection challenges the field to go beyond familiar geographical and historical boundaries and draws attention to unfolding colonial futures.
The Scandinavian Early Modern World explores the early modern colonialism, globalization, and modernity in Scandinavia, along with its colonies, and its role in the shaping of the modern world. Scandinavians played an active role in early modern globalization and were present as traders, as colonialists, and as consumers in competition and collaboration with indigenous agents and other colonial actors in America, Africa, and India. This story is rarely told. The joint study of history, historical landscape, and material culture, from a Scandinavian vantage point, provides for a comprehensive and original interpretation of the birth of globalization and modernity. New perspectives and data are presented, deepening and challenging our knowledge of the long seventeenth century. In-depth analysis of case studies, encompassing four continents and their material entanglement, makes this book a unique contribution to historical archaeology. The Scandinavian Early Modern World aims at students and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, and history, alike, taking interest in the global connections of the long seventeenth century and the role of Scandinavia in that process.
This book approaches the Arctic from a postcolonial perspective, taking into account both its historical status as a colonised region and new, economically driven forms of colonialism. One catchphrase currently being used to describe these new colonialisms is 'the scramble for the Arctic'. This cross-disciplinary study, featuring contributions from an international team of experts in the field, offers a set of broadly postcolonial perspectives on the European Arctic, which is taken here as ranging from Greenland and Iceland in the North Atlantic to the upper regions of Norway and Sweden in the European High North. While the contributors acknowledge the renewed scramble for resources that characterises the region, it also argues the need to 'unscramble' the Arctic, wresting it away from its persistent status as a fixed object of western control and knowledge. Instead, the book encourages a reassertion of micro-histories of Arctic space and territory that complicate western grand narratives of technological progress, politico-economic development, and ecological 'state change'. It will be of interest to scholars of Arctic Studies across all disciplines.
The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions is a landmark collection drawing together the history of the Arctic and Antarctica from the earliest times to the present. Structured as a series of thematic chapters, an international team of scholars offer a range of perspectives from environmental history, the history of science and exploration, cultural history, and the more traditional approaches of political, social, economic, and imperial history. The volume considers the centrality of Indigenous experience and the urgent need to build action in the present on a thorough understanding of the past. Using historical research based on methods ranging from archives and print culture to archaeology and oral histories, these essays provide fresh analyses of the discovery of Antarctica, the disappearance of Sir John Franklin, the fate of the Norse colony in Greenland, the origins of the Antarctic Treaty, and much more. This is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of our planet.
This book explores how the Danish authorities governed the colonized population in Greenland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two competing narratives of colonialism dominate in Greenland as well as Denmark. One narrative portrays the Danish colonial project as ruthless and brutal extraction of a vulnerable indigenousness people; the other narrative emphasizes almost exclusively the benevolent aspects of Danish rule in Greenland. Rather than siding with one of these narratives, this book investigates actual practices of colonial governance in Greenland with an outlook to the extensive international scholarship on colonialism and post-colonialism. The chapters address the intimate connections between the establishment of an ethnographic discourse and the colonial techniques of governance in Greenland. Thereby the book provides important nuances to the understanding of the historical relationship between Denmark and Greenland and links this historical trajectory to the present negotiations of Greenlandic identity.
The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and retu...
Decolonial Sweden exposes the social and political relevance of European colonialism to Sweden and its place in the world. It is a book that points to why and how Sweden is to be included in global decolonial struggles. Sweden is often displayed as an ethnoracially homogenous country without any colonial history: an open and tolerant human rights champion, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and in solidarity with the Global South. For over twenty years, authors Michael McEachrane and Louis Faye have been challenging this account, pointing to Sweden’s involvement in colonial histories and legacies, its racialized nationhood, and embedded colonial structures. This important new book reflects a deco...
Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music offers a detailed exploration of Nordic ritual folk music, a music scene focused on the revival of ancient folkways and archaic music that has found remarkable popularity around the globe. Once the domain of Viking reenactors and neopagan practitioners, the niche sonic and visual aesthetics of this music have found widespread visibility through a new generation of popular films, television series, and video games. The authors argue that many of these musical and media products connect with longstanding cultural attitudes about the Nordic region that conceive of it as wild, exotic, and dangerous, while also being a place of honor, community, and virtue. As such, the Nordic region and its music often becomes a vessel for reactionary escapes from all manner of modern discontentment. However, the authors also posit that spending time re-creating the music of an imaginary past offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.