Sweden and St. Barthélemy: Exceptionalisms, Whiteness, and the Disappearance of Slavery from Colonial History

Inhabitants of St. Barthélemy

The history of St. Bartheĺemy is characterized by the island’s specific topographical and hydrological situation: due to mountainous terrain and a lack of fresh water, St. Bartheĺemy was never well suited for agricultural use either by Indigenous peoples from the region or by European settlers who ultimately found other ways to utilize the territory. Yet St. Bartheĺemy’s history is deeply embedded in the settlement and economic history of the Caribbean. Facts about the island’s inhabitation and utilization, and their public representation, are important in order to understand the particularities as well as the typicalities of Swedish colonial history.

It has proven difficult to gather information about indigenous settlement on the island before and after European conquest. Three Amerindian ethnic groups are frequently mentioned as having lived in the area—Carib, Arawak, and Taíno—but there is no readily accessible information about pre-Columbian history or archeological findings on the island, and I have not been able to find evidence of islanders self-identifying as indigenous. References to Indigenous peoples are made in the form of the island’s Arawak name, Ouanalao, in the coat of arms, of a public sculpture of an Arawak warrior on a prominent roundabout close to the airport at St. Jean, and of brand names; I will later return to the last of these uses of references to Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The island’s aridity is recurrently mentioned as responsible for the impermanent character of indigenous settlement. Recent research suggests that pre-Columbian settlement patterns in the Caribbean were generally characterized by movement and diversity rather than permanent settlement (see, for instance, Hofman and van Duijvenbode 2011). But only few sources on St. Bartheĺemy comment on the dispossession and near-eradication of Caribbean Indigenous peoples during the first centuries of European colonization as a possible reason for their disappearance from the island. Georges Bourdin mentions the use of St. Bartheĺemy as “relay station” for Caribs during their fight against European colonizers (2012, 8). A number of popular and scholarly sources mention a violent act of Carib resistance that drove away a first group of settlers in the 1650s—but it is most often conceptualized not as resistance against dispossession and genocide, but as an “attack” on resilient settlers: they were “slaughtered by a group of passing Caribs” (Maher 2013, 12, xv). A table showing the development of the island’s population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals that a small number of Caribs were enslaved and worked on the island (Lavoie, Fick, and Mayer 1995, 373).

Early settlers arrived, directly from France or via other Antillean islands, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Again, the island’s arid soil prevented the establishment of large-scale plantations upon which the economic system of the transatlantic triangular trade was based; instead, settlers pursued small-scale, often subsistence, farming and fishing. This means, in contrast to most islands in the vicinity, that enslaved laborers from Africa and their descendants never outnumbered White settlers in the island’s rural areas.1 That St. Bartheĺemy was by no means exceptional in the exploitation of Black labor is, however, manifested in a 1736 revolt by enslaved people, who obviously collaborated with protesting enslaved laborers on the neighboring islands (Lavoie, Fick, and Mayer 1995, 377ff.).

With the arrival of the Swedish in the 1780s, the island still gained from the transatlantic trade, including the slave trade. Under King Gustav III, the harbor town of Gustavia was erected and established as free port with very low duty and tax rates. In the first decades under Swedish rule, the port benefitted from wars in Europe and the Americas and from Sweden’s neutral position among belligerents in the Caribbean (Hedberg and Karlsson 2015; Marzagalli and Müller 2016; Müller 2016).

Holger Weiss (2016, 167) has analyzed administrative documents that provide information about the origins of the island’s Black laborers: between 1800 and 1815, one-third of the altogether 2,000–3,000 enslaved workers on the island had been born in Africa (which means they had been abducted and then transported by ship to Gustavia or one of the other ports in the Caribbean), 10 percent had been born into slavery on the island, and 25 percent had been born elsewhere in the West Indies (the origins of the remaining third are unclear). Some church registers or census records list the African laborers’ origins more precisely; a census from 1787 from the windward rural part of the island, for instance, lists twelve of “Ibo” and eight of “Congo” origin (Lavoie, Fick, and Mayer 1995, 385). The demographic pattern was different in the newly established port town, where both enslaved Blacks (often categorized as either “African” or “Creole,” that is, West Indian-born) and a growing number “free coloreds” (for whom seven categories existed, depending on the ratio of European and African ancestry) worked in households and port facilities and formed a majority compared to the White population (for whom three categories existed: European-, Caribbean-, or American-born; cf. Weiss 2016, 146).

