Peter Thonning and Denmark's Guinea Commission

Daniel Hopkins, Ph.D. (1987) in Geography, Louisiana State University, is an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. He specializes in archival studies of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical geography of Denmark’s tropical colonies.

• List of Illustrations AcknowledgementsAbbreviations Introduction: on the geography of colonialismEARLY COLONIAL EXPERIMENTS1. The Guinea Commission commences its investigation: Isert’s colonial expedition of 17882. Denmark’s abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, 1792: the African colonial alternative 3. Africa in the Atlantic world: Guinea plantations on the West Indian model SCIENCE AND COLONIALISM: PETER THONNING'S EXPEDITION4. Peter Thonning’s African sojourn and the formation of his colonial views 5. Reports and reverberations: responses to Thonning’s early African writing 6. The Atlantic triangle stood on its head: African undertakings after the cessation of the Danish slave trade in 1803COLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING THE NAPOLEONIC WARS AND THE ENSUING DEPRESSION7. “For colonization, a more desirable country cannot be found”: plantation experiments during the war years8. An eye to the future: colonial ambitions in a time of retrenchmentRENEWED INTEREST IN AFRICAN COLONIALISM IN COPENHAGEN9. Fresh colonial momentum in the early 1820s 10. Conflicting colonial schemes in the late 1820s11. The literary impulse: a young colonial officer's essays on Denmark's African futureCONFLICTING VIEWS OF THE COLONIAL WORLD: THE GUINEA COMMISSION AND THE CLOSING OF AN ERA12. Plumbing the archives: the Commission frames its debate13. The Guinea Commission in a changed colonial climate14. The tide again turns: new African colonial impetus15. The colonial dénouement, Denmark’s withdrawal from Africa, and the colonial upshotBibliographyIndex