Library:Riding the Wave

Riding the Wave: Sweden's Integration into the Imperialist World System
Author	Torkil Lauesen
Publisher	Kersplebedeb Publishing
First published	2021
Type	Book
Source	https://annas-archive.li/md5/0e7e0ae20903230aa84c142a06344d2b
PDF	https://annas-archive.li/md5/827b991d49a65d4e2679d4eaf7400b17
Audiobook

Introduction

This book is about Sweden’s integration and role within global capitalism. It covers the period from 16th-century colonialism to the present day of transnational production chains. Sweden’s economic and political system cannot be understood without this long and global perspective. The development of global capitalism has significantly influenced the national contradictions that have come to define capitalism’s special “Swedish model.”

Globalization is not a new phenomenon. Capitalism has always been a world system. The breakthrough of industrial capitalism was closely linked to the Portuguese and Spanish looting of gold and silver from Latin America in the 16th century and Dutch, English, and French colonialism in the 17th and 18th centuries. The creation of the world system was at the same time a polarization of the world between a Northwest European core and the rest of the world, a colonial periphery. This process also shaped the birth and development of capitalism in Sweden. The inter-imperialist contradictions of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, between England, France, the USA, and Germany, were of great importance to the economic and political development of Sweden. Up until the Second World War, Sweden was economically and politically tied to Germany. The German defeat in the Second World War, however, changed and broadened Sweden’s pattern of alliances in the direction of the USA and the rest of Europe. Simultaneous with the further development of the social democratic welfare state—the “people’s home” (folkhem)—Sweden expanded its global economic and political influence in the 1950s and 60s. In the mid-1970s, the neoliberal counteroffensive hit Sweden’s model welfare state hard, putting an end to 44 years of continuous social democratic rule. Outsourcing of industry, global finance, and migration flows have changed Swedish society. One cannot understand Sweden without an analysis of how national contradictions interact with capitalism’s principal global contradictions. This may sound familiar, obvious, and trivial. However, most studies of Sweden’s economy and politics start from a national perspective, with the global perspective merely presented as background information.

In this book, I will use examples from history, from early colonialism to the present day, to trace the development of “the Swedish model.” The “folkhem” is, according to the Swedish self-perception, a special progressive form of capitalism with social features. “Capitalism with a human face.” The Scandinavian capitalist welfare states are often regarded as semi-socialist societies, by both left-wing politicians in the United States—like Bernie Sanders—as well as politicians in many Third World countries. For the latter, the Scandinavian countries’ progressive image is bolstered by the fact that they were not significant colonial powers and, even moreso, because Sweden supported many Third World liberation struggles in the 1970s. Even on the more radical left, I have come across the view that the social democratic welfare state is a step towards socialism and that, “we can go with the Social Democrats halfway to our goal.” Such views are manifestations of a lack of a global perspective. The global perspective is not only important for analyzing the world; it is equally important for strategies to change the world. In order to develop effective anti-capitalist strategies, it is necessary to start from the global contradictions. First of all, because they have a decisive influence on the outcome of national contradictions, but even moreso because we, as socialists, must be internationalists, not only in words but also in deeds. We are not struggling for the specific benefit of the citizens of privileged nations like Sweden, but for the proletariat regardless of national or ethnic background. Finally, the global perspective is necessary because capitalism can only be defeated through a coordinated struggle. Internationalism is necessary if we want another, more equal and democratic, world order.

In what follows, I will describe how Sweden became part of the imperialist core—how it tried to be a significant European colonial power but was outmaneuvered by the great colonial powers. Instead, Sweden had to ride on the coattails of colonialism, especially that of Germany and Belgium. I describe the interaction between the breakthrough of industrial capitalism, the rise of social democracy, and the development of the Swedish welfare state, in the context of an increasingly globalized capitalism. Finally, I describe how neoliberalism has brought about economic change and altered the pattern of politics in Sweden, and provide an overview of the current economic and political situation.

Although the Scandinavian countries may seem more progressive than the leading imperialist powers, we will see that when you scratch the surface they are no different in their practice or ideology. For working-class people, they are certainly more comfortable than most countries, whether in the Global North or South—their exploits, however, are just as unscrupulous as those of the “hard-core” imperialist powers. While I focus on Sweden in the following pages, it is not because Norway or Denmark, my home country, are better or worse. It is because Sweden is the most important in economic terms; “the Swedish model” is the ideal type of capitalist welfare state and social democracy there is most advanced.

