This is third title in Thorkild Hansen's classic trilogy on the Atlantic
slave trade, originally published in Danish in 1967; and the first major
translation and publication of the work in English. In Europe and North
America, few are aware that the beautiful and now wealthy Virgin Islands
of St Thomas, St Croix and St Jan were once Danish settlements and
outposts of the slave trade. Moreover that the question of the
independence of the islands was never seriously considered by the Danes,
who instead sold them to the US in 1917 for 25 million dollars, several
decades after the official end of slavery. This was against the will of
the majority of the islanders, who were opposed to rule by the
Americans, wary of their iniquitous treatment of blacks. In Denmark
meanwhile, the popular view of national history presides that Denmark
was the first of the imperial powers to abolish the slave trade.
Thorkild Hansen's work breaks with these miss- representations of
Denmark's role in the Atlantic slave trade. The third and biggest volume
in the trilogy covers the period from the introduction of African slaves
to the Danish islands, their official emancipation in 1848, subsequent
sale to the Americans in the twentieth century, and reactions and
resistance to these processes. Scrutinizing Denmark's moral obligation
towards the islanders, the author draws extensively on primary sources,
dramatizing and depicting real life characters into a moving and
descriptive narrative. The introduction is provided by the historian
A.V. Adams who states that ' Hansen's trilogy and Dako's scholarly
initiative and competence in translating it contributes not only to
Danes' re-reading of their own history, but also to West Indians'
understanding of theirs... Hansen and Darko's contribution reaches
beyond the Caribbean into the larger history of African-diaspora slave
resistance... And inasmuch as the islands under consideration of the
United States of America, this book through its translation becomes a
text of US historiography...'
