Intra-Nordic Differences, Colonial/Racial Histories, and National Narratives: Rewriting Finnish History

Introduction

The role of the Nordic region in European and global colonialism has only recently become the subject of wider scholarly work. In the public sphere, discussions of Nordic histories have been characterized by what Gloria Wekker (2016) calls “white innocence”—ignorance and denial of participation in global colonial histories and the continued colonialism in the region. Such notions of “innocence” or “exceptionalism” have been challenged by an emerging research field that investigates Nordic involvement in colonial histories outside Europe and in the Arctic, and the effects of these histories on current (post)colonial societies (e.g., Ipsen and Fur 2009; Keskinen et al. 2009; Kristín Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012; Naum and Nordin 2013; McEachrane 2014). While these studies have placed global relations and their inequalities at the center of the research agenda, they have usually focused on one nation-state or addressed the Nordic region as a (relatively) coherent entity. Studies on the postcolonial North Atlantic and colonialism in the Arctic (e.g., Körber and Volquardsen 2014; Kuokkanen 2007) have operated beyond the national framework but still focused on specific areas (Greenland, Faroe Islands, Sápmi) instead of engaging with the histories of the region as such.

In this article, I argue for the importance of including a regional perspective when investigating Nordic colonialism. Through an analysis of the colonial and racial histories of Finns and Finland, I will show that it is impossible to understand the colonial/racial relations and processes in which the Nordic countries were involved without properly addressing intra-Nordic power relations and their entanglement with local, state, and global factors. As a country that only gained independence in 1917, prior to which it was under Swedish rule for six centuries and was an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire between 1809 and 1917, Finland provides a case par excellence to investigate the role of regional aspects in colonial/racial histories. While Finland’s subordinate position within the two empires has often resulted in bypassing the role of Finns and Finland in colonial histories, this article seeks to identify the trajectories of colonial involvement before and after independence.

Moreover, I aim to connect the overseas colonial endeavors of the Nordic countries to the colonization of the northern parts of the region. Nordic participation in overseas colonialism has been characterized as “colonial complicity” (Vuorela 2009; Keskinen et al. 2009), referring to a situation in which the countries were neither part of the colonial center but nor can they claim to have remained outside European colonialism. The Nordic countries may have possessed fewer overseas colonies than the British, French, or Dutch empires, but they were intertwined with European colonialism through multiple economic, political, cultural, and knowledge-production processes. The concept of “colonial complicity” also highlights the seductiveness of being included in hegemonic notions of Eurocentric modernity and the material benefits it promises for countries located at the margins of Europe, some of which, like Finland, occupy ambiguous inside/outside positions in relation to Europeanness (Keskinen 2014). However, the work by Sámi and other indigenous scholars (e.g., Kuokkanen 2007; Gärdebo, Öhman, and Maruyama 2014) points toward more profound and continued trajectories of colonialism in the Nordic region, which raises the question of whether “colonial complicity” is an adequate concept to capture all forms and temporalities of Nordic colonialism. This article thus also examines the question of whether new concepts are needed to understand Nordic involvement in colonialism when the overseas perspective is combined with studies on the Arctic.

The empirical focus of the article is the colonial/racial histories of the Finnish people and Finland as a territory; after independence, I also investigate the repressive and assimilatory actions of the Finnish state, as well as the racialization of Indigenous people and minorities perceived as threats to the modernizing nation. My interest in examining the colonial involvement of Finns and Finnish enterprises or missionary work during a time when the nation-state of Finland did not exist should not be interpreted as nationalist imposition of current classifications on earlier historical periods (Kjerland and Bertelsen 2014, 19); instead, I seek to identify the ways in which people and parts of Europe subordinated by larger kingdoms and empires were drawn into and actively participated in overseas colonial endeavors and settler colonialism. The question of whether Finland itself was colonized in the pre-independence area divides scholars: some point out that Finland was an integrated part of the Swedish kingdom with similar legislation to the rest of the kingdom and that its autonomous position in the Russian Empire provided administrative and economic benefits, while others argue that the subordinated “periphery” created wealth for the Swedish state and economy, and they view at least the last decades of Russian rule with repressive and assimilatory policies as a sign of near-colonial relations (Rantanen and Ruuska 2009). In any case, the imperial and colonial world order of these periods shaped the context in which people living in Finland, and later in the newly established nation-state, operated.