Louis Proyect’s 2015–2016 series about Sweden in his blog “The Unrepentant Marxist” served as an inspiration to write this book, as did many other sources. I attempt to take this material and show how it fits within an overarching process of imperialist polarization and shifting global contradictions. Of course, these conclusions are mine alone. I would like to thank everyone who has read drafts of this book and provided me with useful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Karl Kersplebedeb for assuming the task of editing the book, both in terms of language and content.

SWEDEN: NATIONAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Early colonialism and the slave trade

The rise of capitalism in Europe and colonialism are two inseparable phenomena. It was the conquest of the Americas and the looting of Africa and Asia that boosted the development of capitalism in Europe. The Spanish colonies in Latin America provided the silver and gold that Europe needed so desperately for its growing trade. The European kings, nobility, and Church were insatiable in their lust for luxury; following in their footsteps, the growing bourgeoisie and members of the state apparatus also became consumers of more and new kinds of goods. Gold and silver coins were the necessary medium for the growing trade. The limited amount of these two metals hampered the circulation of goods. That is why the thirst for gold and silver from the “New World” was so great. Precious metals were looted—or mined by slave labor—in Mexico and Peru and were then transported in huge quantities, mainly to Spain. From there, they spread throughout Europe and quenched the budding capitalism’s thirst for a means of exchange.^[1] Between 1500 and 1800, approximately 100 million kg of silver were transported from South America to Europe.^[2] The silver coins developed European manufacturing and paid for the import of goods from Asia—at the time, Europe had nothing of interest to Asia except gold and silver.

1. “The discovery of America was due to the thirst for gold which had previously driven the Portuguese to Africa, because the enormously extended European industry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the trade corresponding to it demanded more means of exchange than Germany, the great silver country from 1450 to 1550, could provide. The conquest of India by the Portuguese, Dutch and English between 1500 and 1800 had imports from India as its object—nobody dreamt of exporting anything there. And yet what a colossal reaction these discoveries and conquests, solely conditioned by the interests of trade, had upon industry: they first created the need for exports to these countries and developed large-scale industry.” Frederick Engels, “Letter to Schmidt, C. London, October 27, 1890.” In Marx and Engels Correspondence (Moscow: International Publishers, 1968).

2. Bill Warren, “Myths of Underdevelopment: Imperialism and Capitalist Industrialization,” New Left Review 81 (September–October, 1973): 41.

Slavery was expanded and systematized in the colonies in South America and the Caribbean. The Spaniards and Portuguese initially used Latin America’s Indigenous population as slaves in the mines and plantations. The Incan, Aztec, and Mayan peoples had developed societies that organized collective irrigation, production, and the distribution of food. The violent colonization broke down the structures of these Indigenous societies and famine ensued. In addition, Europeans brought epidemic diseases, such as smallpox, which killed millions of people. The colonization process brought the population to the brink of extinction in parts of South America, falling from an estimated 50 million in 1492 to 4 million in the late 1600s.^[3] Because of a lack of labor, the Spaniards and Portuguese began a slave hunt in Africa, transporting their prey to their colonies in America. This business was so lucrative that England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark soon got involved. Approximately 15 million captive Africans were thus transported across the Atlantic between 1700 and 1850.

Sweden attempted to become a colonial power but was not very successful. Around 1650, Sweden established a number of forts in present-day Ghana on the West Coast of Africa, intending them to be a staging area for looting, slave-hunting, and trade. The Swedish merchants did not manage to undertake more than fifty slave transports, however, before the forts were conquered by Denmark in 1663. Sweden also established a trading colony on the southern tip of South Africa in 1649, but it was conquered by the Netherlands in 1663. In 1784, King Gustav III purchased the Caribbean island of Saint-Barthélemy from France, but he was cheated: the island was small, had no drinking water, poor quality soil, and few inhabitants—and so could not be used to produce the sought after products: sugar and tobacco. It did serve as a free port until the 1870s, however, generating a modest revenue. Subsequently, the island became less important and was sold back to France in 1878. Sweden also tried to establish colonies in India, but England and France prevented this.