After the end of the wars, Gustavia declined in importance. Slavery was abolished in 1847, but most inhabitants of African descent subsequently left the island in search of opportunities elsewhere, due to lack of employment in the rural or urban areas of St. Bartheĺemy.2 The vast majority of native islanders have since been of European descent. The island was perceived as an economic burden, and Sweden transferred the island back to France in 1878. The island then depended mainly on a subsistence economy again, and on the employment of islanders on neighboring islands, until the 1950s, when members of the Rockefeller family and the adventurer, entrepreneur, and later mayor of the island, Rémy de Haenen, identified the island’s potential for the establishment of private estates and luxury vacation resorts. Luxury tourism, the real estate business, and connected services have since become the undisputed main source of revenue for the island. Since 2007, when St. Bartheĺemy seceded from the Overseas Department of Guadeloupe, it has held the status of French overseas collectivity.

Sweden and St. Barthélemy Today

Few relations of an official political character remain between Sweden and St. Bartheĺemy. There is a Swedish consulate in the capital Gustavia, but given the only ten or so Swedish inhabitants of the island, its function is mainly symbolic. A partnership exists between St. Barthé-lemy and the northern Swedish town of Piteå, with regular mutual visits of officials and tour groups. The organization in Sweden that has been most active in re-establishing and maintaining relations with St. Bartheĺemy is the Stockholm-based S:t Bartheĺemysällskapet (St. Bartheĺemy Society). With publications and public events, the Society produces and disseminates knowledge about the Swedish historical presence on the island, organizes regular trips to St. Bartheĺemy, and receives groups from the island in Stockholm (organized by the partner organization l’ASBAS: l’Association St Barth des Amis de la Suède). The trips organized by the St. Bartheĺemy Society, in cooperation with a travel agency, take place in November to include “Piteådagen” and the race “Gustavialoppet.”

By visiting the island at the same time and joining the group for some of their activities during the weekend, I found an apt opportunity to learn more about both the Swedish legacy and an encounter of a group of Swedes with that legacy. Thanks to the generous invitation by the Society’s chairman to join a meeting with a travel group from St. Bartheĺemy in Stockholm, and to join the Swedish group guided by him on St. Bartheĺemy, I also had the opportunity to meet the Swedish-born vice-president of the Collectivity of St. Bartheĺemy, who gave me a tour of the assembly hall of the Collectivity; to visit a private museum about the island’s Swedish period; and to meet a former mayor of the island who in 2002 had received the Swedish “Nordstjärneorden,” the “Order of the Polar Star,” for services rendered to Swedish-St. Bartheĺemy relations. I am very much indebted to all of them for the generous sharing of their knowledge. This is reflected in the article also in instances where I do not explicitly refer to them.3

Easily accessible information about St. Bartheĺemy—for instance, the results of a quick online search—relays an image of the island as a high-end tourism destination and tax haven, and as a slice of Europe in the Caribbean. I found the island’s status as global capitalist “paradise” (Körber 2018b) and the island’s “Europeanness” and whiteness to be some of the most surprising and fascinating aspects of the legacy of the shared past of St. Bartheĺemy and Sweden. Historical and natural factors have given rise to a situation on the island that is unusual in its West Indian context and in the context of the French overseas territories and their legacy of colonization and slavery: namely, the predominantly White population and the subordinated role of the region’s Afro-Caribbean heritage. What is usual, on the other hand, is the marginalization of indigenous history.

My main argument concerns the question of how this situation is perpetuated by exceptionalist narratives on both sides of the Atlantic, and how images of Sweden and of St. Bartheĺemy reflect each other in interesting ways. The naturalization of whiteness and the downplaying of the relevance of slavery and of Indigenous presence and their manifold legacies are two features that have characterized the Swedish self-understanding of the country’s colonial history. I want to argue that Sweden’s only colony in the Caribbean has contributed to, rather than challenged, this self-understanding. The predominance of national settler, explorer, and merchant narratives over non-white perspectives on the shared past is nothing unusual in European colonial histories, also since one purpose of historiography has been to create positive identification with the nation. What is surprising, instead, is the fact that such positive narratives have been left unchallenged for so long (for the Danish case, see Nonbo Andersen 2017, 54ff.). I will explain how this could happen in the case of Swedish narratives of St. Bartheĺemy.

