Postcolonial Norway

(Post)Colonial Norway traces Norwegians' entanglement with European and also U.S. colonialism from the 1700s down to the recent present. Through a longue durée approach, the volume presents a selection of historical cases and contexts. The episodes treated in this volume include missionaries trained in Trondheim in the 1700s who contributed to the process often described as the colonization of Sápmi in the Arctic, and Norwegians who participated in the transatlantic slave trade as part of Denmark-Norway. Norwegians were active knowledge producers when it came to presenting themselves as white settlers at the Chicago Fair in 1893, exhibiting colonial subjects at the "Congo Exhibit" in Oslo, and, later, Norwegians were avid collectors of human remains from the Pacific Islands to be stored at the University of Oslo. This longer colonial legacy continues to shape contemporary imaginaries of Norwegianness as white, and remains embedded in urban spaces - for instance in Møhlenpris in Bergen, named after a seventeenth-century merchant whose commercial activities can be tied to transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation economy.(Post)Colonial Norway should be read as a contribution to the historiography of Nordic colonialism and European colonialism "from the margins."