As a curiosum, I will mention that Sweden attempted, under King Karl XII (1682–1718), to establish a colony on Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The idea was that it should serve as a trade post and a pit stop for ships from the Swedish East Asian Company, on the important trade route between Europe and China. Madagascar was, at the time, an important base for pirates, mainly of Indian origin. In 1718, the pirates offered Karl XII the island of Sainte Marie near the coast and an area on the mainland in exchange for being protected by Sweden and “legalized” as Swedish citizens.

The pirates with their twenty-five ships and their fortune were to have the right to obtain land and settle in Sweden. Karl XII accepted the offer and a contract was drawn up; how- ever, the king died before he could sign it. His daughter and successor, Queen Ulrike Eleonora, equipped an expedition in 1721 to realize the plan, but a lack of funds left the ships stranded in Cadiz in Spain, and the project came apart.^[4]

In terms of acquiring colonies, Denmark was more successful than Sweden. It established 30 forts and trade posts along the West African coast. Between 1626 and 1825, Danish vessels carried approximately 100,000 captive Africans from West Africa to the Caribbean. Some of the slaves were sold in the Danish colonies in the Caribbean—St. Thomas (1672), St. John (1718), and St. Croix (1733)—where they mainly produced sugar and tobacco. The Danish East India Company also established trade posts in Tamil Nadu (Sri Lanka), in the Nicobar Islands, and in India in Tranquebar (1620) and Serampore (1755). In the North Atlantic, Greenland was recolonized by Denmark in 1721, joining Iceland and the Faroe Islands as part of the Danish kingdom. Denmark sold its pos- sessions in India to England in the mid-1800s, and the Danish West Indies—now called the Virgin Islands—to the United States for 25 million dollars in 1917. As Lenin commented:

'Who says that in our day there is no trade in human beings? There is quite a brisk trade. Denmark is selling to America for so many millions (not yet agreed upon) three islands, all populated, of course.'^[5]

Sweden did not manage to become a major slave trader, and yet the chains and bars on the Danish ships were made of Swedish iron. Sweden was the leading European iron exporter in the 17th century. Iron was involved in the colonial triangular trade between Africa, America, and Europe in several ways. It was used as a trading currency to buy slaves in Africa, for the production of chains and bars to keep the slaves locked up, and for tools for farming in the colonies. Denmark—and also England and Germany—bought large quantities of Swedish iron for these purposes.^[6] Besides iron, Sweden exported timber and salted herring to feed the slaves who labored on the Caribbean plantations, and imported sugar, tobacco, and cotton.^[7]

One possible reason for the lack of tenacity in Swedish attempts to acquire overseas colonies may be that there were prospects closer to home. In 1634, Peder Olofsson found a smooth and shiny black stone at Nasafjäll in the Arjeplog mountain region, in the north near the border with Norway. Upon closer examination, the stone was found to contain silver and lead. A “silver rush” broke out. Senator Karl Bonde expressed hopes that the discovery might solve Sweden’s economic troubles. “With God’s help, this will become the Swedish est Indies.” Swedish Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna added: “In Norrland we have an ‘India’ within our borders, if only we realize we should be taking advantage of it.”^[8] The northern part of today’s Sweden was at the time a very unpromising terrain, inhabited only by Sami and their herds of reindeer. National borders in the Scandinavian far north were not precisely established before 1700 and the Sami were to some extent an independent nation; therefore, the silver mining project was in fact a colonial venture.

The Sami were forcibly recruited to transport the silver ore to the south. However, it turned out that the ore was not as rich in silver as hoped, and production was abandoned after a few years. Still, the venture was the first industrial project in the region and as such signaled the beginning of the colonization of Sami territory, with the construction of roads and harbors to be used to service future iron and copper mines. At that point, the Sami were again used as cheap labor for the transport of ore to the harbors, from where it would be shipped further south in Sweden.

Sweden also colonized areas in the Baltic region in the 17th century. The country developed a strong militarized state machinery based on the landed aristocracy, which needed new territories to supplement its limited income from the lean farmlands in Sweden, which could barely sustain the peasantry.^[9] Finland was a Swedish province until 1808, when Russia conquered it during the Napoleonic Wars. Over the centuries, many Finns immigrated to Sweden, where they served as cheap labor, especially in the forestry and mining industries.

