Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania

Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; timber merchants on Zanzibar’ coffee farmers in Kenya; and King Leopold’s footmen in Congo. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers. It charts the entrepreneurial routes chosen by various Norwegians and the places they ventured, while demonstrating the importance of recognizing the complicity of such “non-colonial colonials” for understanding the complexity of colonial history.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Preface Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland List of Contributors Introduction: Norwegians Navigating Colonial Orders in Africa and Oceania: an Introduction Bjørn Enge Bertelsen Chapter 1. Swedish and Norwegian Shipping to South Africa 1850-1914 Knut M. Nygaard Chapter 2. Long Haul Tramp Trade and Norwegian Sailing Ships in 
Africa, Australia and the Pacific, 1850-1920: Captain Haave’s Voyages Gustav Sætra Chapter 3. Liminal but Omnipotent: Thesen & Co. – Norwegian Migrants in the Cape Colony Erlend Eidsvik Chapter 4. Business Communication in Colonial Times: The Norway-East Africa Trading Company in Zanzibar 1895-1925 Anne K. Bang Chapter 5. 
‘Three Black Labourers Did the Job of Two Whites.’ African Labourers in Modern Norwegian Whaling Dag Ingemar Børresen Chapter 6. The Consular Affairs Issue and Colonialism Svein Ivar Angell Chapter 7. Norwegian Shipping and Landfall in the South Sea in the Age of Sail Edvard Hviding Chapter 8. Adventurous Adaptability in the South Sea: Norwegians in ‘the Terrible Solomons’, ca. 1870-1930 Edvard Hviding Chapter 9. Norwegians in the Cook Islands: The legacy of Captain Reinert G. Jonassen (1866-1915) – Trader, Musician, Navigator, Diplomat and Good Samaritan Jon Tikivanotau Michael Jonassen Chapter 10. From Adventure to Industry and Nation-making: The History of a Norwegian Sugar Plantation in Hawai‘i Knut M. Rio Chapter 11. Scandinavians in Colonial Trading Companies and Capital-intensive Networks: The Case of Christian Thams Elsa Reiersen Chapter 12. Colonialism in Norwegian and Portuguese: The Plantation Madal in Mozambique Bjørn Enge Bertelsen Chapter 13. Norwegian Investors and Their Agents in Colonial Kenya Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland Chapter 14. Scandinavian Agents and Entrepreneurs in the Scramble for Ethnographica during Colonial Expansion in the Congo Espen Wæhle Afterword Peter Vale Index

About the Author :
Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland is a historian with UiB Global at the University of Bergen. Beginning in 1999, she was part of a team of historians writing a history of Norwegian development aid, published in three volumes in 2003. She initiated the research project “In the Wake of Colonialism” and is the author of Nordmenn i det koloniale Kenya (Spartacus, 2010) and co-editor, with Knut Mikjel Rio, of Kolonitid: Nordmenn på eventyr og big business i Afrika og Stillehavet (Scandinavian Academic Press, 2009).

Review :
“Navigating Colonial Orders provides a novel prism in which to examine the informal imperial influence of ‘noncolonial colonials’, both European and non-European, who thrived in foreign imperial systems. While the work resists the generalising ‘shade’ of globalisation, the contributions illuminate the global nature of expanding social, economic and political exchanges that shape contemporary core–periphery interaction. Norwegian entrepreneurs in Africa and the Pacific, utilising expertise in shipping, management, whaling and timber, flourished in an environment of rapid industrialisation and vast economic exploitation. Navigating Colonial Orders proves that Norwegians were ‘integral to and complicit in’ the feeding frenzy of European colonial expansion.” · Journal of Pacific History “This collection is an extremely informative and valuable addition to the field of Scandinavian colonialism studies and colonial history of Africa and the South Pacific illustrating the multiform and complex nature of the colonial systems.” · Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History “This fascinating and deeply engaging volume makes a unique contribution not only to the study of Norwegian political and economic history from 1850 to 1950 but also to the interdisciplinary field of Postcolonial Studies. Through original and ground-breaking research, the contributors question the perception that Norway’s active role in the world at large came into being only in the modern era as a promoter of world peace and human rights… A counter-intuitive scrutiny of such popular assumptions through rigorous research – as the contributors to this volume have done – is of tremendous relevance to broader critical interrogations of the overlapping concepts of Nordic norm entrepreneurship and Nordic exceptionalism.” · Scandinavian Journal of History “Navigating Colonial Orders is an extremely valuable record of geographically extensive and variously troubled and profitable Norwegian overseas adventures, enterprise and community from 1850 to 1950. Collated in a single, compelling collection, a series of painstakingly researched chapters by thirteen accomplished scholars examines Norwegian commerce, shipping, whaling, fishing, farming and forestry in Africa and the Pacific Islands….The presentations draw from an impressive range of primary archival material and secondary library material, and on the expertise of anthropologists, historians, a geographer and a political scientist.” · Gordon Pirie, University of Cape Town