St. Barthélemy in Swedish Research and Consciousness

In her overview of Swedish historiography related to colonialism, Gunlög Fur describes Scandinavia’s uneasy relationship with the history of colonialism:

Engagement with colonialism proper appears limited and distant in time, and this “indirect” form of Scandinavian involvement in colonial expansion allows room for claims of innocence in confrontations with colonial histories. Seemingly untainted by colonialism’s heritage, the Scandinavian countries throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first successfully maintained positions as champions of minority rights and mediators in global politics. (2014, 18)

Two aspects are especially relevant for my study of the legacy of Swedish colonialism in St. Bartheĺemy: the metaphor of untaintedness and the disassociation of past and present Swedish engagement with the world. “Untaintedness” implies the idea of a state of innocence, purity, and homogeneity; a blank slate; and a subsequent encounter with something dirty, bad, unclean, or foul. Such imaginations have received a racial dimension in the context of colonialism and slavery and their aftermath. My aim is to show how representations of colonialism—in historiography and tourism discourse, but also in cultures of remembrance consisting of artifacts, events, and narratives—are one arena where links between whiteness, purity, and innocence are actively established and perpetuated.

Fur suggests that Sweden has skipped a phase of scrutinizing its own involvement in colonialism and transatlantic enslavement that in the first place caused many of the conflicts that Sweden, at least since the second half of the twentieth century, has volunteered to help resolve (2014, 26ff.). This gap is evident in the case of relations between Sweden and St. Bartheĺemy, where there is a break from the end of actual colonial rule in 1878 until the resumption of friendly ties from the 1960s onward. Another elliptical narrative concerns the celebration of abolition, often in the form of European abolitionist “heroes,” while the establishment and maintenance of systems of enslavement remain more obscure.4 What is more, the history of St. Bartheĺemy is one instance where claims of mere complicity with the imperialism of others become manifest: it is not Sweden, but the Spanish conquerors or the earlier French colonizers who could be held responsible for the island’s initial colonization and violent conflicts with the region’s Indigenous population.

In the meantime, there has been a tendency to treat St. Bartheĺemy as an exotic but rather insignificant curiosity. This tendency in Swedish historiography is currently being remedied, with a range of recent publications based on meticulous research using available archival material (Pålsson 2016; Thomasson 2015; Weiss 2016; Wilson 2016). They approach St. Bartheĺemy as a cosmopolitan, dynamic, and contested space where inner-European conflicts, conflicts between the Old and New World, and race-related conflicts inherent in the ideology supporting overseas expansion, enslavement, and transatlantic displacement played out. This historical research is currently being complemented by efforts to develop a history and theory of Swedish race relations. Studies comprise, among other aspects, overseas colonialism and enslavement; the treatment of minorities and Indigenous peoples; the history of Swedish race biology, ideology, and the institutionalization of eugenics; as well as the assumed conflation of national belonging and whiteness (Habel 2008; 2012; Hübinette 2017; Lundström and Teitelbaum 2017; McEachrane 2014).

However, these previous studies do not discuss the ways in which Swedish colonialism in St. Bartheĺemy is remembered, imagined, and represented today on both sides of the Atlantic. Many initiatives strive to make colonial history visible and tangible again in present-day Sweden.5 But what is seldom provided is an idea of what kind of place the former colony is today. There is thus no ready archive to resort to when studying the relations between Sweden and its former colony, especially in the present day. What remains underrepresented is the continuous relevance of the shared past for the self-understanding of both places. Contextualized and complemented with previous research from, mainly, the fields of global and colonial history, and social geography, this article aims to foreground a performative methodology inspired by and indebted to indigenous, anthropological, and social geographical methodologies (see, for instance, Jernsletten and Storfjell 2017; Larsen and Johnson 2012; Öhman 2016), to deduce findings from my own observations, experiences, and engagement with the places and people I encounter, and from informal conversations and correspondence.

St. Barthélemy and the French West Indian Context

The population of St. Bartheĺemy is exceptionally homogeneous in a Caribbean context, with an approximate 95 percent of inhabitants being of European descent.6 Roughly half of them are the descendants of the first settler families, who still form part of the island’s influential elite. The other half stems from metropolitan France and has been arriving in larger numbers during the past decades of economic upswing. There is also a growing number of primarily US American villa owners who reside on the island for shorter periods of the year.

St. Bartheĺemy deviates from the social and economic patterns of most of the Caribbean in general, and from the French overseas territories, the so-called DROM-COM (départements et régions d’outre-mer and Collectiviteś d’outre-mer; overseas regions and collectivities), in particular. According to Françoise Vergès, what these territories share “is a colonial past, traces of which are to be found today in fragile economies, weak industry and high rates of unemployment, as well as rampant inequality” (2017, 165). She does not mention St. Bartheĺemy, one of the overseas collectivities, in her article on the overseas territories as vestiges of French colonialism, nor is the island mentioned in some of the most recent publications on the legacy of French colonialism and imperialism (Majumdar 2007; Bancel, Blanchard, and Thomas 2017). The fundamentally different “social and anthropological foundations” (Dahomay 2017, 176) of St. Bartheĺemy imply a strong economy, low unemployment rates, and a general high standard of living, and involve a less contested relation with the motherland France.