Imperialism without colonies

In the first part of the 19th century, before the breakthrough of industrial capitalism, mercantile capital was dominant. Throughout the 18th century, European and North American naval power had enabled their mercantile capital to acquire a dominant position in world trade. Trade in Europe and North America flourished because of cheap commodities based on the exploitation of slave labor in the colonies.

Meanwhile, in Denmark and Sweden, a mercantile bourgeoisie based in shipping was gaining power. In the latter part of the 18th century, big merchants dominated economic life in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Stockholm. At first, they participated in the various trading and colonial companies controlled by the absolute monarchy. Later, they established independent trading companies, which challenged the power of the monarchy. The Scandinavian mercantile bourgeoisie blossomed from around 1750, in part due to the many wars at the time between the competing nations of England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. The Scandinavian countries managed to remain neutral in most of these conflicts, and their merchant fleet could therefore provide the warring countries and their colonies with transport.

Founded in 1731, the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet) made 132 expeditions to Asia, mainly to Guangzhou (Canton) in China. Between 1739 and 1767, a total of 16,533 tons of Bohea tea were imported by the company.^[10] Cantonese tea was probably the fastest growing commodity in the 18th-century global economy. In England and Holland, drinking tea with lots of sugar became a part of everyday life, even for the lower classes, as early as the 1730s. The Swedish East India Company accounted for about 10–20 percent of European tea imports from 1730 to 1784. Together with the Danish Asiatic Company, the two enterprises accounted for a third of all Guangzhou’s trade in tea.^[11] Only 2–3 percent of the tea was consumed in Scandinavia, the rest being sold to independent dealers who smuggled it into Great Britain, the major tea-drinking nation in Europe, much to the chagrin of the mighty English East India Company.^[12]

Metals in the form of semi-finished or finished products constituted the bulk of the Swedish East India Company’s exports, predominantly bar iron at the beginning of the eighteenth century.^[13] However, it turns out that most, if not all, of the bar iron did not get all the way to China but only to Cádiz, in Spain, where it was sold to pay for chests of silver. Silver was practically the only thing the Swedes could sell in China: “the cargo of Spanish piasters was the sine qua non of the Company’s trade.”^[14] The lucrative tea imports came to an end in 1784 when the British parliament passed a law that reduced the sales duties on tea from 119 percent to 12.5 percent. As the British market for illegal teas more or less disappeared so did the profitability of the Swedish company.

The Scandinavian merchant fleets found other products and customers, however, and maintained a very strong position into the next century.^[15] As a result of the political union between Sweden and Norway in 1814, the administration of Norway’s merchant fleets ended up under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm. Between 1875 and 1905, the combined Swedish/Norwegian merchant fleets were the third or fourth most important in the world. The English merchant fleet was the largest, the American was number two, then came the Swedish/Norwegian fleet, which was the same size as the German but larger than the French, Dutch, and Italian fleets.^[16] Without a colonial territory of its own, Sweden had to set up a network of trade envoys in the service of this fleet. By the end of the 19th century, Sweden possessed more than one hundred consulates in different port cities around the globe.^[17] The Norwegian and Danish merchant fleets are still of great importance; for instance, the Danish A. P. Møller-Maersk Line is one of the largest container shipping companies in the world today.

Mercantile and industrial capital from all the imperialist powers of Europe and North America demanded access to the global market; however, it was not always necessary to exercise territorial control over colonies in order to make a profit. The main goal of capital was to integrate the resources and markets of the colonial territory into one’s own economic sphere. For a country like Sweden, whether this was possible depended on relations with the ruler of the colonial territory. Sweden could make special arrangements or, with luck, the colonial power might advocate free trade, as England did in the late 19th century.

In general, the Scandinavian countries did not have the necessary military power and administrative capacity to establish and operate their own colonies. They had to ride the wave of the great colonial powers in order to enjoy the benefits offered by imperialism.

There was no difference, however, between the Scandinavian countries and the great colonial powers regarding their attitude towards colonialism. European colonialism can be seen as a unified whole in which large and small countries played different roles. Some managed territories and opened up markets, others provided capital, built infrastructure, or transported goods to and from the colonies. The Scandinavian countries earned large sums by navigating in the wake of the major colonial powers. The Frederiksstaden district of Copenhagen is full of mansions built with the profits made from the trade in slaves and colonial goods.

