Talk:Danish slave trade

Sources for article expansion

• Listed here. — LlywelynII 23:57, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
• Also, a list of known slave cargoes in the Danish Virgin Islands appears as Appendix J in The Danish West Indies under Company Rule.
• A separate list in (in German) apparently giving the Danish Africa Company ships and their cargoes upon loading (?), rather than upon delivery. — LlywelynII 11:37, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Scandinavian slavery articles

Some recent activities of one trigger-happy user seem a bit random and illogical. I have invited her/him to provide a brief rationale for the unexplained spate of rollbacks to the articles Danish slave trade, Thrall, Slavery in Sweden, and Slavery in Denmark. I'm not sure that the user actually read these articles.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.252.94.31 (talk) 09:37, 8 April 2018 (UTC)‎

I believe the good-faith edit complained of - the removal of a country specific category added by this user - has been reverted. But I can understand why the editor concerned did so, because both Norway and Denmark have a shared Norse or Viking heritage, so this article does not fit cleanly into a single modern county category. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 20:08, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Danish slave trade outside of the Atlantic?

The Danish India page mentions slavery in Tranquebar in passing but this page does not. This page also says that Denmark abolished the trade in 1803, but one must click over to the Danish West Indies Slavery page to find that the practice was not abolished until 1842, which seems misleading. MyIP19216811 (talk) 18:53, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

It does mention the slave trade in Europe and with the Abbasid Caliphate. --Aciram (talk) 12:52, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Sock-puppetry marker?

I was looking through the history, anyone have any idea what this mark referred to? I would have expected a number of back and forths from multiple accounts, but nothing springs look off. The only conflict was a discussion about swedes vs Danish vikings, which is understandable as historians keep either splitting them or saying you cant split the two. Carewolf (talk)

See w:en:Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Badgorges. Mellk (talk) 09:37, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

Ah okay, the edits by the puppets look fine, so you suspect they was building up history to misuse the accounts later. Carewolf (talk) 10:22, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

They have created a lot of sockpuppet accounts and we also have a policy on block evasion. Mellk (talk) 07:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands

I don't see any information about the Danish slave trade in relation to Danish-ruled Iceland, Greenland or the Faroe Islands and not much is coming up when I search. Did slavery-gained money from the Danish Treasury enter the Icelandic, Greenlandic, and Faroese economies? Were any slaves ever brought to any of these colonies? Were slave-produced goods like sugar going to these colonies? Were slave ships coming and going from these ports? I would not be especially surprised if at least some ships travelling back and forth between Copenhagen and the Danish West Indies were stopping in Iceland or the Faroe Islands. There were certainly Danish merchants who were involved in both the Iceland Company and the Danish West Indian Company. This topic seems understudied. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 08:50, 9 December 2025 (UTC)

To answer this question, it is necessary to know a little more about the Faroe Islands and Iceland in this time period. If one study that issue, it is easy to see why it is, as you call it, "understudied". Both were very poor parts of Denmark-Norway, primarily inhabited by poor farmers and fishermen. There were virtually no upper class people present in these provinces that could afford or have any use for slaves: no nobility, no mansions or estates, no rich merchant class, and not even any cities or towns. There were not even any true merchant class developed, since the provinces were rural, and lacked towns. The population consisted of rural small time farmers, and not farmers of the American planter type. The closest one comes to any sort of upper class were slightly more well off peasants; the Danish officials that live there temporarily; and the priests. The poor rural peasants of the Faroe Islands and Iceland are not likely to have owned slaves. That would have been a foreign concept to them. They are unlikely to have even been aware that Denmark owned colonies in the Carribean that used slaves.--Aciram (talk) 04:07, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

@Aciram You keep insisting that the Nordic relationship to slavery is unlike, say, the Southern US slave plantation economy, but that's not an assertion that has ever been made. The average lifestyle of the Icelandic or Faroese or Greenlandic peasant doesn't necessarily answer my questions. What sort of money was Denmark sending to Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands? If the Danish government was making money from slavery, and they were sending so much as one Kroner to these northern colonies, it is a question worth asking. Was even one slave dragged to these islands? Were any slave-produced goods like sugar imported to these islands at all? It's not an assertion that these islands' economies were built around slavery, it is a question of the extent of the influence of Danish slavery and colonialism, however small. As for Icelandic and Faroese people being unaware of slavery, I doubt that. The people who knew Hans Jonatan were certainly aware of slavery. Later on, certainly some Icelandic nationalists in the 19th and 20th centuries were aware of the Inuit and West Indians and developed racist attitudes towards them. Reykjavík was founded in the 1700s through a donation from the King of Denmark, later being given trading rights, and it was Danish traders who dominated the Reykjavík economy. How many of these Danish traders had benefited from slavery and colonialism elsewhere? These matters may be small on the global slavery scale, but small is not the same as non-existent. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 09:25, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

