Ale Pålsson and Victor Wilson: "Swedish Caribbean Colonialism 1784–1878: Research, Challenges and Opportunities for Caribbean Digital History"
Speakers: Dr. Ale Pålsson and Dr. Victor Wilson (Uppsala)
Chair: Clelia La Monica (Uppsala)
UCL Respondent: Michael Donnay
Uppsala Respondent: András Tóth
About this talk: The Swedish Caribbean Colonialism 1784–1878 project (SweCarCol) integrates, orders and opens up important dispersed archives for research by publishing them on the Internet in cooperation with Uppsala University Library. It builds on the successful digitization project (2011–2016) of the unclassified and closed for research Swedish governmental archive in the French Colonial Archives. SweCarCol orders these for Swedish colonial history indispensible records together with Saint Barthélemy holdings in Sweden and creates a database-driven integrated and reclassified Caribbean archive. This virtual archive is ordered with new criteria based in historical theory and Digital Humanities. It will open up for research into previously overlooked areas such as gender and the social history of the enslaved and free black majority population. In addition to the archival integration the three project members will create new historical data in the fields of demography, slave trade and commerce, and slave law and justice. GIS depictions of the colony, as well as new material on transatlantic slavery connections has already been discovered, and several new avenues of research are readily available.
About the speakers:
Ale Pålsson has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History, Uppsala University, since June 2019. At Uppsala, he is a member of the project Swedish Caribbean Colonialism (VR2018-06064), funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), with the aim of digitizing and making accessible the majority of Swedish colonial records from Saint-Barthélemy. In his Ph.D. thesis, Our Side of the Water: Political Culture in the Swedish Colony of Saint Barthélemy 1800-1825, he examines citizenship and political involvement among naturalized citizens, highlighting racial structures, gender roles and Atlantic World political symbolism. He has continued to examine social-historical aspects of the Swedish colony, as well as published research on modern literary interpretations of the colony.
Victor Wilson has also been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History, Uppsala University, since June 2019. At Uppsala, he is a member of the project Swedish Caribbean Colonialism (VR2018-06064), funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), with the aim of digitizing and making accessible the majority of Swedish colonial records from Saint-Barthélemy. He is also currently tasked with writing the history of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland). Victor's work is focused on Caribbean colonial and economic history, with a focus on Nordic free ports in the Caribbean. Within that context, Wilson has done research on and written about Swedish participation in the transatlantic and intra-Caribbean slave trade. The findings of that research were a part of his 2015 thesis, Commerce In Disguise. Trade and War in the Caribbean Free Port in Gustavia, 1793–1815 (Åbo Akademi University).