From emigrants to settlers

There is another way in which Swedes played a significant role in colonialism: as settler-colonists. This began as early as 1638, when Sweden established “New Sweden,” financed by Swedish, Dutch, and German shareholders. New Sweden was located along the Delaware River, in present-day Pennsylvania, an area in which Swedish tobacco planters and fur traders had settled since 1610. New Sweden did not last long; it was conquered by the Netherlands in 1655 and became part of the New Holland colony. The Dutch governor Stuyvesant allowed the Swedish settlers to retain their land and continue as a “Swedish nation,” governed by their own legal system and with their own militia. All able-bodied adult male settlers were part of the militia, whose primary task was to keep the Indigenous people in check and to gain access to land and other natural resources. The semi-sovereign “Swedish nation” was maintained until 1681, when England conquered the area. Throughout the 18th century, Swedes continued to settle in New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, though it was not until the 19th century that emigration from Sweden really took off. At which point, settlerism became more than just a strategy for a trading company to acquire goods—the new wave of emigration was partly a consequence of the poverty and distress that resulted from the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe, partly a result of the possibilities created by colonialism and the new means of transport, which enabled millions of Europeans to settle in the “New World.”

In the early 19th century, Europeans experienced few political restrictions on the movement of labor across national borders. Passports were rarely used and immigrants gained relatively easy access to new homelands. Approximately 70 million people emigrated from Europe throughout the 19th century. They were often “surplus” labor in the countryside who could not find work in the cities. Poverty, even famine as in Ireland, drove the emigrants across the globe: 36 million to the United States, 6.6 million to Canada, 5.7 million to Argentina, 5.6 million to Brazil, and others to Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Algeria. A significant number of the emigrants settled—claimed land—often displacing and dispossessing the original population in bloody conflicts. Overall, the proportion of emigrants accounted for more than 17 percent of the 408 million people living in Europe in 1900. By acquiring land or work in the New World, emigrants helped to reduce “reserve army of labor” in their old homelands, thus securing the remaining workers a better starting point in the struggle for higher wages. Emigration was a safety valve alleviating social unrest in Europe. The businessman, politician, and later Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, described the situation well:

I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I wondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.^[18]

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, 1.2 million people emigrated from Sweden—about 25 percent of the population at the time, a proportion which is surpassed only by Ireland. By comparison, only 300,000 emigrated from Denmark, corresponding to 10 percent of the population. Approximately one million Swedes settled in North America, the rest went to other destinations, including Denmark, referred to as “the poor person’s America” because the trip there was so much more affordable. Wages in Denmark were higher than in Sweden, in both agriculture and the growing industrial sector, and Swedish labor was sought after, considered diligent and cheap. Swedes found work in Danish quarries, railroad construction, shipyards, and especially in agriculture, which had prospered due to growing exports of grain, butter, and meat to the English market.^[19]

Sweden was a poor country in the early 19th century. The high standard of living and level of equality that would come later had no precedent in Swedish peasant society. Poverty in the Swedish countryside gave way to regular famines in the years 1867–69, when first cold weather and then drought made the crops fail.^[20] A simultaneous economic boom in the United States accelerated emigration. The message home from the settlers was that life in the United States was so much easier. By 1910, approximately 665,000 Swedes had settled in the United States; in addition, approximately 700,000 second-generation Swedes lived there.^[21] In 1900, just over 100,000 Swedes lived in Chicago, making it the second-largest “Swedish” city in the world.^[22]

In the United States, impoverished European workers and peasants turned into settlers, in a nation that was on the verge of replacing England as the leading global power. The success of the settler state was based on the dispossession of the Indigenous population and the exploitation of African slaves. Land speculation and slavery generated the capital for the fast-growing US economy. The wealth of the first president of the United States, George Washington, came from speculating in land from which the Indigenous population had been displaced; 317 slaves labored to maintain his household and plantation.^[23] This racist hierarchy, embedded in the foundations of the American state, positioned immigrants from Northwestern Europe as an upper part of the working class. Between 1830 and 1860, 4.5 million immigrants from Europe arrived in the United States. These new Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Polish workers supplemented the former generations of European immigrants, Blacks, Latin Americans, and Asians, in the rapidly expanding agricultural and industrial sectors. Indians and Chinese were imported on what were known as “coolie contracts.” Together with slaves and the remaining Indigenous population, the Asians were given the hardest work at the lowest wages. They built railroads and worked in mines and on plantations. The original settlers, the first generations of Anglo-Saxon origin, retained their privileged positions in skilled jobs or as foremen in charge of teams of workers. At the time, they received the highest wages of any worker in in the world, approximately double the wages in Britain. The Swedish immigrants were ranked just below the workers of Anglo-Saxon origin.