It is also significant, for a postcolonial consciousness on the island—or a lack thereof?—that St. Bartheĺemy was Swedish during the French and Haitian Revolutions,7 and during its history of abolition: it is the only place in the world where the Swedish “Code Noire,” ruling the territory’s slavery policy (Thomasson 2015), and the Swedish law for the abolition of slavery were ever in force. St. Bartheĺemy, thus, does not form part of a French or Caribbean collective remembrance of national and liberation movements. Apart from the French (yet English-speaking) part of St. Martin, the other French Antilles are not in the immediate vicinity. The Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe—of which St. Bartheĺemy formed a part until 2007—and Martinique have brought forth such eminent postcolonial thinkers and writers as Aimé ceśaire (1913–2008), Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), and Edouard Glissant (1928–2011), and the créolité movement. They have explored and theorized the impact of the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and hybridization on identity formation, race relations, and African diaspora cultures, and developed strategies of anticolonial resistance (see, for instance, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1993; ceśaire 1950; 1987; 1987; Fanon 1952; 1961; Glissant 1981). Guadeloupe and the other French Overseas Departments and regions have also been at the center of protests—with one wave beginning shortly after the secession of St. Bartheĺemy—that Jacky Dahomay interprets as ongoing negotiations of identity, citizenship, and nationality in the region and within the French Republic (2017, 175ff.).

To summarize, the most important difference between St. Barthé-lemy and the rest of the French West Indies remains the absence or presence of descendants of enslaved people, respectively, and with them the production of a creolized culture and the outlined tradition of decolonial and anti-racist thought. A “racial fracture” (Vergès 2017, 169) is palpable in St. Bartheĺemy, but in a way that renders invisible any impact of slavery that is so decisive for the social, cultural, and economic development of the other French overseas territories. Economically independent, and with a population that is predominantly of European descent, the island can be imagined as untainted by the legacy of slavery, devoid of anticolonial resistance, the trauma and memory of enslavement, and also of guilt, shame, and resentment. Because of its different pattern of heritage and affiliation, it is not surprising that St. Bartheĺemy opted for separation from the Department of Guadeloupe to shape its own independent relation to mainland France—not free of conflict, yet different.

I will proceed to explain how imaginations of the island as “untainted” by slavery are perpetuated, by a selective memory culture and other means to “Europeanize” and “whiten” the island, after which I will suggest interpretations for the role of the Swedish legacy therein.

The Whiteness of St. Barths

A picture I saw in the assembly hall of the Collectivité in Gustavia can illustrate how St. Bartheĺemy differs from its surroundings in terms of the ethnic makeup of its population. The picture showed, on a map of the islands, all mayors of the French Overseas Department Guadeloupe that St. Bartheĺemy was then still a part of. The only White mayor of the thirty-four municipalities of Guadeloupe in 2007 was Bruno Magras, now the Collectivity’s president. My conversation partners during my stay on the island emphasized that St. Bartheĺemy fares much better now “without Guadeloupe.” I was also told that parents, if at all economically able, send their children to high school and university in France, or—a recent trend—to Canada, preferring to avoid any of the neighboring islands. The reasons given were safety issues and the quality of education, but I had the impression that questions of affiliation and belonging, intertwined with race, were also at stake.

The very small proportion of Afro-Caribbeans or Latin Caribbeans on St. Bartheĺemy can be traced to historical as well as contemporary political origins. Self-representations of the history of the island follow traditional colonial narratives and tropes. One example is the official website of the Collectivity of St. Bartheĺemy.8 Its overview of the island’s history starts with the transatlantic routes of Christopher Columbus’s fleet, his “discovery” of the island, and the name it was given—after Columbus’s brother. There is then a gap until the arrival of the French in the late seventeenth century, reflecting a common imagination of the emptiness of land before the arrival of European explorers and settlers. The page mentions neither a pre-nor a post-Columbian Indigenous presence on the island, nor the history of slavery.

The argument of—at least temporary—desertedness, the theory or myth of terra nullius, has time and again been used to justify territorial claims and colonization from metropolitan centers (for the example of Sápmi and the Arctic, see, for instance, Heith 2014; Mustonen 2014). For St. Bartheĺemy, this seems to be true of more recent times as well. According to Bruno Cousin and Sébastian Chauvin, when branding the island for tourism and the real estate industry, “it is perceived as a virgin natural terrain rather than as a pre-existing cultural substrate to incorporate” (2013, 194). Another aspect, more specific for the island, is the aforementioned narrative about the island’s non-arable topography, aridity, and poverty. I mentioned earlier how the circumstances presumably prevented permanent Indigenous settlement and the establishment of a plantation economy.