This article brings together and re-interprets the results of previous studies in order to develop an analytical model of the colonial and racial histories of Finland that emphasizes their regional and global linkages. My wish is that this analytical perspective be applied in studies of other contexts in the future. Methodologically, I conduct a re-reading of previous studies, uncovering the role of Finns and Finland in the colonial/ racial histories discussed. I have teased out the role of actors who are usually left unnoticed when attention is directed at more dominant actors (such as Swedes) or at hegemonic national narratives that ignore colonial/racial histories.

In the following sections, I first question the common pattern in postcolonial research of treating the Nordic region as a homogeneous entity and discuss the implications of taking intra-Nordic power relations seriously. Second, the article uncovers the ways that individual Finns, as well as enterprises, trading companies, and missionary organizations based in Finland took part in overseas colonial ventures from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. These often followed in the footsteps of other Nordic and European colonial actors. Third, I investigate the effects of European scientific racism and racial taxonomies, in which the Finns were placed on the lower levels of the hierarchy from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The role of Swedish scholars in particular is highlighted in this analysis. Fourth, I show how racialization and assimilatory policies directed at the Indigenous Sámi population and the Roma minority reveal continuities from the Swedish and Russian periods of rule, but also gain renewed importance in the post-independence era when these groups are constructed as “Others” of the modernizing Finnish nation-state. The multi-layered analysis of local, state, regional, and global relations developed in the article allows for an understanding of how multiple hierarchies work simultaneously and points toward the continuities and ruptures of these processes.

Colonial/Racial Histories and Intra-Nordic Relations

In order to understand the colonial/racial histories within and outside the Nordic region, it is essential to acknowledge the regionally dominant role of Denmark and Sweden. Until nationalist ideologies and nation-building processes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gradually led to the emergence of Norway, Finland, and Iceland as nation-states, these areas and populations were part of the Danish and/or Swedish kingdoms. The union of Denmark-Norway ran until 1814, after which Norway entered a union with Sweden. As previously mentioned, Finland was part of the Swedish kingdom until 1809 and, after that, the Russian Empire until gaining independence in 1917. The relationship with Sweden and the state structures that developed during the long period of Swedish rule remained central for the country before and after independence. Common scholarly narratives in Finland present national histories as disconnected from European involvement in the slave trade and colonialism. In the scarce collection of studies on Finnish involvement in overseas colonial endeavors (e.g., Löytty 2006), European colonialism represents the context and reference point of the analysis, but the continuities of the colonial/racial histories of Sweden and other Nordic countries, as well as Finnish participation in them, are left untouched.

As a result of the regionally dominant position of Denmark and Sweden, Nordic histories of overseas colonization and slave trading are usually discussed in reference to these two kingdoms. Historical studies have shown that Denmark colonized three islands (St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix) in the Caribbean from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until 1917; moreover, it established trading posts in West Africa and South Asia and participated in both the slave trade and slavery (Naum and Nordin 2013, 5–8). These elements have been disconnected from the dominant national narrative that presents Denmark as a small egalitarian nation with freedom-loving and tolerant people (Jensen 2015). Norway’s role has been addressed to some extent when discussing the colonization of Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, but even so, the role of Denmark is often viewed as more prominent. The latter is perhaps not so surprising considering the recent and continuing rule of Denmark in the North Atlantic.

Likewise, the history of Swedish colonial endeavors and slave trading is often discussed without recognizing that Finland was an integrated part of the kingdom until 1809. While scholars increasingly study the colonial history of Sweden, they tend to disregard or make implicit the Finnish involvement. In the following, I trace Finnish involvement in the Swedish history of overseas colonialism and slave trading, but also relate it to broader patterns of European colonialism during the periods in question. Moreover, the racial hierarchies within the Nordic region are barely touched upon in scholarly work: while the racialization of the Sámi has gradually gained attention, the multiple racial hierarchies developed in scientific racism are seldom addressed. This article thus seeks to fill a gap in existing research.1