The result being that, by 1900, the American working class was divided by national origin into three main groups: At the top, the Euro-American labor aristocracy, a privileged layer of “born in the USA” workers who constituted approximately 25 percent of the industrial working class. They got the best-paid skilled jobs, protected by the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Below them was a layer of workers made up of the new immigrants from Europe, which comprised between 50 and 75 percent of the industrialized working class in the northern states. They were mostly unorganized and were systematically excluded from the AFL, and thus from the better-paid jobs. However, their wage levels were significantly above salaries in Northwestern Europe at the time. At the bottom was the “colonial proletariat” of African, Latin American, and Asian origin. They did the hardest work for the lowest wages, on the railways and in construction, in mining, as well as on the plantations of the southern states. Cotton production, mainly carried out by labor of African origin, remained important to the economy. Between 1870 and 1910, cotton production tripled, accounting for 25 percent of total US exports. Blacks also worked in Alabama’s coal mines and steel plants. Likewise, Mexicans, Asians, and the Indigenous population constituted an intensively exploited proletariat in the southwestern states, as field workers, on cattle and sheep ranches, in the mines, in railroad construction, and in the urban service industry. The salary of these proletarians was about $4 a week. The industrial proletariat in the northern states from Eastern and Southern Europe earned $6–$10 a week, while the skilled labor aristocracy received $15–$20 a week.^[24]

Gerald Horne describes how Europeans settlers could climb up “the class ladder with sugar stalks and Africans as the rungs,” by acquiring a share of the profits from land privatization and speculation and the benefits from slavery. A racist ideology of white supremacy was gradually shaped as a “pan-Europeanism: an invented solidarity between Europeans that transcended class, ethnic, and religious lines.”^[25] Through the journey across the Atlantic and the confrontation with the Indigenous population as well as slavery, an identification of belonging to the white race was strengthened. Racism against Indigenous people, Blacks, Latin Americans, Indian and Chinese immigrants, combined with an identity as Anglo-Saxon Protestants of Northwest European origin, lent a particular quality to American nationalism. The United States was God’s own land ruled by the white man. Racism and nationalism blocked the development of solidarity based on class consciousness. The trade unions and socialist and communist movements never succeeded in establishing as strong a foothold as they did in Europe. Not even social democracy developed in the United States. But racism and, as a consequence, the anti-racist struggle have been prominent recurring features of US history, and the ideology of white supremacy has characterized US domestic and foreign policy right up to the present day.

As mentioned above, emigration to the US helped alleviate pressures that might have led to social upheaval in Northwestern Europe. It significantly reduced the “reserve army of labor,” which led to more favorable conditions for the wage struggles of those workers who remained behind.^[26] An analysis of Swedish emigration shows that it led to increased membership in trade unions and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Furthermore, the tendency to strike and to vote for left-wing parties in parliamentary elections increased.^[27]

It was not only poor workers and peasants who immigrated to the colonies seeking lands of opportunity; British imperialism also provided an opening for Scandinavian entrepreneurs to participate in colonial exploitation. Take, for example, the case of Joseph Stephens, born in Stockholm in 1841 of two British parents. Like so many other sons from the middle classes, Stephens hoped to make his fortune through a career in the colonies. When he was just 19 years old, his father took out a loan to finance the journey from Sweden, and he arrived in India in December 1859. Stephens became an apprentice in civil engineering, and after completing his apprenticeship became a railway contractor with the Great India Peninsular Railway Company, which built railways and infrastructure in the Bombay region, the cotton belt of India. The American Civil War had disrupted the supply of cotton produced by slaves and this increased the demand for Indian cotton to feed the booming textile industry in England. Stephens’s firm organized the construction of railway stations and fencing for the railway company and storage houses and ginning factories for the cotton industrialists. By 1865, Stephens employed thousands of workers; his archive provides a detailed account of the contracts with carpenters, masons, stone workers, and headmen. If a worker failed to provide services in the agreed upon time and manner, they were liable to be fined and jailed.

