Pages from the history of the Caribbean area is the title of the thread in order to leave room for others to join in with their stories, but what follows in this first post, who knows - perhaps the only one, concerns a limited page of history surrounding what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands. At the same time this history may have similarities and parallels with the history of some other areas in the Caribbean area, at the end there are also some notes about the end of the Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent trade in Chinese indentured labourer. It began as a comment to a post in
Session 18 May 2019
I find it quite interesting that the Danes singing in harmony while the Danish Church & Kingdom were involved with enslaving people in the Caribbean & in the pacific. Both entities owned enslaved people and still today benefit from stolen people, goods and lands. If it were not for these resources, the Danish government would not be the power it is today 400 years later. I'm just saying. Were these Danes aware of the horror their people were imposing on others while singing these lovely hymns?
I doubt it. Singing promotes belonging and a sense of togetherness, but few become saints. In the mid 18th century the lifes of many poor people in Europe and also in Denmark, also among those who went to church probably did not differ very much form the lives of serfs. They were, apart from being able to read the Bible rather ignorant, and many had very hard lives. I have read accounts of life in poor areas of the country in the latter half of the 19th century where people were genuinely grateful when the crops were plenty and they would not have to starve at the end of the winter. It is hard to imagine, the poor buildings some lived in without much heating or insulation, with water to be picked up from a pond which was shared with the animals and also used for washing. Physical abuse with violent beating was not unheard of and only changed with new laws implemented in the early 20th century. Of course some people had good lives and few qualms about how they went about earning their living, in an odd sense not too different from today when wars for the preservation of Freedom and Democracy are waged or supported by several NATO countries. Since you mention the Caribbean, what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands, used to be a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, initially company owned business property, but later upon the bankruptcy of the company St Thomas and St John were in the 1670'ies, taken over by the state which then in 1733 purchased St Croix from a French company. Looking at the map it would not have been surprising if the islands eventually had joined up with surrounding islands or had formed their own state, but that is not what happened. As we now know they were sold in 1917 to the US (about 40 years before segregation was ruled unconstitutional), but the sale has a history. I'll begin with the way the Wiki
Danish West Indies - Wikipedia presents it:
Danish colonizers in the West Indies aimed to exploit the profitable
triangular trade, involving the export of firearms and other manufactured goods to Africa in exchange for
slaves who were then transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations. The final stage of the triangle involved the export of cargos of sugar and rum to Denmark. The economy of the Danish West Indies depended on slavery. After a rebellion, slavery was officially
abolished in 1848, leading to the near economic collapse of the plantations.
In 1852 the Danish parliament first debated the sale of the increasingly unprofitable colony. Denmark tried several times to sell or exchange the Danish West Indies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: to the United States and to the
German Empire respectively.
Denmark tried to sell, ... yes, and here is the interesting detail found on
https://www.virgin-islands-history....estindiske-oeer-usa/salgstraktaten-1867/where one can see the photographs of the handwritten documents from 1867:
When one machine translates the following page to English one gets:
Sales Treaty 1867
From the middle of the 19th century, it started to go down in every way for the Danish West Indies, because the sugar from St. Croix was fiercely increasing competition in the world market, and because trade and shipping at St. Thomas waned.
The 1867 Sales Treaty, the first page.
The first page of the sales treaty. (National Archives).
American interest in the islands
After Denmark lost the war in 1864, Americans became afraid that Austria, as a kind of war booty, would take on the Danish West Indies. US Secretary of State William H. Seward therefore began negotiations with the Danish envoy Waldemar Raasløff in Washington. The Americans were very interested in acquiring the excellent port of St. Thomas to his naval fleet.
Seward and Raasløff were powerful and result-oriented men. In early 1867, they negotiated a battle treaty in place. It was signed at diplomatic level on October 24, 1867. The Americans would buy St. Thomas with St. Jan for $ 7.5 million in gold, on the other hand, they were not particularly interested in the agricultural island of St. Croix.
Referendum or not
Denmark had one wish, which we insisted on, although the Americans found it unnecessary. It was a referendum on the islands regarding the sale. Paragraph 1 of the Treaty stated: "His Majesty the King of Denmark, however, will not exert any coercion on the people and will therefore, as soon as possible, give it the opportunity to freely express his wishes with regard to this concession." The result of the referendum, which was carried out on St. Thomas and St. On January 9, 1868, 1244 voted for the sale and 22 against the sale of the two islands to the United States.