Finnish Involvement in Overseas Colonial Endeavors and Missionary Work

Finns and Finnish enterprises participated in and benefitted from colonial and settler-colonial endeavors in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa, at times playing a central role in Swedish colonial aspirations. As in other European countries, dreams of wealth and power through the establishment of colonies and engagement in transatlantic trade captivated the rulers of Sweden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The short-lived colony of New Sweden (1638–1655), situated on the Delaware River on the Atlantic Coast of North America, was initiated by former employees from the Dutch West India Company and high-ranking members of the Swedish government. The colony was expected to enhance Swedish trade, provide land and resources, enable missionary work, and provide opportunities to “civilize” the Indigenous population (Fur 2006), well in accordance with the colonial aspirations of the time. Among the criminals that the Crown persuaded to move to New Sweden, a number of persons had a Finnish background (Ekengren, Naum, and Wolfe 2013, 172). The Finns participated in a settler colonial project that entered the land of Native Americans (the Lenapes and the Susquehannocks) and sought to impose European habits and faith on them. A renaming of landmarks and places took place, with, for example, Chamassung being renamed Finland. After the colony was attacked and taken over by the Dutch in 1655, settlers from Sweden and Finland continued to move to the area, which had now turned into a multicultural site attracting a wide array of European settlers seeking better life opportunities. Among the settlers was, for example, the Mårtenson family, of which the father Mårten was born in Finland (Ekengren, Naum, and Wolfe 2013, 176–7). One of his descendants, John Morton, became a leading politician in Pennsylvania and a signatory of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which resulted in him being counted as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.2 Persons of Finnish origin therefore occupied even authoritative positions in the settler colonial project.

The Swedish attempts to establish a colony in West Africa also included Finnish actors. At the same time as New Sweden was established, the Africa Company (Afrikakompaniet) grounded a fort in Cabo Corso. The fort was a base for trade in gold and ivory, but the Africa Company also became a successful actor in the slave trade for a short time in the middle of the seventeenth century (Schnakenbourg 2013, 232). Cabo Corso was soon lost to the Dutch, but the dream of Swedish colonies in Africa was not abandoned. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, several plans to establish colonies in West Africa were presented. Ulrik and August Nordenskiöld, who initiated many of them, had Finnish roots. August is said to have been born in Sibbo in South Finland and educated at Åbo Akademi University (Peltoniemi 1985, 15). Ulrik was stationed in the Nyland Brigade in South Finland (Weiss 2016, 25). The Finnish and Swedish parts of the kingdom were tightly connected: the administration in Finland was Swedish-speaking, and it was common for individuals from the higher ranks of society to move between different parts of the kingdom. Ulrik Nordenskiöld wrote the first Swedish book on colonial trade arguing for the benefits of Swedish colonies in the West Indies and Africa with reference to the profits that could be made in the trade of sugar, coffee, and slaves (Schnakenbourg 2013, 236). August Nordenskiöld was among the initiators of the Guinea Company, which aimed to create a colony and engage in trade in West Africa (Weiss 2016, 25–30). Despite these efforts, the plans never came to fruition. August Nordenskiöld died in Sierra Leone while preparing to start a utopian settler colony, New Jerusalem, the central tasks of which were to “civilize” the Africans, teach them to cultivate land, and convert them to Christianity (Peltoniemi 1985, 16).

Swedish efforts to profit from colonial trade turned to the Caribbean when Sweden obtained Saint Bartheĺemy from its previous colonizer, France. Saint Bartheĺemy was a small island not well-suited for a plantation economy, but it developed into a relatively successful trading colony after the capital, Gustavia, was granted the status of free port (Schnakenbourg 2013, 239–40). Gustavia was a transit port in the transatlantic and the intra-Caribbean slave trade, although the role of Sweden in the slave trade of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was comparatively minor (Weiss 2016, 133–40). As on other Caribbean islands, slavery was part of the economy of Saint Bartheĺemy. The inhabitants were categorized according to skin color, and their rights were connected to both their status as slave or free person and to their race (Thomasson 2015). Enslaved workers were used in the cotton plantations of the island, as well as in private households, construction sites, the harbor, and diverse city areas (Weiss 2016, 152–63).