By 1867, after only seven years, Stephens’s colonial activities had made him a fortune. Now 26 years old, he wrote to his father explaining that he had two options: to be a construction manager in England and live as a member of the bourgeoisie or to buy an estate with a manor house in Sweden and live like landed gentry. He chose the latter, purchasing a 600-acre forest and industrial estate in Huseby, in Småland in southern Sweden. He married a woman of “class” and sat in the Swedish parliament. In the following years, Joseph Stephens turned his estate into an ironworks and timber lot. His colonial experience informed his business regime in Sweden, as he pursued new connections in imperial England and attempted to sell his timber to the Indian railways. He also managed workers and artisans on his estate through contractual relationships, as he had done in India.

Stephens’s life story recently came to light when his personal archive was discovered at his old manor house, the Huseby Bruk.^[28] Discussing the discovery of the archive, Arun Kumar wrote:

“The Stephens’ archive weave together India (the colony), England (the coloniser), and Sweden (a Western nation state) in one thread which, otherwise, may appear totally disconnected in the mid-nineteenth century. Stephens’ life history forces us to rethink our understanding of India’s railway development, the wider distribution of colonial wealth in the Western world, and the transnational nature of British imperialism.”^[29]

German imperialism and the “Congo Conference” in Berlin

In the 1890s, Sweden underwent rapid industrialization, which led to a rise in wages in the mining, iron, and timber industries, forestry, and agriculture. The industrial breakthrough in Sweden was linked to the development of capitalism, specifically in Germany.

In the early 19th century, present-day Germany was regarded as a relatively backward part of Europe. In the second half of the century, however, Germany moved from a semi-peripheral position to the core of the capitalist world system. The development of the English colonial empire gave way to an expansion of the core which encompassed the northwestern part of continental Europe.^[30] Between 1840 and 1870, British foreign trade increased by 500 percent, part of which included imported agricultural products from Germany and Scandinavia.^[31]

The German industrial revolution occurred between 1850 and 1875, under the Prussian military regime of Otto von Bismarck. The German rural nobility, known as “Junkers,” had made their fortunes by supplying food to the expanding English market; they would become a cornerstone of the emerging industrial and financial bourgeoisie, together with the new industrial capitalists. Both the industrialists and the Junkers wanted the Prussian state to build a strong navy and to pursue an active military colonial policy in order to secure access to commodities such as copper, rubber, cotton, and vegetable and mineral oils. Raw materials were considered necessary if Germany was to compete with England, France, and the new ascendant power—the United States. As the general and future president Paul Von Hindenburg stated: “Without colonies, no security regarding the acquisition of raw materials, without raw materials, no industry, without industry, no adequate standard of living and wealth. Therefore Germans, do we need colonies.”^[32]

Like Cecil Rhodes in England, in the 1890s the German Junker and colonialist Ernst von Weber argued that a colonial empire would save Germany from recurring crises of overproduction and unemployment. According to Weber, Germany needed a “mass export of revolutionary tinder” in order to avoid a bloody social revolution.^[33] Germany, like the other European powers and the United States, regarded the rest of the world as a resource to be used and exploited at will. The problem was how to divide up the world, as imperialist rivalry was becoming a principal contradiction in the world system. For that reason, in 1884 a conference was held in Berlin to agree upon how to divide up Africa between twelve countries and thereby avoid “unnecessary” expenditures on warfare.

In this power game, smaller states such as Sweden sought to secure their interests. The problem was explained by Swedish diplomat Carl R. A. Georgsson Fleetwood, immediately before the conference:

“It is a well-established fact that European politics is hardly European any more, but Asian or African—it is in these remote parts of the world that the fate of Europe is being decided. Are we at the beginning of a new era in colonial politics? In which case, will we second- or third-rank state powers become even more insignificant than before—or might commercial interests possibly give us increased influence—or might we possibly act as colonizers on a smaller scale, so as to benefit in some way from the drain caused by the growing emigration?”^[34]

