Finnish Colonial Encounters From Anti-Imperialism to Cultural Colonialism and Complicity

Breaking new ground in the study of European colonialism, this book focuses on a nation historically positioned between the Western and Eastern Empires of Europe – Finland. Although Finland never had overseas colonies, the authors argue that the country was undeniably involved in the colonial world, with Finns adopting ideologies and identities that cannot easily be disentangled from colonialism.

Chapters 1, 7 and 8 are available open access under a via link.springer.com.>

Foreword

1)      Finns in the Colonial World

Part I: State, Nation and Colonialism in Finland

2) Wisdom of the Oppressed: Finnish Colonial Complicities in the Age of the Russian Empire

3) Finnish Parliamentarians’ Conceptions of Imperialism and Colonialism, 1917-1995

4) Settler Colonial Eyes: Finnish Travel Writers and the Colonization of Petsamo

5) Nation-building and Colonialism: The Early Skolt Sami Research of Väinö Tanner

Part II: Colonial Encounters in Finland

6) “Queensland Cannibals” Encountered in Finland (1886): Locally Rooted Visions of Exhibitions of Colonized People

7) Colonialism, Race and White Innocence in Finnish Children’s Literature: Anni Swan’s 1920s’ Serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa”

Part III: Finns’ Colonial Encounters Abroad

9) From the Eastern Front to the Western Frontier: The Transimperial Life of a Finnish Worker during the First World War

10) Photography and the Religious Encounter: Finnish Missionaries’ Representations of the Owambo, Namibia

11) “Did you really have a place in the Boer War?”: Colonial Conflict and the Contested Production of “Finnish” Nationality, 1899-1908

12) The “Pioneer Men”: Making of Finnish Settler Identity in Southern Africa pre-1914

Raita Merivirta is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of European and World History at the University of Turku, Finland.  She is a specialist in postcolonial history, literature and cultural studies, and the author of The Emergency and the Indian English Novel: Memory, Culture and Politics (Routledge, 2019).

Leila Koivunen is a Professor of global history and intercultural interaction in the Department of European and World History at the University of Turku, Finland. She is a specialist in the history of cultural encounters and the processes of intercultural knowledge formation, especially between Africa and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Timo Särkkä is a Docent in Economic History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and a Visiting Professor in the Global History Division of the Institute for Open and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives (OTRI) at Osaka University in Japan. He specialises in global economic history with an emphasis on economic imperialism.