Slaves in Denmark-Norway

It is my understanding that prior to 1792, slaves could be transported back to Denmark-Norway from Africa and the Caribbean, and legally could be held in slavery in Denmark-Norway. The article could use some more info about this. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 20:04, 10 December 2025 (UTC)

In 1792, the Danish banned the import of slaves; but that ban referred to the Danish colonies, not to Denmark-Norway itself. The reason was that the slaves had always been directed to the colonies, not to Denmark-Norway proper. You may therefore be misunderstanding the issue. I am not aware of any slaves in Denmark in this time period, unless you wish to consider the occasional kammarmohr at the royal court slaves (even less so in Norway, which had less of an upper class culture in this period). I am not aware that slavery was legal in Denmark-Norway itself. It was common for European countres in this time period to allow slavery in their colonies, and yet not allow it in the mother country. This may have been the case in Denmark-Norway as well. That is an important factor to consider when it comes to this issue; it was very different from example America. The first step to answer your question, would be to find out if slavery was actually practiced in Denmark itself during this time period, rather than only the colonies. My impression is that it was only allowed in the colonies. The law of 1792, that you may be referring to, adressed the import of slaves to the colonies; it says nothing about the issue in Denmark proper. --Aciram (talk) 04:12, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

@Aciram According to this: "On three islands in the Caribbean, called the Danish West Indies, and in the colony of Trankebar in India, enslaved Africans had to work on plantations...Some of them worked as servants for the plantation owners or for those who governed the island. “When the slave owners returned home to Denmark-Norway, they brought one or two slaves with them,” said Østhus." The same Hanne Østhus has written this piece titled Slaves and non-european servants in Denmark-Norway during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Elsewhere Østhus has written about "the life of Adam Jacobsen, an enslaved man who was trafficked from the Danish West Indies to the small town of Arendal in southern Norway sometime around 1780...Although the number of people of African and Afro-Caribbean origin, enslaved and free, were limited in pre-industrial Denmark-Norway, they were there. Most lived in Copenhagen, but some, Jacobsen being among them, were found in smaller towns or on occasion in the Danish-Norwegian countryside." This suggests to me that Denmark-Norway had various inhabitants of African origin: some enslaved and some "free" former slaves working as servants. Østhus also writes, "Here I particularly examine the question of whether Jacobsen was a slave or not, wherein I argue that Arendal’s authorities employed a dual practice of both declaring slavery illegal but also of simply sidestepping the issue of legality altogether." The last bit is something I have alluded to before: the difference between what the law technically says and what was actually practiced. Quoting Østhus again: "Furthermore, among Herlofson’s connections in St. Croix was the merchant Jens Friedenrich Hage who brought black slaves with him when he moved to Copenhagen in 1801. His sister-in-law did the same. There were, therefore, people in Herlofson’s network who condoned slave keeping in Europe." Also note what she says about "local servants who illegally left their employment...it was not uncommon for servants in eighteenth-century Denmark-Norway to abscond". This sounds like some form of involuntary servitude to me. There's also very literal slave auctions happening in Denmark: "In 1774, the question of whether or not four slaves brought in from West Africa could be sold on auction came up. The regional governor doubted the legality of this and had to ask the central governing body of the Danish Chancellery (Danske Kancelli) for guidance. They mulled it over, and came to the conclusion that the sale of humans was legal...In addition, towards the end of the eighteenth century Copenhagen’s courts concluded that slavery was for all intent and purposes legal there." Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 07:42, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

@Aciram A related question is the legal status of slavery in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland under Danish rule. The Dano-Norwegian government was not enslaving the Inuit or the Faroese or the Icelanders as far as I know, but they were enslaving Africans in the West Indies and West Africa and apparently India too. So that opens the question of whether Greenlanders, Icelanders, and Faroese officially had legal rights that Danish West Indians and others didn't have. Not just the actual practice or non-practice of slavery, but the letter of the law itself. Bohemian Baltimore (talk) 08:00, 12 December 2025 (UTC)