Scandinavians in the Early Modern Colonial World and Beyond

Scandinavians played a small but enduring role in the foundation of a colonial world order. From the early seventeenth century until the present, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have been active in exploiting peoples and spaces of the globe. Recently archaeological perspectives and source materials have been acknowledged for providing new insights into the role of material culture, space, and man in these processes. This talk will present a brief overview of colonial history from a Scandinavia vantage point emphasizing critical archaeological perspectives on prevalent methodological nationalistic views on Scandinavian pasts from the early modern period to the present.

Jonas Nordin is PhD associate professor in historical archaeology and a researcher at the department of archaeology and ancient history at the University of Uppsala as well as the Swedish History museum. His main research interest lies within the field of early modern globalization and birth of modernity through studies of colonialism and cultural contact. He has studied Scandinavian colonial encounters in America, India, and Sapmi and is currently running two major research projects on colonial collecting of Sami material culture and on industrialization of northern Fennoscandia. His background is within medieval archaeology where he has studied enforcement of power through architecture and spaces as well as the birth of new forms of organizing people through guilds.