In 1819, the right to party –dancing, gambling, and general revelry –became a political issue in the Swedish colony of Saint-Barthélemy. The Swedish governor, fearing that such nocturnal activities would lead to disorder and rebellion, imposed strong regulations on dancing and gambling. However, the colony’s inhabitants, most of which were not Swedish but had French-or British-Caribbean backgrounds, furiously defended their dancing, arguing that the regulations would “make them stoop almost to the level of their slaves”. In fact, by restricting dancing, the Swedish colonial government with its Nordic views on social order, had taken a shot at one of the defining practices of Whiteness in the colonial Caribbean. Dancing was such a vital element of performing white creolity in the Caribbean that it became almost a caricature; it was closely linked to libertinage and colonial exploitation. It was omnipresent in travel reports, observations, pamphlets and letters. The problem of dancing in Saint-Barthélemy points towards a phenomenon that is observable across all kinds of sources from the Caribbean: That of conflicting notions of Europeanness and, in consequence, Whiteness. While white creole colonials all over the Caribbean called themselves “Europeans” and aimed to be recognized as such, they simultaneously developed practices of a specific Caribbean Whiteness, deeply intertwined with slavery, as well as notions of environment and climate. Very often, these ideas and practices would clash with those imported by those born and raised in Europe. This paper wants to deconstruct what “Europeanness” meant for “Whiteness” in the tropical colonies in and around the Age of Revolutions.

After the Spanish-American War (1898) and Cuban independence (1902), North American boosters began to promote Cuba as a new frontier in the expansion of U.S. power in the Caribbean. Colonies of North American settlers mushroomed throughout the island, particularly on the Isle of Pines and in the eastern provinces. Many hoped these colonies would ultimately help the U.S. to annex Cuba. But not all colonists were Anglo Americans: there were also German, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, and Finnish settlers. How did these non-American colonists map onto the broader U.S.-American colonization effort? How can focusing on the Nordic settlers specifically complicate our understanding of “settler colonialism” in the Americas? This paper explores these questions by focusing on two working-class Finns who moved to Cuba in 1907: William Keskinen of Omaja Colony and Peter Neska of the Chicago Colony. Keskinen and Neska were part of a larger group of Finnish socialist immigrants who moved to Cuba in 1904–1908 to build co-operative agricultural colonies. While their compatriots left disillusioned, Keskinen and Neska persevered and prospered. They became relatively successful farmers but did not abandon their socialist convictions. Yet, ironically, the socialist revolution of 1959 became their undoing. Neska died in Cuba soon after the revolution, but his children escaped the island for Florida, as did Keskinen and his family. Through newspaper articles and letters, this paper examines how Neska and Keskinen sought to accommodate their socialist and anti-imperialist convictions with their lives as settlers in U.S.-dominated Cuba.

This paper will focus on the Chinese merchant and interpreter known as Afock (阿福) –or ChoyChun Ng[1](蔡鎮伍, b. ca 1763) –and his journey to Sweden in 1786. By using Afock as an example, it seeks to show that early Chinese visitors to Europe had far more individual agency than what previous research has shown. It also explores the experiences of overseas Chinese from a Nordic perspective, which I argue can complement the dominant perspective of (mainly) Anglophone scholarship. The paper offers a critical view of the traditional narrative of the asymmetrical power relations between non-European visitors to Europe and their local hosts. Travellers like Afock were not completely dependent on the Europeans they encountered. On the contrary, they had their own economic and educational incentives behind travelling to Europe, and skillfully managed to navigate the foreign environment by using their status as “exotic” visitors –something that was made possible by the general Sinophilia of Enlightenment culture. Finally, the paper argues that travellers like Afock belonged to a kind of social middle position, between the largely unlettered Chinese sailors –who started arriving in ever greater numbers in Europe after 1780 –and the scholar-officials, who seldom went abroad prior to the late nineteenth century. This middle position placed them in a unique situation, that allowed them to act as cross-cultural brokers or go-betweens while in Europe.

This paper examines the local life of a global idea, namely early modern Nordic adaptations of the classical paradigm that climate shaped human bodies and mental faculties. Following a set of early modern scholars who rearticulated climate theory to fit Nordic conditions, and travellers who interpreted their experiences of faraway places in light of the Nordic climate, the paper explores possible avenues for integrating global history with climate historical perspectives. Ancient climate theory posed that the world was divided into a number of zones with distinct climatological conditions. Climate was not just a question of hot and cold, instead, it was understood as a force that shaped human mental faculties and physiques. According to this paradigm, the northernmost part of the world constituted a “frigid zone”, impossible to inhabitate, or at least detrimental to human life. This theory posed considerable headache to the scholars and statesmen working to promote the standing of the Swedish Empire in the early modern period. In a parallel development, Nordic travellers had to face the potential dangers of encountering different climatological conditions in far-away parts of the world. The responses to this conundrum formulated by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century travellers and scholars work as a case study for exploring the analytical potential of combining climate history and global history, and the particular role of Nordic perspectives in this endeavour.