Navigating Colonial Orders

Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania

Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781782385394
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782385400
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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 contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction — Norwegians Navigating Colonial Orders in Africa and Oceania
• Chapter 1 — Interconnecting the British Empire: Swedish and Norwegian Shipping to South Africa, 1850–1914
• Chapter 2 — Long-Haul Tramp Trade and Norwegian Sailing Ships in Africa, Australia and the Pacific, 1850–1920: Captain Haave's Voyages
• Chapter 3 — Liminal but Omnipotent: Thesen & Co. – Norwegian Migrants in the Cape Colony
• Chapter 4 — Business Communication in Colonial Times: The Norway-East Africa Trading Company in Zanzibar, 1895–1925
• Chapter 5 — 'Three Black Labourers Did the Job of Two Whites': African Labourers in Modern Norwegian Whaling
• Chapter 6 — The Consular Affairs Issue and Colonialism
• Chapter 7 — Norwegian Shipping and Landfall in the South Sea in the Age of Sail
• Chapter 8 — Adventurous Adaptability in the South Sea: Norwegians in 'the Terrible Solomons', ca. 1870–1930
• Chapter 9 — Norwegians in the Cook Islands: The Legacy of Captain Reinert G. Jonassen (1866–1915)
• Chapter 10 — From Adventure to Industry and Nation Making: The History of a Norwegian Sugar Plantation in Hawai'i
• Chapter 11 — Scandinavians in Colonial Trading Companies and Capital-Intensive Networks: The Case of Christian Thams
• Chapter 12 — Colonialism in Norwegian and Portuguese: Madal in Mozambique
• Chapter 13 — Norwegian Investors and Their Agents in Colonial Kenya
• Chapter 14 — Scandinavian Agents and Entrepreneurs in the Scramble for Ethnographica during Colonial Expansion in the Congo
• Afterword — Her og na (Here and Now): History and the Idea of Globalization
• Contributors
• Index