I also mentioned before that this is ultimately also the reason why the majority of islanders are White. When asked about these circumstances, my conversation partners told me that the French settlers themselves were so poor that slaves—and, after emancipation, freed laborers—would just have been additional and unaffordable mouths to feed. This assertion of a more equal relationship of master and slave than elsewhere in the Caribbean is supported by research (Lavoie, Fick, and Mayer 1995, 371), yet the picture is complicated. Slave ownership was unequally distributed on the island,9 and the question remains why there is no larger population of Afro-Antilleans on the island today, despite the enormous upswing of the economy since the 1950s and, one would presume, large numbers of new jobs in the tourism-related service sector; why there is so little—at least from an outsider’s perspective—notable Afro-Caribbean presence on the island.

Cousin and Chauvin offer one explanation when they discuss the impact of politics and economy on the implementation of the island’s own brand, which, according to them, is based on its “white ethnic identity” (Cousin and Chauvin 2013, 197). The authors suggest that the “exodus” of almost all of the island’s Black population allowed tourism promoters to use the ethnic makeup of St. Bartheĺemy as a selling point, “even if it wrongly implied slavery had never existed on the island” (Cousin and Chauvin 2013, 187). Public campaigns against such distorted memory by the website “Mémoire St Barth,”10 among others, run by a local activist and dedicated to the island’s history of slavery, stopped such biased advertisement, the authors claim. My own experience shows, however, that the racial bias is still there, if in another guise. One instance is the repeated distancing from the rest of the Caribbean despite multiple economic and infrastructural ties, and another example is the extreme visual privileging of White residents and tourists, for instance, in the innumerable glossy magazines on the island advertising luxury products, vacation villas, and real estate. If there are any people of color at all represented in such magazines, they are not Black.11

This observation is in line with that of Cousin and Chauvin, who conclude that the strategy of the island’s tourism industry and wealthy immigrants has been to develop “a brand of exoticism which owes much more to the international upper class’ strategies of cultural distinction than to Caribbean heritage” (Cousin and Chauvin 2013, 197). A global eclectic exoticism is indeed ubiquitous in St. Bartheĺemy—a mix of Buddhas, Balinese architecture, and the rare reference to the region’s Indigenous peoples, for instance, in the name of the brand “Kalinas & Taïnos” selling jewelry made of Tahitian and Australian pearls12—but an “Antillean creolized identity” remains marginal (Cousin and Chauvin 2013, 194). Like Cousin and Chauvin, I was surprised to notice that there are only a few Caribbean restaurants and that even service staff is almost never from the West Indies, but mostly from metropolitan France (cf. Cousin and Chauvin 2013, 193).

I have elsewhere discussed the emphasis in international and Swedish tourism advertising, and tourism-related publications, on the island’s exceptional status in the Caribbean (Körber 2018b). The discourse juxtaposes the security, privacy, tidiness, and sophistication connected to the island’s Europeanness with a negatively connoted Caribbean. One example will suffice here, namely, a Svenska Dagbladet article titled “Karibiens svenskö” (The Caribbean’s Swedish Island):

Förbi svenska flaggor och lyxiga villor. Överallt är det klanderfritt rent. Ingen fattigdom, ingen smuts. … Det är lätt att förstå dem som förälskar sig i St Barth. Skönheten, lugnet och integriteten. Den franska gastronomin, de förstklassiga hotellen och de trendiga barerna. Allt finns här. Och så stränderna förstås. 22 stycken. Kritvita. (“Karibiens svenskö” 2004)

(Past Swedish flags and luxurious mansions. It is impeccably clean everywhere. No poverty, no dirt. … It is easy to understand those who fall in love with St. Barths. The beauty, serenity and integrity. The French gastronomy, the first-class hotels, and the trendy bars. It has it all. And the beaches, of course. 22 of them. Chalky white.)

It is difficult to ignore the connection made in the material between the island’s qualities for vacationers, its “Europeanness,” and ethnic makeup. My findings support the assertion that the island’s exclusive brand does not only have a dimension of class distinction and social stratification, but also a racial dimension. It includes the metaphorical description of the island as pure and clean, which, at least in the Swedish material, is linked to the Swedish legacy and whiteness, while the place’s Caribbean context, history, and non-European population are neglected.

