Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: On the Geography of Colonialism -- The Guinea Commission Commences Its Investigation: Isert’s Colonial Expedition of 1788 -- Denmark’s Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1792: The African Colonial Alternative -- Africa in the Atlantic World: Guinea Plantations on the West Indian Model -- Peter Thonning’s African Sojourn and the Formation of His Colonial Views -- Reports and Reverberations: Thonning’s Early African Writing -- The Atlantic Triangle Stood on Its Head: African Undertakings after the Cessation of the Danish Slave Trade in 1803 -- “For Colonization, A More Desirable Country Cannot Be Found”: Plantation Experiments during the War Years -- An Eye to the Future: Colonial Ambitions in a Time of Retrenchment -- Fresh Colonial Momentum in the Early 1820s -- Conflicting Colonial Schemes in the Late 1820s -- The Literary Impulse: A Young Colonial Officer’s Essays on Denmark’s African Future -- Plumbing the Archives: The Commission Frames Its Debate -- The Guinea Commission in a Changed Colonial Climate -- The Tide Again Turns: New African Colonial Impetus -- The Colonial Dénouement, Denmark’s Withdrawal from Africa, and the Colonial Upshot -- Bibliography -- Index.

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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 The international movement of colonial news and ideas can very usefully be traced in his unpublished writings, especially among the Guinea Commission's extraordinarily wide-ranging records.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.

Title from PDF title page (viewed on Dec. 26, 2012).