No study has focused on the participation of Finns in the colonization of Saint Bartheĺemy and Caribbean trade, but I was able to detect traces of this in the empirical findings of the study by Weiss (2016). It was only in Finland that a “Bartheĺemy-fever” was said to have spread after the obtaining of the colony (Weiss 2016, 141). Attracted by the authorities’ promises of a good life and favorable economic prospects in the Caribbean, Finns who suffered from failed crops gathered in crowds in the harbors and waited to be shipped to Saint Bartheĺemy. These poor people were not able to migrate to the island, but tradesmen and factories with a base in the Finnish parts of the kingdom became active partners in trade relations with the West Indies (Weiss 2016, 82–4). Gothenburg and Stockholm were the main ports in Sweden where sugar, coffee, and other products from the West Indies were shipped, but ships also sailed to Turku in Southwest Finland. The Turku-based tradesman Johan Ludwig Escholin was the owner of the ship Express that arrived at Turku from Gustavia in 1787 with a load of sugar, rum, and other local products (Weiss 2016, 83). The masters and seamen on ships registered to Saint Bartheĺemy were men with homes in Oulu and Pietarsaari in Finland (Weiss 2016, 90, 159). The crews in which these men worked included enslaved persons.

It is perhaps not possible or necessary to examine the role that Finns played in the colonization of Saint Bartheĺemy or the trade of colonial products and enslaved persons. Instead, the available research indicates that persons with background in the Finnish areas of the kingdom participated in the colonial endeavors and in some cases played a central role in initiating Swedish colonial plans. Finnish and Swedish actors may have been small colonial agents in comparison to the Portuguese, Spanish, French, or Dutch, but were nevertheless driven by hopes of profiting from slave trade and the export of colonial products. Moreover, Finnish participation in the early colonial projects of North America and the Caribbean points toward membership in multicultural settler colonist groups consisting of persons from many European countries—not only Swedes, but also Dutch, British, French, Danish, and other nationalities. This is evidence of the kind of “colonial complicity” discussed at the beginning of this article, which involves participation in and benefitting from the geopolitical world order that was established during the high tide of colonialism.

Similar characteristics can be found when examining mass migration to and participation in settler colonialism in the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The Finns were one group among many other nationalities that sought to find better life conditions in the promised wonderland of the American West, resulting in nearly 400,000 persons migrating to the United States between 1870 and 1930 (Koivukangas 1986, 39). While there are a considerable number of studies investigating this migration and the lives of Finns in the United States, this migration is seldom discussed in connection to settler colonialism. Migrants can become part of settler colonial orders even if they do not enjoy citizen rights upon arrival (Veracini 2010, 3–4), as was the case with the United States during this period. Finnish migration to Southern Africa and Australia was of small scale and followed in the footsteps of other Nordic and European settlers. Not all Finns stayed in these colonies, but those who did, adapted to the local settler colonial regimes. Finnish settlement in Australia began with the Gold Rush of the mid-nineteenth century, but increased to large numbers only in the twentieth century (Koivukangas 1986). Already on board the ship of Captain James Cook that landed in Australia 1770 and gave the starting shot for the colonization of the continent was a Finnish scientist, Herman Spöring.

Southern Africa has a particular role in the Finnish imaginary of racialized Others, especially Black Africans. The flow of Finnish migrants to South Africa followed the discovery of gold and diamonds in the 1870s (Kuparinen 1991, 119–21). But even more important were the long-lasting contacts to what was called Amboland, today part of Namibia. Amboland was the site of Finnish missionary work from 1870 onward, and Finnish influence is visible in the naming of places and people in the area. When the overseas colonies of Germany were divided between other European nations after World War I, certain groups in Finland considered Amboland a suitable colony for Finland and organized a delegation to suggest this to the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Löytty 2006, 14). The delegation, led by Professor Gustaf Kompa, never succeeded in its aims, and the idea was abandoned. The event nevertheless shows that colonial aspirations were not strange to the elite of the newly established nation-state. Missionary activities in Amboland were closely entwined with the colonization of the area: missionaries built contacts that were later used by colonizers, informed the colonial administration of conditions on the ground, and, by converting the population to the Christian faith, they considerably affected the social order in the area (Löytty 2006, 70–1). The missionary work also had effects on the views that Finnish people came to adopt about African people. Several studies have shown that the representations of Africans that circulated in Finland in the colonial era largely followed the othering and racializing discourses known from elsewhere in Europe (e.g., Rastas 2007).