(The Absence of a) Memory Culture concerning Transatlantic Enslavement

There is no monument, museum, or any other site of remembrance for the island’s enslaved population and their descendants.13 Apart from the aforementioned factors, some particular features of the island’s history have contributed to the lack of visible physical manifestations of the lives of people of African descent on the island. These are related to the particularities of the setup of St. Bartheĺemy as a Swedish free port colony—and I will explain how they resonate with Swedish exception-alist self-representations.

First, it seems that many more enslaved people of African descent were sold in Swedish waters than set their foot on, or even worked on, the island (Weiss 2016, 127–35). The natural harbor of Gustavia, then Le Careńage, was the main asset when Sweden took possession of the island in 1784. Some of the trade conducted there seems, however, to have taken place offshore,14 or on the uninhibited Fourchue Island, where the trade in enslaved people continued even after it was outlawed (Maher 2013, 141). This could be why there is no such material evidence of the slave trade in Gustavia as the sites of former “slave markets” turned into memory sites, for instance, in the “slave forts” in Ghana (cf. Körber 2017) or, for that matter, the former Danish West Indies (today’s US Virgin Islands). Weiss mentions a pillory for the punishment of the enslaved, but there is no sign or monument (2013, 295). There is thus no designated space on St. Bartheĺemy that would offer affective engagement with the history of slavery and the fate of the island’s enslaved and “free Blacks” (“fria kulörta” in Swedish at the time), or, for that matter, with the history of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Interestingly, the major museum and memorial site Mémorial ACTe on Guadeloupe, the self-designated “Caribbean Centre for the Expression and Memory of Slavery and the Slave Trade,” was commissioned in the year when St. Bartheĺemy was separated from the Department of Guadeloupe, and inaugurated in 2015. The museum confirmed to me that St. Bartheĺemy is not represented in the permanent exhibition.

An additional contributing factor to the invisibility of slavery— especially in the Swedish discourse—is the fact that St. Bartheĺemy never was a Swedish settler colony, but a so-called free port colony whose prosperity was directly linked to Sweden’s political neutrality in contemporary European and American conflicts. There were never more than around 130 Swedes living on the island at the same time. None of them were farmers, but rather they were officers or they held administrative posts, which means that none of them were large-scale slave owners. The main asset and responsibility of a free port colony was to facilitate the trade of one’s own trading company—in this case, the Swedish West India Company (Svenska Västindiska Kompaniet, 1786–1805), but more importantly in terms of scope, the trade of anyone else.15 The Swedish West India Company obtained a trade monopoly and the right to conduct slave trade in West Africa.16 In comparison with the scope of trade conducted by other nations in St. Bartheĺemy, and with the overall scope of the transatlantic slave trade, the numbers of ships under the Swedish flag carrying human cargo on the Middle Passage between West Africa and the Caribbean, and the number of enslaved brought to the island by Swedish ships, is very small (Weiss 2016). Victor Wilson, however, points to the fact that “the neutral free port allowed foreign actors to circumvent international treaties and laws that were becoming prevalent in the overall efforts to abolish the transatlantic slave trade” (2016, 255): while Swedish slave transports were small in scope, Swedish neutral free trade facilitated those of others.

The two arguments ensuing from the historical circumstances and their biased interpretation—one about the quantity of Swedish slave trade and slavery, and one about Swedish neutrality in times of war17—have contributed to an understanding of the Swedish colonial endeavor in the Caribbean as negligible and inconsequential.

Images of Sweden as a Naïve and Benign Colonial Power

When assessing contemporary narratives and commemorative events about the Swedish period in the history of St. Bartheĺemy, all seem to support the idea of Swedish colonialism as harmless, good-natured, or even absurd. I will give a few examples of anecdotes and Sweden-related events and places in Gustavia.

One anecdote describes the dilettantism of the Swedish defense of the island. On November 12, 1807, the French Navy raided the island. Two Swedish officers were killed in what the Swedish administration wrongly perceived as a hostile attack. It turned out that the only purpose of the raid was to stop an unwelcome merchant’s business, that French spies were fully informed about the goings-on on St. Bartheĺemy at all times, and that the entire town of Gustavia had been prepared for the raid, except for the Swedish administration. The greatest humiliation was, according to Anders Z. Sandström, who includes the anecdote in his book Saint-Barthélemy: Kulturhistoriska promenader bland svenskminnen från 17-och 1800-talen that “stadens bagare hade bakat extra mycket och det var färdigt tidigt på morgonen när de franska soldaterna skulle äta frukost” (Sandström 1997) [the town’s baker had baked more than usual, to be ready when the French soldiers had breakfast early in the morning].