Sweden’s top representative at the Berlin conference was Gillis Bildt, who a few years later briefly served as the country’s prime minister (1888–1889). Sweden did not manage to acquire any colonies at the conference but did endorse the division of Africa adopted by the major colonial powers.^[35] Sweden’s strategy was to try to secure its trade interests by obtaining special agreements from the major colonial powers. For example, Sweden managed to be “particularly favored” by Belgian King Leopold’s International Congo Association. As a result, Swedish soldiers, sailors, businessmen, and missionaries would eagerly participate in the colonization of the Congo.^[36] King Leopold welcomed Sweden’s participation in the “civilizing” mission; in a letter to Swedish King Oskar II, he wrote that Sweden already had “authorised several outstanding officers from her splendid army to enter into the service of the International Congo Association. Important stations, central nodes for vast areas in the middle of Africa, are today managed by Swedes.”^[37] King Leopold’s International Congo Association is today known to have been one of the most brutal colonial regimes, as reflected in the drastic decline in the Congo’s population from 20–30 million in 1884 to only 8.5 million in 1911.^[38]

Sweden’s main strategy, however, was to strengthen its ties with Germany by supporting its positions at the conference. On December 7, 1884, as negotiations were coming to an end, King Oskar II wrote to Bildt: “I have followed the ongoing Congo conference with interest; however, one question above all others has been on my mind. Are Germany’s new and, in some cases, surprisingly active colonial policies, the main goal (if a goal it can still be said to be?) or is this really just a means of luring its western neighbor even further along the same road and thus, for a long time, weakening its power and diverting its attention from Alsace Lorraine? [emphasis in the original]”^[39]

Bildt answered the king, stating that, in terms of European power politics, the goal of Germany’s colonial ambitions was partly to neutralize France’s desire for revenge for its defeat in 1871 and partly to exacerbate tensions between France and England, but that the main purpose was to obtain resources and open markets as well as to bolster Germany’s national prestige.^[40]

In the 1890s, Germany built a sizeable merchant and navy fleet and established naval bases as far away as the South Coast of China. The German Navy was very active in the Mediterranean, north of the African coast and east of Turkey, in fierce competition with England and France. Within a few years, Germany built up a colonial empire. By 1906, East Africa (Tanzania), South West Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, New Guinea, Togo, the Caroline, Paula, and Marianne Islands, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, and Kiauchau were German colonies, with a combined land mass the size of India. Besides which, German economically dominated Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey.^[41]

It was in this colonial context that the idea of the German Herrenvolk, or master race, developed. The basic elements of Nazi race theory were developed during this period and practiced in South West Africa, present-day Namibia. However, it would be a mistake to label German colonialism as especially brutal—English, French, Dutch, and Belgian colonialism were no less so. The racism, national chauvinism, and brutality of Nazism were later condemned by the other European powers, but as poet and politician Aimé Césaire wrote:

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa.^[42]

In parallel with the expansion of the colonial empires, there developed the idea of Europe as the historical cradle and center of civilization. The myth imagined a thousand-year continuity, from ancient Greece’s philosophy and culture to the liberal values of Western capitalism. In actual fact, however, it was not until the Renaissance and the dawn of capitalism that Europe began to cultivate the idea of Greek antiquity as its origin. The problem with this idea is that the Renaissance is separated from classical Greece by centuries, during which neither the European economy nor its philosophy or culture were by any means the center of world civilization. Christianity was also an element of this construction, supposedly a central element of specifically European values. Yet Christianity was not founded in Paris, Rome, or Berlin, but in the Middle East. The “Holy Family” and the Egyptian and Syrian Church Fathers had to be Europeanized and Jesus portrayed as a blond Northern European to fit the myth.

Along with colonialism, it was the breakthrough of industrial capitalism in England that made Europe rich and powerful. Science and culture fused with rationality and technical efficiency. Values of democracy and social justice developed within the framework of Europe and North America while the same states killed, enslaved, and exploited people throughout the world. European ideas of a racial and ethnic hierarchy were bestowed a scientific legitimacy. Colonial practice was translated into the social and biological sciences, as theories about the superiority of the Aryan race and its birthright and duty to rule over the “primitive races.” Eugenics was widely accepted, in Scandinavia as elsewhere. Racism was popularized with the concept of “the white man’s burden” and in literature. In zoos and fairs all over Europe, Africans, Asians, Indigenous peoples of North America, Bedouins, and Inuit were exhibited like animals.

European racism reflects the hierarchical division of humanity that colonialism created. Colonialism is a shared European responsibility. The racism and national chauvinism that characterize modern-day right-wing populism—including in Sweden—have their origins in the ideas of colonialism. The dehumanization of the peoples of the colonies was a prerequisite for the idea of Europe and the West as the center of civilization.