Finnish Colonial Encounters

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.

• 1. Finns in the Colonial World; Raita Merivirta, Leila Koivunen & Timo Särkkä.- Part I: State, Nation and Colonialism in Finland.- 2. Wisdom of the Oppressed: Finnish Colonial Complicities in the Age of the Russian Empire; Pekka Rantanen, Petri Ruuska & Timo Särkkä.- 3. Finnish Parliamentarians’ Conceptions of Imperialism and Colonialism, 1917-1995; Mika Suonpää & Matti Välimäki.- 4. Settler Colonial Eyes: Finnish Travel Writers and the Colonization of Petsamo; Janne Lahti.- 5. Nation-building and Colonialism: The Early Skolt Sami Research of Väinö Tanner; Jukka Nyyssönen.- Part II: Colonial Encounters in Finland.- 6. “Queensland Cannibals” Encountered in Finland (1886): Locally Rooted Visions of Exhibitions of Colonized People; Leila Koivunen.- 7. Colonialism, Race and White Innocence in Finnish Children’s Literature: Anni Swan’s 1920s’ Serial “Uutisasukkaana Austraaliassa”; Raita Merivirta.- 8. Encountering Colonial Worldsthrough Missionary Maps in the Late Nineteenth-Century Grand Duchy of Finland; Johanna Skurnik.- 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; Aleksi Huhta.- 10. Photography and the Religious Encounter: Finnish Missionaries’ Representations of the Owambo, Namibia; Napandulwe Shiweda.- 11. “Did you really have a place in the Boer War?”: Colonial Conflict and the Contested Production of “Finnish” Nationality, 1899-1908; Wm. Matthew Kennedy & Chris Holdridge.- 12. The “Pioneer Men”: Making of Finnish Settler Identity in Southern Africa pre-1914; Timo Särkkä.