This narrative of the Swedish regime as non-aggressive, overwhelmed, or clumsy might refer to the factual scarcity of personnel and capital that the Swedish colonial administration of St. Bartheĺemy suffered from. The (potentially fictive) detail about the bakery is left out in historian Ale Pålsson’s more thoroughly source-based version of the same event that emphasizes Governor Ankarheim’s frustration, also expressed in letters home to Sweden, about the fact that the Swedish administration and garrison were too easily outnumbered and thus defenseless (2016, 98ff.).

The essence of the narrative, however, is kept alive by the initiatives, places, and events that currently commemorate the island’s Swedish history in St. Bartheĺemy. Despite the remnants of Swedish military presence on the island,18 there is no emphasis on violent conflict that would put Swedes in the center as actors or aggressors.19 On the contrary, the connection to Sweden’s past and present is connoted with positive imaginations of health, friendship, inclusiveness, environmental awareness,20 peace, and reconciliation. For instance, a central part of the annual Swedish Weekend, or “Piteådagen,” is the race “Gustavialoppet,” inspired by the Swedish Vasaloppet, the “Vasa race,” and created in the beginning of the 1990s in collaboration with Swedish sport event managers to promote sport and health. Professional athletes from the neighboring islands also participate in the 10-kilometer race. In order to include the entire population, there is also a shorter “marche populaire” and the “Ti Moun” (Haitian Creole for child) race for children. Participants receive T-shirts decorated with a coat of arms of pelicans and reindeer to celebrate the friendship between St. Bartheĺemy and Sweden and especially the sister city of Piteå. The final event of “Piteådagen” is a public, free open air concert with local bands on Sunday evening, for which the stage is decorated with massive Swedish flags.

The celebrations also include a ceremony at the old Swedish cemetery outside of Gustavia. In November 2016, an Anglican priest and the Catholic bishop of Guadeloupe were present, and wreaths were laid by the Swedish St. Bartheĺemy Society, the St. Barth Association of the Friends of Sweden (l’ASBAS), and the Collectivity in honor of those who died on the island during the Swedish period. On the occasion of the 2016 memorial event, coincidentally, descendants of both the Swedish priest Fredrik Adolf Lönner (in office 1815–1824) and the governor Johan Norderling (in office 1819–1826) were present at the cemetery. The priest and the governor had fallen out with each other over the erection of a Catholic church in Gustavia, which the priest naturally opposed, and the governor, as realist politician, supported. Now, almost 200 years later, members of the families met again and took photos as proof of their “reconciliation.” What is missing, however, from the cemetery and the memorial event are gravestones or any other monument to enslaved Africans and their descendants.21

Another interesting example of how Swedish-St. Bartheĺemy connections are conceptualized as peaceful and cheerful is embodied in the owner of the legendary bar Le Select in Gustavia, entrepreneur Marius Stakelborough. Stakelborough, a descendant of enslaved Africans, was born on the island in 1923 and, after years of odd jobs on neighboring islands, opened Le Select, at the time the only bar and restaurant, in 1949. Swedish journalists and writers who came to the island in the 1960s to find out more about the former colony thought it probable that Stakelborough descended from one of the Swedish governors, Berndt Robert Gustaf Stackelberg (1784–1845). Although this hypothesis has since proven unlikely, Stakelborough has nevertheless adopted his identity as bridge-builder between St. Bartheĺemy and Sweden to such a degree that the bar is full of Sweden memorabilia, the royal family visited in the 1980s, he has made many trips to Sweden together with his children, he has received several medals for his engagement to tie the two places closer together, and he was appointed honorary consul.

I tend to agree with Cousin and Chauvin who write that Stakelborough’s popularity should not be equated with the island’s embrace of its West Indian heritage. Rather, Stakelborough “obtained the recognition he enjoys today … by becoming an advocate—and later the very icon of—the rediscovery of the island’s forgotten identity as … Swedish” (Cousin and Chauvin 2013, 194ff.). Stakelborough grew up in poverty, and Ingrid and Joachim Wall write that his wish to get engaged to and marry a member of one of the oldest and most influential families on the island was first declined by her parents because he was Black (1999, 54). So Cousin and Chauvin conclude that when Stakelborough’s originality and exceptionality as (allegedly) both Black and Swedish is concerned, it is not necessarily his, or the island’s, “ethno-cultural creolity” that is celebrated (2013, 195): Stakelborough’s presence does not demand engagement with the history of enslavement, but rather allows for reconnection with the second colonial power, Sweden, and, ultimately, an imagination of reconciliation. Rather than putting into focus the Black population of St. Bartheĺemy, Stakelborough’s story paradoxically enhances the island’s double European and White heritage.

