The country you’re visiting for clean design and the Nordic model once planted a colony on the Delaware River, ran a slave-trading fort in Ghana, owned a Caribbean island for 94 years, and — at home — built the world’s first state race-biology institute. The neutral, progressive Sweden is real. So is this. Hold both.
New Sweden on the Delaware River, founded by an expedition under Peter Minuit — the same man who had earlier run the Dutch New Netherland.
Saint-Barthélemy, held since 1784, was sold back to France — the final scrap of a small colonial empire quietly wound down.
The State Institute for Racial Biology opened in Uppsala on 1 January 1922 — the first government-funded race-science institute anywhere.
Under a 1934 law, roughly 63,000 people were sterilised; a 2000 government inquiry judged ~21,000 forced and ~6,000 more coerced — mostly women.
Sweden’s empire never rivalled the Dutch or the British — but it was real, it spanned an ocean, and it reached from a fort in Ghana to an island in the Caribbean and a river in what’s now Delaware. The fourth marker is the one Swedes reckon with least: Sápmi, the Sámi homeland inside Sweden’s own north. Tap a marker.
Sweden’s overseas holdings were modest and short-lived, and its slice of the Atlantic slave trade was minuscule beside Portugal or Britain. “Minor” is honest. “Clean” is not: the fort, the island, and the free port all touched slavery directly.
The forgotten engine wasn’t plantations — it was neutrality-for-hire. Sweden ran Saint-Barthélemy as a tax-free port where other empires’ slave ships and cargoes moved freely. Profiting from the trade without owning many plantations is still profiting from the trade.
The policies that shaped Sweden most weren’t across the ocean. They were aimed at the Sámi in the north, and at Swedes deemed “unfit” — nomad schools, land loss, race measurement, and sterilisation. Don’t file that under a separate heading; it’s the same century.
In March 1638 two ships, the Kalmar Nyckel and the Fogel Grip, sailed into Delaware Bay under Peter Minuit — the same Minuit who had earlier directed the Dutch colony of New Netherland and, by legend, “bought” Manhattan. They built Fort Christina, named for Sweden’s child-queen, on the site of present-day Wilmington, Delaware.
Over 17 years the colony drew roughly 600 settlers — mostly Swedes and Finns, plus Dutch, Germans, a Dane, and at least one Estonian. It never grew large, but it left a durable mark: historians credit New Sweden’s Finnish and Swedish settlers with introducing the American log cabin.
New Sweden lived by the sufferance of stronger neighbours. In 1655 the Dutch director-general Peter Stuyvesant sailed from New Amsterdam with a fleet, laid siege to Fort Christina, and forced its surrender. The colony was absorbed into New Netherland — which the English would take, and rename New York, less than a decade later.
This is the piece most travellers have never heard. In 1649 the financier Louis de Geer chartered the Swedish Africa Company; in April 1650 an expedition under Hendrik Carloff founded the Swedish Gold Coast on the Gulf of Guinea, in what is now Ghana. Its centrepiece was Fort Carlsborg (Carolusborg) at Cabo Corso — the site of today’s Cape Coast Castle, one of the most infamous slave-trading forts in West Africa.
Gold and ivory were the pitch; people were part of the trade. During the Swedish period, enslaved Africans were shipped from the coast to the Portuguese sugar island of São Tomé, and by 1657 the company had contracted to deliver 500–600 enslaved people to the Dutch colony of Curaçao. Sweden held the fort only about a decade before losing it — to the Dutch again — in April 1663.
Sweden’s direct traffic was tiny next to the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced across the Atlantic overall. But “small share” is not “no share.” A Swedish company built and ran a fort whose business included buying and selling human beings — and the same building later processed captives by the tens of thousands under other flags.
Sweden’s longest-held colony came by swap, not conquest. In 1784 France ceded the small Caribbean island of Saint-Barthélemy to King Gustav III in exchange for trading rights in Gothenburg. The Swedes renamed the harbour town Gustavia, after the king, and in 1785 declared it a free port — tax-free, open to all flags.
The free port thrived precisely because Sweden stayed out of other powers’ wars. Ships came to trade duty-free; at its peak around 1,300 vessels called at Gustavia a year, and the town grew to roughly 5,000 people. The Swedish West India Company, chartered in 1786, ran the port and held exclusive commercial rights.
The trade the port welcomed included the slave trade. A 1790 tariff made importing enslaved Africans duty-free. By an 1819 count, enslaved people made up roughly a third to half of the island’s population — somewhere between 1,283 and 2,033 people. Sweden abolished the island slave trade and, in the 1840s, slavery itself.
The free port lost its edge, the economy sagged, and in 1878 Sweden sold Saint-Barthélemy back to France — after a local vote — for a modest sum. It was the last colony of the Swedish empire, closed with a bill of sale rather than a battle.
