Conclusion

To write a history that views the Baltic-and Sweden in particularfrom the perspective of the Atlantic may seem perverse. After all, Sweden's experience of the Atlantic was largely indirect. The American colony of New Sweden (Nya Sverige) had been founded amid high hopes in 1638, but Swedish control of the lower Delaware valley was shortlived. 1 The territory was surrendered to the Dutch in 1655, who lost it in turn to the English. Swedish-speaking Lutheran communities lived on in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, but they were just one, increasingly minor element in a colonial scene dominated by English and Welsh Quakers, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, German Pietists of different stripes, and Africans whose spiritual beliefs stood apart from those of their north European masters. 2 Swedish endeavour on the African coast was equally eeting. Louis De Geer, no less, was among the promoters of the Swedish West India Company (Guineakompaniet), established in 1649 to force an entry into the booming slave trade, but the forts that were established along the Gold Coast in the 1650s did not endure. The last of them was seized by the Danes in 1663. 3 Sweden's imperial presence in the Atlantic was not renewed until the 1780s, when Gustav III, exploiting the diplomatic fallout from the American Revolution, acquired the tiny Caribbean island of St Barthlemy.

Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Legal Studies and Society

• Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic

  D J Hancock, David Hancock•The Journal of Interdisciplinary…•1998

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