Conclusion: Interpreting the Legacy of Swedish Colonialism on St. Barthélemy

When ties were resumed by Sweden and St. Bartheĺemy in the 1960s, it was a meeting between postwar Sweden with its new self-image of modernity, postcoloniality, anti-racism, and a new neutrality (Fur 2014, 26ff.), and St. Bartheĺemy in a phase of new economic upswing and new cosmopolitanism. Sweden was able to adopt its former colony without being met by any charges for apologies or reparations (in contrast, for instance, to Denmark’s relation with the US Virgin Islands, where such debates play a major role; see Nonbo Andersen 2017; 2018), and as an arena where friendliness, open-mindedness, and antiracism could be displayed.

St. Bartheĺemy was also able to adopt its former colonizer without reservations. Since most victims of the slave trade and forced labor have left the island long ago, as have Indigenous people,22 together with material evidence of these parts of the island’s history, and the most prominent inhabitant of African descent turned out to become the most prominent advocate for Sweden-St. Bartheĺemy relations, there are, to my knowledge, no Afro-Antillean or Indigenous counter-narratives that could challenge the status quo of St. Bartheĺemy-Swedish memory culture. The aforementioned website “Mémoire St Barth” provides an archive of the history of slavery on the island from a critical local perspective, but I had the impression that it is the result of the efforts of an individual, with limited impact on the general portrayal of the island’s demographic development. Neither St. Bartheĺemy nor any of the other French Caribbean dependencies is a member of CARICOM (Caribbean Community), and thus none participate in the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) campaigning for reparatory justice for the region’s communities of Indigenous peoples and people of African descent. When the CRC was established in 2013, Sweden was addressed alongside eight other European nations held responsible for the legacy of “genocide, slavery, slave trading, and racial apartheid.”23 Although the only reason for Sweden to be included in the group of formerly slave-trading nations is St. Bartheĺemy, the initiative is not rooted on the island, and the political issue has apparently not left any traces in the relationship between Sweden and St. Bartheĺemy.

Encounters with the group of early French settlers providing for themselves by farming and fishing before, during, and after the Swedish period also proved to be peaceful. Since they had been quite separate—at least geographically, topographically, and culturally—from the development of the urban harbor area of Gustavia, no collective memory of conflict and suppression could be expected, especially because the Swedish administration had, as I have suggested, never been powerful enough to control all activities on the island.

As for the group of arrivals from metropolitan France or elsewhere during the past decades, the colonial era is not particularly relevant. For them, as well as for the old families of the island, what is understandably at stake is the maintenance and steady improvement of their standard of living. High-end tourism and the real estate industry have proven excellent means to meet this goal, which again are supported by the successful branding of the island as European and cosmopolitan within the Caribbean. If it is seen as relevant at all, the Swedish heritage does not disturb, but rather supports the island narrative and brand: it brings with it no memories of a violent regime, but instead imaginations of European modernity and “White innocence.”24

Claims of White innocence are indeed what I suggest link Sweden’s and St. Bartheĺemy’s exceptionalist narratives. Scholars of race relations in Sweden have argued that what has been characteristic of the Swedish national code of conduct—that is, at least until the rise of the Sweden Democrats and other right-wing groups openly advocating White supremacy—has been a collective anti-racist stance, albeit without acknowledgment of the impact of race on the foundation of the country’s economy, social structure, or daily life. Sweden has claimed an exceptional position in the larger picture of European expansion and race ideology, a claim that cannot be maintained after scrutinizing the history of and narratives about Swedish colonialism in the Caribbean. Rather, my study suggests that Sweden is a specific, but nevertheless typical, example of European expansion and imperialism in the Caribbean that needs to be considered on equal terms with other colonial powers, and in its circum-Atlantic entanglements. The past years have seen a wealth of scholarship, activism, and artistic approaches to challenge Swedish and Nordic exceptionalist self-images and historiography—seemingly more so than on St. Bartheĺemy.

On St. Bartheĺemy, I have been told repeatedly by my conversation partners who were members of the White majority that “there is no racism on the island,” that “race doesn’t matter,” and “we treat everybody the same.” However, the island and Gustavia have been and still are segregated and segregating spaces. To not see—or rather, to not be willing to see—race on the island means to disassociate St. Barthé-lemy from its West Indian heritage and the Caribbean present and, instead, to associate oneself more closely with the double European expansionist legacy and ensuing tales of cultivation and cultivatedness, modernity, and enterprise. The island’s Swedish heritage contributes to these maneuvers, which in turn facilitate Swedish exceptionalist narratives of (relative) innocence and good intentions.