Racial Taxonomies: When the Finns Became “White”

If the Finnish involvement in overseas colonialism was part of larger Swedish, Nordic, and European endeavors, transnational relations were also important when the position of Finns was defined in scientific racism. Scientific racism and racial taxonomies were produced in complex processes, in which race was a constantly changing and relational categorization. The populations living in the Nordic region were divided and hierarchized already in the racial taxonomies developed by Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, but during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these categorizations were built into the academic disciplines of racial biology and physical anthropology. The Nordic race, described as the superior and most fit of all races (Broberg and Tydeń 2003, 81–6), only included Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes. The Sámi, Finns, Tatars, and the Roma were among the groups placed on the lower levels of the hierarchy. The Sámi were particularly inferiorized with reference to their alleged primitiveness and nomadic way of life.

While not inferiorized to the same extent as the Sámi, the Finns were placed on the lower levels of the racial hierarchies. In physical anthropology, the Finns were perceived to be of Mongolian descent, as one of the Fenno-Ugric people. The perception of Finns as of Mongolian descent was created in the eighteenth century by Friedrich Blumenbach and his skull study (Kilpeläinen 1985). Even in linguistic studies, the Asian roots of the Finns were emphasized: in the Turanian and Skyt heritage theories, the Finns were connected to the nomadic people of Central Asia (Laskar 2017, 76–8). However, the Mongolian theory dominated the scientific understandings of the origins of the Finns during the eighteenth century. Arthur de Gobineau, whose racial thinking was extremely influential in Germany and other parts of Europe in the late nineteenth century, described the Finns as ugly, lazy, and belonging to the yellow race, in his work An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (as discussed in Kilpeläinen 1985, 169–70). German anthropology textbooks and popular encyclopedias at the end of the nineteenth century commonly presented Finns according to the Mongol theory, as did all Nordic encyclopedias of the time.

Being classified as of “Mongol” descent meant that the Finns were placed outside the White race and connected with the Asian or “yellow race.” This interpretation was later contested by scientists in racial biology and physical anthropology, who developed theories of the “East Baltic” and “East European” races from the 1920s to the 1940s. An important figure behind the idea of the East Baltic race was Rolf Nordenstreng, a race biologist born and educated in Finland, who later moved to work in Sweden (Kemiläinen 1985, 321–2). Nordenstreng described the East Baltic race as differing to some extent from the Nordic race, for example, through skin color, type of hair, and bodily structure. The areas where Nordenstreng thought the East Baltic race was to be found were Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. Austrian and German physical anthropologists developed theories of an Eastern race to refer largely to the same groups but disagreed on whether this was a race of its own or part of the White race (Kemiläinen 1985, 345–7). Through these shifting categorizations, the Finns gradually became “whiter,” resulting in an inclusion—albeit an ambiguous one—into a Europeanness that was coded as White.

Intra-Nordic power relations were also reinforced through Nordic racial biology and physical anthropology, which treated the Finns as inferior to the Nordic race. Swedish race scientists, who were world-renowned in the area, were central actors in establishing and spreading this idea. Anders Retzius, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, developed a skull index to investigate “longskulls” and “shortskulls,” coming to the conclusion that the Finns, the Sámi, and Hungarians were to be placed among the Turanian type, understood as of Asian origin (Laskar 2017, 74–8). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Retzius’s son, Professor Gustaf Retzius, also studied Finnish skulls, publishing a thick volume called Finska kranier (Finnish Craniums; Kilpeläinen 1985, 191; Laskar 2017, 80–1). The State Institute for Racial Biology, established in 1922 in Uppsala, engaged in lengthy studies on both the Finns and the Sámi, including skull measuring, photography, and other methods to investigate different racial types.

