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This is the tale of how an expatriate Briton in Copenhagen made a fortune in Imperial India and then, unusually, chose to retire to Sweden rather than the UK.

• lb1lf 6y ago
  -Scandinavians did try to find a few small bits of empire, though - mostly to find that the only places left over were the ones none of the major powers cared about. The US Virgin Islands used to be The Danish West Indies until 1917, also there were colonies in present-day Ghana and in India - at least part of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, as well as a couple of places on the mainland whose names escape me. Iceland was Danish until WW2. Today? Greenland and the Faroes remain (sort of) in the Danish Empire. Norway, being in union with Denmark when the empire building took place, bided its time until the nineteen thirties, when a group of whalers occupied parts of Eastern Greenland, an occupation which was backed by Norwegian authorities after the fact until the League of Nations told us to snuff it. The Swedes, too, dabbled in colonialism but never really putting their heart in it; the only overseas colony lasting more than a few years was Saint Barthelemy in the Caribbean, which was Swedish from the latter part of the eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century.
  • publicola1990 6y ago
    There was a Danish East India Company too, and they did hold on to their colony of Tranquebar in the East coast of India, for quite some time.
  • vidarh 6y ago
    Don't forget the glorious Norwegian expansion to.... Bouvet Island. The UK protested meekly for a little bit, then I guess realised it was worthless enough not to be worth arguing about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvet_Island
    • unhammer 6y ago
      And Jan Mayen! Annexed by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
    • lb1lf 6y ago
      -Oh, I've seen Bouvet off in the distance once, and if the Norwegians would just have kept mum about their annexation, the British would be none the wiser to this day. Bouvet looked, to put it mildly, barren, mostly covered in ice as it is, and the few bits not covered in ice looks pretty much like the less hospitable parts of the Moon. I'd pass. (Oh, also we possess the slightly larger but no less barren Peter I Island, which for a while after it was discovered in the 1820s was the southernmost known landmass.) We really ought to reiterate our claim to North America, though, what with Leiv Eirikson, L'anse Aux Meadows an'all.
  • markvdb 6y ago
    Down the wikipedia rabbithole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Empire .
  • infinite_beam 6y ago
    from : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_India Denmark–Norway held colonial possessions in India for more than 200 years, including the town of Tharangambadi in present-day Tamil Nadu state, Serampore in present-day West Bengal, and the Nicobar Islands, currently part of India's union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
• mellosouls 6y ago
  No, although Scandinavia has its own history in invading and colonising other peoples, including the British. The story is more nuanced than your "Briton who just happens to end up in Sweden" summary though.
  • Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    At one point (30 years war) Sweden was a major military power
    • cafard 6y ago
      And well beyond--think of the Great Northern War.