Colonial coethnics, including settlers: John L. Hennessey, Janne Lahti, ‘Nordics in Motion: Transimperial Mobilities and Global Experiences of Nordic Colonialism’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 51, 3, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Colonial coethnics, including settlers: John L. Hennessey, Janne Lahti, ‘Nordics in Motion: Transimperial Mobilities and Global Experiences of Nordic Colonialism’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 51, 3, 2023

08Jun23

Excerpt: This special issue investigates Nordic individuals in transimperial spaces. It tracks Nordics on the move from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as they crossed imperial boundaries, and connected, networked, and operated in different spaces around the world within the framework of European global expansion. Though coming from countries with few or no formal colonies of their own, Nordic people were not distant observers but actively participated in the co-production of colonial ideology, knowledge, and rule from North America and the Caribbean in the west to the Dutch East Indies and China in the east, and from Africa in the south to Sápmi in the north. Nordics in motion sought personal gain, they crossed spaces within and between empires for work and leisure, and their mobility took place independently and as part of institutional settings. And in the case of the Sámi they also engaged in involuntary crossings. By zooming in on Nordics in motion these articles not only expand the cast of colonial projects from the classic ‘coloniser’ – ‘colonised’ binary, but develop a more complicated and nuanced conceptualisation of colonial mobilities and therefore of colonial globality, meaning the asymmetrical relationships created by colonial empires that structured global integration, cultural flows, and projects of modernisation. Aligning with the recent imperative to blur distinctions between national and colonial histories to better comprehend the legacies of Western colonialism in the modern world and within a genuinely global perspective, these articles build on and connect to transimperial history and Nordic colonial history, two fields that have expanded more or less concurrently but in relative isolation from each other.

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