In a study on the photography archive from the State Institute for Racial Biology of the 1920s and 1930s, Kjellman (2017) shows how racial biology divided the Swedish population into three main racial types (the pure Nordic type, the pure East Baltic type, and the pure dark type). The dark type was equivalent to the Sámi (at the time, called Lapps), and the East Baltic type referred to the Finns. The divisions were made on the basis of the color of hair and eyes, body length, and skull measurements. Phenotypic characteristics were thought to correspond to mental and intellectual characteristics. The Nordic type was often presented in the photographs in favorable lighting, with fine clothes and posing in idyllic environments, while the racial types considered inferior were often photographed in worn clothes, poor environments, and unfavorable lighting. Photographs in publications such as The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation (Lundborg and Linders 1926) systematically ordered the racial types hierarchically, presenting first the type ranked highest (Nordic type) and last, the one of the lowest rank (the Lapp), with the East Baltic type (Finns) placed between these two.

In Finland, the relation to racial taxonomies was ambivalent due to the classification of Finns on the lower levels of the hierarchy. Several Finnish anthropologists and linguists criticized the Mongol theory and sought to provide evidence of its invalidity, but they also distanced themselves from groups perceived to be racially inferior (Kilpeläinen 1985, 189–90). At the beginning of the twentieth century, several studies within Finnish physical anthropology were conducted to measure the skulls and other bodily characteristics of the Finns and the Sámi population (Isaksson and Jokisalo 2005, 152–5).

The “racial line” also divided the Finnish-and Swedish-speaking populations in Finland. In the early twentieth century, many Swedish-speaking scientists in Finland emphasized their relations to Sweden and the Nordic race (Hämäläinen 1985, 408–10). In addition to scholars, Swedish-speaking students and politicians were also among those who thought that the Swedish-speaking and the Finnish-speaking populations belonged to different racial types. Darwinist, Social Darwinist, and eugenic thought had spread among the Swedish-speaking elite, but also fear of ordinary Finns was tangible in the period leading to and following the Finnish civil war in 1918. Class and race were connected in assertions that Finnish working-class people belonged to the “biologically lowest level” (Hämäläinen 1985, 411–2).

In the early periods of independence, Finland in the 1920s and 1930s, right-wing academic and political movements promoted expansionist politics toward the Soviet Union, referring to tribal ties and the need to help “kinsmen” with Finnish origin (Nygård 1985). These kinds of racially motivated politics led to military actions in the Soviet-Russian territory in 1918–1922, but also gave rise to ideas of a “Greater Finland” that would cover the large areas where Fenno-Ugric peoples lived (Nygård 1985, 462–3, 470–2; Tervonen 2014, 152–3). Among others, professor and politician E. N. Setälä argued in 1920 that Finland had a missionary task of world importance: it should act as the guardian of Western culture against the barbarous East, and one way of doing this would be to ensure that the Karelian population on the Soviet side of the border would be connected to the Finnish civilization. During World War II, such arguments were presented to legitimize expansionary politics beyond the pre-war borders in the war against the Soviet Union.

Finns were thus inferiorized in the racial hierarchies developed in the Nordic region and Europe, but especially in the period following national independence, the Finns themselves engaged in knowledge production and politics that built hierarchical distinctions between themselves and the Sámi and the Russian people. The desire of the newly established nation to belong to European modernity and the “West” was manifested through distinctions toward those perceived to be “non-civilized” Others.

Colonized Lands, Modern State, and Its Others

The modern nation-state developed during the imperial and colonial era. Its history is tightly interwoven with racial definitions. Goldberg (2002, 2) uses the concept “racial state” to emphasize that “the modern state has always conceived of itself as racially configured.” The state was a central actor in the colonization of the Sámi lands in the northern part of the Nordic region and the production of racialized knowledge about—and the repressive and assimilatory politics toward—the Indigenous Sámi people and the Roma minority. Many of the policies and practices were already developed during Swedish and Russian rule, but the projection of the Indigenous Sámi and the Roma minority as the “Others” of the modernizing Finnish nation-state intensified the governing and racialization of these groups in the post-independence era.

The colonization of the Sámi homeland again shows the importance of analyzing intra-Nordic power relations and interconnectedness. As an area that covers parts of northern Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Russia, Sápmi has been and continues to be affected by the actions of these states, all of which have exploited the natural resources and suppressed Sámi cultural rights. Simultaneously with the establishment of the overseas colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries described earlier, the Swedish state tightened its control over Sámi lands. It encouraged agricultural settlements in the Sámi areas by issuing a series of decrees to institutionalize this policy, among those the so-called Lapplandsplakatet established in 1673 and renewed in 1695. During the eighteenth century, the property rights that had guaranteed the Sámi villages’ (siidas) right to land were gradually suspended (Lehtola 2010, 30–2). The life circumstances of the Sámi were heavily affected by the institution of national borders, especially by the 1809 treaty that declared Finland to be a part of the Russian Empire. The Sámi areas were split among several states, and the Sámi population could no longer move freely across the borders. The Norwegian-Russian border and the Swedish-Russian border were, respectively, closed in 1852 and 1889, resulting in major changes in Sámi livelihoods.

