Islands of Slaves

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…’