Time is running out
Denmark was thereby prepared to ratify (approve) the Treaty; but in the United States there were political concerns. Despite Raasløff's vigorous efforts, time went by without the Congress being able to decide. The last deadline for ratification expired in April 1870, without the Senate having agreed to the purchase of the colony. The race was thus run for this time.
1867, the year of the treaty, was the same year that the US purchased Alaska from Russia for only 7,2 million or USD 300,000 less than offered for St. Thomas and St. John, that cover 132 square kilometers. If one looks around in the same area of the world, the history is complex as told on
Territorial evolution of the Caribbean - Wikipedia where there are so many maps describing the developments. Since 1983 nothing has changed:
1peacelover mentiond also Denmark or Danish companies involved in slave trade in the Pacific. It is possible, what I did find was
The Pacific Slave Trade
In 1802 Denmark became the first country to stop participating in the Atlantic slave trade. England followed in 1807, the United States in 1808, Holland in 1814, France in 1818, Spain in 1820, Portugal in 1836. Then the same multinational commercial interests that had operated the trade in Africans turned to Asia for laborers, and from 1840 to 1875, an estimated 138,000 Chinese men were shipped to Latin America and the Caribbean.
Proponents of this "coolie trade" claimed willing emigrants were indenturing themselves for a few years–usually between six and eight–after which they would be free to settle in the New World or return home. In fact, few of the laborers from China were voluntary; contracts, when they existed, were often signed under duress and rarely honored. Chinese, saying men were being sold like pigs, referred to the trade as "mai jui jai," the sale of piglets.
About 80% of the men shipped across the Pacific from China were kidnapped or decoyed; most were from the southern coastal region; and close to 100,000 landed in Peru. The Peruvian Congress–during a failed attempt to halt the traffic in 1856–likened it to "a kind of Negro slave trade." But traffickers found shipping Chinese yielded even greater profits than the African slave trade. According to James O'Kelly, a reporter for the New York Herald, the 900 Chinese on board a ship he visited in Havana, Cuba were worth $450,000 to their importers and had been obtained for a mere $50,000.
About why and how the Danish slave trade over the Atlantic stopped in 1802 I found
Dansk forbud mod slavehandel over Atlanten i 1792 - Dansk Vestindien
Danish ban on slave trade across the Atlantic in 1792
From the 1650s Denmark participated in the slave trade across the Atlantic. In total, some 120,000 enslaved Africans were transported from Africa to the West Indies on ships under Dannebrog.
Despite Denmark's active slave trade, for many years there was virtually no public debate on the subject in Denmark. Yet in 1760, the Bishop of Zealand defended this trafficking. However, this changed in the late 18th century. In 1788, for example, a book was published by the physician Paul Erdmann Isert, who condemned the slave trade.
Commission for better living conditions
There were also new initiatives from the official side. The Danish Minister of Finance from 1784, Count Ernst Schimmelmann, was very wealthy and owned some of the best plantations with about 1,000 slaves in the Danish colony in the West Indies. In 1791 he was appointed a commission to ensure "the better decor of the negro trade." In a comprehensive report largely authored by Schimmelmann himself, the Commission argued for better living conditions for slaves in the West Indies. However, the purpose was not humanitarian. Above all, one would avoid the many deaths in the colony which provided a constant need for expensive slave transport from Africa. Furthermore, one would save the expensive forts on the Guinea coast.
King Christian VII signs regulation on the 'negro trade'
In March 1792, Christian VII set his signature on a new regulation on the "Negro trade". The slave trade across the Atlantic under Dannebrog was to cease, however, very pragmatically only from 1803 - 10 years later. Meanwhile, the islands could introduce all the slaves they wanted. Even financial support could be obtained from the state so that the slave population could be as large and balanced as possible in terms of gender and age.
The result was, paradoxically, that during the 1791-1803 settlement period, the slave population grew from 28,000 to 36,000. Subsequently, there was only limited illegal slave trade across the Atlantic under the Danish flag.