During the nineteenth century, the municipal government replaced the self-organization of the Sámi siidas. The municipality law was extended to cover Sámi areas in 1893. In Finland, the role of the municipal government was central even in the administration of reindeer herding cooperatives while in Sweden and Norway, the Sámi siidas were given this right (Lehtola 2010, 42). The development of education and other municipal services strengthened assimilatory state politics. In particular, the assimilatory school system has had a crucial effect on the Sámi. After World War II, the earlier Finnish school system in which teachers, knowledgeable in the Sámi languages, traveled to Sámi villages was abolished and replaced with a boarding school system. This meant that Sámi children stayed away from their families, were taught in the Finnish language, and were trained to accept Finnish values (Kuokkanen 2007, 151–2; Lehtola 2015). Such policies are by no means exceptional to Finnish colonialism; residential schooling and its role in the abolition of indigenous culture, norms, and values have characterized colonial practices in many other parts of the world as well.

As discussed in the previous section, the Sámi suffered from inferiorization through racial taxonomies and were the target of many anthropological and race biological studies. These were also conducted by Finnish researchers. For example, in the large research program led by Professor Yrjö Kajava during 1926–1934, altogether 37 percent of the Finnish Sámi had their skulls measured (Lehtola 2012, 179). As in Sweden, the physical anthropology studies included being stripped naked and photographed from behind, from the front, and sideways. Skeletons of buried Sámi people were dug up, archived at the University of Helsinki, and used for skull research (Lehtola 2012, 180). Although seldom acknowledged, physical anthropology was a central research area in Finnish medicine in the 1920s and 1930s. Researchers like Väinö Lassila used concepts that distinguished between the Sámi and the Finns, referring to “lower races” and “cultured races” (Lehtola 2012, 181).

Thus, the history of the Finns being categorized on the lower levels of racial hierarchies did not prevent well-known researchers from using similar racial categorizations about the Sámi, especially during the period when Finland had gained its independence and academics participated in the definition of a national identity. Not only racial anthropologists but also other Finnish researchers held onto the idea of the Sámi as a primitive people that could not keep up with the changes of modern society, reproducing the evolutionary paradigm of cultures at different developmental stages. Similar patterns of a subordinated group in turn asserting itself as superior to others within the colonial and racial hierarchies have been discussed by Memmi (2010, 61) as the “pyramid of petty tyrants.” Memmi referred to how Arabs, constructed as inferior to Europeans, in turn inferiorized Black Africans and other subordinated groups in colonial Algeria.

The Roma minority that has lived in the Finnish territory since the sixteenth century has also suffered from repressive and assimilative state actions. To begin with, the Swedish state sought to deal with the Roma through expulsion. In the eighteenth century, a distinction between the “foreign” and “national” Roma was made in the vagrancy legislation and public efforts aimed at forcing the Roma to establish permanent homesteads. Finnish policies during Russian rule likewise regulated the movement of the Roma through vagrancy legislation. Legal sanctions of vagrancy were harsher on the Roma than on other itinerant people until 1883, when this discriminatory practice was ended (Pulma 2006, 79–80). The 1900 committee report on the Roma situation recommended registration of the Roma and establishment of a specific “Gypsy Commission” for this purpose. The report also suggested gathering Roma children into boarding schools where they could be “protected” from the bad influence of older Roma people. References to the Roma as a separate race were also visible: the report argued that boarding schools would result in the disappearance of the Roma language, which so forcefully had united the Roma and “kept them as a separate race” (Pulma 2006, 95). While the report with these racializing suggestions received criticism and was finally dismissed, many of its suggestions were taken up in later Roma policies.

