Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; timber merchants on Zanzibar’ coffee farmers in Kenya; and King Leopold’s footmen in Congo. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers. It charts the entrepreneurial routes chosen by various Norwegians and the places they ventured, while demonstrating the importance of recognizing the complicity of such “non-colonial colonials” for understanding the complexity of colonial history.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Preface
Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland
List of Contributors
Introduction: Norwegians Navigating Colonial Orders in Africa and Oceania: an Introduction
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
Chapter 1. Swedish and Norwegian Shipping to South Africa 1850-1914
Knut M. Nygaard
Chapter 2. Long Haul Tramp Trade and Norwegian Sailing Ships in
Africa, Australia and the Pacific, 1850-1920: Captain Haave’s Voyages
Gustav Sætra
Chapter 3. Liminal but Omnipotent: Thesen & Co. – Norwegian Migrants in the Cape Colony
Erlend Eidsvik
Chapter 4. Business Communication in Colonial Times: The Norway-East Africa Trading Company in Zanzibar 1895-1925
Anne K. Bang
Chapter 5.
‘Three Black Labourers Did the Job of Two Whites.’ African Labourers in Modern Norwegian Whaling
Dag Ingemar Børresen
Chapter 6. The Consular Affairs Issue and Colonialism
Svein Ivar Angell
Chapter 7. Norwegian Shipping and Landfall in the South Sea in the Age of Sail
Edvard Hviding
Chapter 8. Adventurous Adaptability in the South Sea: Norwegians in ‘the Terrible Solomons’, ca. 1870-1930
Edvard Hviding
Chapter 9. Norwegians in the Cook Islands: The legacy of Captain Reinert G. Jonassen (1866-1915) – Trader, Musician, Navigator, Diplomat and Good Samaritan
Jon Tikivanotau Michael Jonassen
Chapter 10. From Adventure to Industry and Nation-making: The History of a Norwegian Sugar Plantation in Hawai‘i
Knut M. Rio
Chapter 11. Scandinavians in Colonial Trading Companies and Capital-intensive Networks: The Case of Christian Thams
Elsa Reiersen
Chapter 12. Colonialism in Norwegian and Portuguese: The Plantation Madal in Mozambique
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen
Chapter 13. Norwegian Investors and Their Agents in Colonial Kenya
Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland
Chapter 14. Scandinavian Agents and Entrepreneurs in the Scramble for Ethnographica during Colonial Expansion in the Congo
Espen Wæhle
Afterword
Peter Vale
Index
About the author
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His articles have appeared in Journal of Southern African Studies, Social Analysis, Anthropology Today, and Urban Studies. He is the author of Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique (Berghahn Books, 2015, Open Access) and co-editor of Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval with Bruce Kapferer (Berghahn Books, 2009).
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