Peter Thonning and Denmark's Guinea Commission : a study in nineteenth-century African colonial geography / / by Daniel Hopkins.

• Superior document: Atlantic world : Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500-1830, v. 24
• Author: Hopkins, Daniel.
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: Atlantic world (Leiden, Netherlands) ; v. 24.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (759 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Several years before Denmark legislated against the Atlantic slave trade in 1792, the government, anticipating the decline of production in the Danish West Indies as a consequence, embarked on a policy of agricultural colonization in West Africa. Peter Thonning, a young natural historian of the highly economic and geographical Linnaean school, spent three formative years in Africa and then for decades administered Denmark's African colonial undertakings. The international movement of colonial news and ideas can very usefully be traced in his unpublished writings, especially among the Guinea Commission's extraordinarily wide-ranging records. These rich archives and contemporary published opinion in this cosmopolitan Scandinavian society open fresh perspectives on the broader history and geography of European colonialism.

Table of Contents

pt. I. Early colonial experiments -- pt. II. Science and colonialism : Peter Thonning's expedition -- pt. III. Colonial developments during the Napoleonic Wars and the ensuing depression -- pt. IV. Renewed interest in African colonialism in Copenhagen -- pt. V. Conflicting views of the colonial world : the Guinea Commission and the closing of an era.