After World War II, the religiously oriented “Gypsy Mission” organization, supported by the Finnish government, became a central agent in Finland’s Roma policy. Children’s homes and work colonies became the central means for its operation (Pulma 2006, 164–5). Targeting Roma children in order to make them part of the “normal way of life” became the aim of the postwar Roma policy, which in practice meant assimilatory and repressive actions. Many Roma children were taken into custody and placed into children’s homes, which left long-lasting scars in the Roma community and its trust in the Finnish authorities.

Although no proper analysis has been conducted on how race was part of the Roma policies, my analysis of the sources shows that the language of race was used in at least part of the policy texts. Racial language emerged again in the 1960s when criticism toward the Finnish Roma policy was raised. International comparisons to the United States and South Africa prompted, for example, a group of clergymen and politicians to articulate questions like “Are the Finnish Gypsies living in an apartheid system?” (Pulma 2006, 177). Even the lyrics of the very popular Roma music ensemble Hortto Kaalo in the 1970s referred to race: “Why are the doors not opened for us? Is this the result of our race?”

This section has investigated how the modern state colonized and encouraged settlement on Indigenous land, engaged in repressive and assimilatory politics, and produced racializing knowledge on Indigenous people and minorities perceived as “Others.” It points toward continuities in state policies from Swedish and Russian rule to the post-independence Finnish nation-state.

Conclusions: Intra-Nordic Relations, Colonial/Racial Histories, and National Narratives

In its national narrative, Finland is usually portrayed as a small country at the margins of Europe that has faced economic hardships, wars, and struggles for independence, but nevertheless has managed to survive and prosper economically due to the unyielding will and resilience of its people (cf. Tervonen 2014). In this article, I have instead situated Finnish histories in the triangle of Nordic/European colonialism, racial thinking, and modern state-building. The picture that emerges from this contextualization shows the Finns, Finnish enterprises, and state actors as participants in European colonial/racial histories, benefitting from colonialism but also being inferiorized and marginalized in relation to European modernity.

The analysis indicates that the involvement of the Finns and Finland in colonial/racial histories is characterized by three main patterns. First, Finns participated in colonialism and settler colonialism on several continents (the Americas, Africa, Australia), along with other Nordics and Europeans. Second, the Europeanness of the Finns was ambiguous due to their categorization as of Mongol origin and part of the Asian racial lineage, according to prevailing racial theories. Third, colonial/racial histories were connected to the modern state-and nation-building processes, which created “Others” of the Indigenous and minority populations, who were perceived as biologically and/ or culturally inferior. The colonization of Sámi lands, discourses of racial/cultural Otherness, and strong assimilation policies have been the silenced underside of the modernization process in Finland.

Through the examination of the history of Finns and Finland, I have sought to show how intra-Nordic power relations are crucial in colonial/racial histories and their legacies in current Nordic countries. I thus propose for future research to investigate colonial/racial relations through a multi-level model that focuses on the relations among the global, regional, state, and local levels. As the Finnish case shows, the national frame is not suitable for analyzing pre-independence histories; thus, a focus on state rule and actions will better qualify for analytical purposes. The local level allows for an examination of the histories of people, enterprises, missionary organizations, and other colonial encounters. These different layers of colonial/racial histories are interconnected but should be analytically distinguished.

Theoretically, my analysis points to the need to further elaborate the concept of “colonial complicity” and the postcolonial perspective it is based on. The continued colonialism in Sápmi and other Arctic areas cannot be properly grasped with postcolonial perspectives, nor is complicity an adequate description of it. I suggest that the understanding of “colonial complicity” should be combined with theorization developed in decolonial perspectives, especially the concept “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000). “Colonial complicity” is useful for understanding Nordic participation in overseas colonial endeavors, but needs to be complemented with the recognition of continued colonialism in the Arctic. The concept “coloniality of power” (or the “colonial matrix of power”) places the emergence of race in the context of global, Eurocentric, capitalist power. According to Quijano (2000), the coloniality of power was built around two axes: the idea of race, which classified bodily differences as a sign of the hierarchical relation between the colonizers and the colonized, and the new structure of the control of labor, its products, and land. The decolonial perspective addresses both the historical and current aspects of coloniality, as well as firmly connecting modernity/coloniality to the development of capitalist economies and Eurocentric knowledge production.