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| Title: | The Danish Ban on the Atlantic Slave Trade and Denmark's African Colonial Ambitions, 1787-1807 |
| Author: | Hopkins, Daniel P. |
| Year: | 2001 |
| Periodical: | Itinerario: European Journal of Overseas History |
| Volume: | 25 |
| Issue: | 3-4 |
| Pages: | 154-184 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Denmark Ghana |
| Subjects: | colonial conquest slave trade abolition of slavery plantations colonialism History and Exploration Labor and Employment |
| Abstract: | By the summer of 1788, Paul Isert, forts' surgeon in the Danish establishments on the Guinea Coast (now Ghana), and Ernst Kirstein, Danish Finance Minister Ernst Schimmelmann's private secretary, were drafting formal legislative proposals for a small but ambitious colonial undertaking a few miles inland from the Danish forts on the Guinea Coast. Isert acquired a piece of land in the king's name in the hills of Akuapem, some distance inland from Fort Christiansborg. Throughout the half-century of Frederik VI's regime Isert, Jens Flindt, Peter Thonning and their powerful patron Schimmelmann, and others besides, proposed placing a plantation colony. As opposed to the opinion of G. Nörregård (1966) en Henrik Jeppesen (1966) Svend Erik Green-Pedersen, the historian of the Danish slave trade, stated in 1979 that the Danish slave trade commission never advanced the possibility of establishing African plantations as an argument in favour of the abolition of the slave trade. Basing himself predominantly on archival sources, the present author concludes that all through the period in which Danish society was turning against the Atlantic slave trade, from the 1780s to 1807, the Danish government actively pursued the planting of an agricultural colony on the Guinea Coast. Notes, ref. |