Sweden’s heaviest and longest colonial project was internal. The Sámi — the Indigenous people of the European Arctic, whose homeland Sápmi spans northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia — were governed as subjects to be managed, not citizens to be included. The pattern is textbook settler colonialism, applied within one country’s own borders.
Sweden’s official doctrine held that Sámi should stay reindeer-herders and stay separate. From 1913 the state ran segregated nomad schools for herding Sámi children — deliberately kept apart from Swedish schools and, in theory, from too much education — while the language and culture were pushed out. In the 1940s the huts became boarding schools; teaching was in Swedish.
Grazing lands, hunting and fishing rights, and traditional territory were steadily curtailed and redefined by the state — dispossession by legislation rather than by treaty. Reindeer husbandry was licensed and confined; Sámi who left herding could lose their recognised rights altogether.
Norway’s harsher fornorsking (“Norwegianisation”) and Finland’s assimilation ran in parallel — banned languages, boarding schools, suppressed religion. The Sámi story isn’t Sweden’s alone; each Nordic state now runs, or resists, its own truth-and-reconciliation reckoning.
Here is the part hardest to square with the image. In 1922 Sweden opened the Statens institut för rasbiologi — the State Institute for Racial Biology — in Uppsala. It was the first state-funded race-science institute in the world. Under Herman Lundborg it measured skulls, catalogued bodies, and photographed populations — Sámi and Roma prominently among them — to chart and “protect” a supposed Nordic racial type.
Race biology wasn’t a fringe hobby; it fed policy. In 1934 Sweden passed a sterilisation law, broadened in 1941. By the time it ended in 1975, roughly 63,000 people had been sterilised. A 2000 government commission estimated about 21,000 were forced and another ~6,000 coerced into a “voluntary” operation — the great majority of them women, many judged “feeble-minded,” “antisocial,” or of “mixed” descent.
Sweden’s eugenics program predated Nazi Germany’s and outlived it by three decades — running under the same Social Democratic governments that built the welfare state. The uncomfortable truth is that “folkhemmet,” the people’s home, and the sterilisation of the “unfit” were products of the same modernising, engineering impulse.
Peter Minuit’s expedition founds New Sweden and builds Fort Christina on the Delaware (modern Wilmington). Settlers are mostly Swedes and Finns.
Louis de Geer charters the Swedish Africa Company; an expedition founds the Swedish Gold Coast and lays out Fort Carlsborg at Cabo Corso (today’s Cape Coast, Ghana).
Peter Stuyvesant’s Dutch fleet besieges Fort Christina; New Sweden surrenders and is absorbed into New Netherland.
The Swedish Africa Company contracts to deliver 500–600 enslaved people to Dutch Curaçao — its involvement in the slave trade documented in its own records.
The Dutch seize Fort Carlsborg for good; the Swedish Gold Coast ends after roughly a decade.
France cedes Saint-Barthélemy to Sweden for trade rights in Gothenburg. The Swedes rename the harbour Gustavia and declare it a tax-free port.
The Swedish West India Company is chartered to run the island; an 1790 tariff makes importing enslaved Africans duty-free. Gustavia booms as a neutral entrepôt.
Sweden abolishes the slave trade and then slavery on Saint-Barthélemy.
Sweden sells Saint-Barthélemy back to France — the last colony of the Swedish empire.
Sweden institutes segregated “nomad schools” for reindeer-herding Sámi children, formalising the “Lapp shall remain Lapp” doctrine.
The State Institute for Racial Biology opens in Uppsala — the world’s first state race-science institute.
Under sterilisation laws, ~63,000 people are sterilised; a later inquiry finds tens of thousands were forced or coerced, most of them women.
| When / stop | What to notice | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Stockholm’s grand 17th-century core | The great-power wealth behind Gamla Stan and the palace came from the same era as the first colonies. | Sweden’s golden age had an overseas and imperial edge, not just Baltic wars. |
| Nordiska museet / Skansen, and any Sámi exhibit | Look for how the Sámi are framed — and read the newer, franker labels on nomad schools and race biology. | Swedish museums are slowly getting honest about the colony at home. Follow the frank labels, not the folklore ones. |
| Uppsala (day trip north of Stockholm) | The university town also housed the race-biology institute — a fact rarely on the tourist map. | World-class science and race science shared an address here. |
| The word “Lapp” | It’s now considered derogatory; the people are Sámi and the land is Sápmi. | Naming is part of the reckoning — small correction, real respect. |
| Anywhere Sweden is called “neutral” or “progressive” | Both are largely true — and both coexisted with Gustavia’s free port and the sterilisation law. | Two things at once. The point isn’t to cancel the good story; it’s to stop pretending there’s only one. |