Summary
The workshop “Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond”, funded by the Profile Area Human Rights, took place on 11-12 June 2024. The workshop started from the observation that the last decades of the eighteenth century saw an increasing and explicit use of the concept of “human rights”, theoretically and practically, in Scandinavia. The aim was therefore to chart these still largely unknown waters of the political and theoretical uses of human rights discourses in Scandinavia in its global and colonial contexts. Accordingly, the contributions ranged widely chronologically, geographically and thematically. Together they made it clear that that the history of natural and human rights in Scandinavia has a significant potential for changing the historical narrative of human rights, and much more work needs to be done on this topic.
Mads L. Jensen and Joachim Östlund, Department of History, Lund University
The workshop “Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond”, funded by the Profile Area Human Rights, took place on 11-12 June 2024. The workshop started from the observation that the last decades of the eighteenth century saw an increasing and explicit use of the concept of “human rights”, theoretically and practically, in Scandinavia. The aim was therefore to chart these still largely unknown waters of the political and theoretical uses of human rights discourses in Scandinavia in its global and colonial contexts. Accordingly, the contributions ranged widely chronologically, geographically and thematically. Together they made it clear that that the history of natural and human rights in Scandinavia has a significant potential for changing the historical narrative of human rights, and much more work needs to be done on this topic.
Recent years have seen significant revisionist work on the history of human rights with substantial implications for our understanding of the foundations (philosophical as well as historical) and the practical and political uses of human rights. Perhaps the most prominent revision has come from Samuel Moyn, who has argued for the distinctive political and legal nature of human rights in the, especially later, twentieth century.[1] This has not only served to sever twentieth century human rights from earlier modern and pre-modern traditions, but like the best genealogical work in modern intellectual history also to bring to the fore alternative political and philosophical human rights conceptions revealing, the limits and weaknesses of current regimes and uses of human rights.[2]
In response, Dan Edelstein has reinscribed the modern history of human rights, from the French Revolution to the UDHR, in the larger tradition of natural law and natural rights in early modern Europe. For Edelstein, the decisive development in the eighteenth century was the physiocrats’ establishment of the “preservationist regime” of natural rights. For Edelstein, this helps explain the enduring significance of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as a formulation of the “preservationist regime” into the twentieth century.[3] But also reveals that our conceptions of human rights carry with them “metaphysical foundations [that have] only been brushed over, and never fully dealt with”, not least the “theological vision of God as Creator.”[4]
However, Edelstein and much of the recent scholarship on the intellectual history of rights in early modernity, is predominantly anglo- and francocentric focus. Moving beyond this by focusing on Scandinavia, the workshop “Human rights in global and colonial contexts: Scandinavia and beyond” brought out discourses and uses of human rights that developed outside of Britain (including America) and France and, significantly, before the French declaration. In so far as political and intellectual developments in the French revolution were received in Scandinavia, this was against this preexisting intellectual background. Neither Denmark nor Sweden was subject to revolutions, and the workshop contributions outlined some of the distinctive practical concerns and uses of human rights discourse in Scandinavia. This was not least in the context of the global and colonial connections of both Scandinavian monarchies.
One distinctive feature of Scandinavian human rights discourse was that it emerged not out of physiocratic discourse, but out of natural jurisprudence. So, the Copenhagen political propagandist and professor of law and economics, Christian Ulrich Ditlev von Eggers argued in 1796, that “the most recent times” (meaning the last 20 years) had seen the development of a “genuine doctrine” of natural jurisprudence. Moreover, this had informed the great changes and upheavals of his time, such as the American and French revolutions, the great legal reforms, and the abolitions of the slave trade. The intellectual and political changes were global, concerning “the entire race of humankind”.[5]
As formulated in late eighteenth century global and colonial Scandinavia, the discourse of human rights thus entailed universal and global claims. In other words, human rights were seen as pertaining to all human beings, even if the formulation of the concrete contents of human rights, their retention, abrogation, or violation, differed across time and space. Considering the universal import of human rights also in the eighteenth century, it becomes a methodological and historiographical imperative to investigate whether also non-European individuals, groups, and societies laid claim to what amounted to human rights in the long eighteenth century.
To help address these imperatives, we had invited Saliha Belmessous, British Academy Global Professor at Oxford University and a leading expert the political and legal agency of indigenous people in the history of European colonialism, to give the opening lecture. Belmessous outlined a programme for what she termed “indigenous intellectual history”. In particular, she subjected to critique several conceptual and methodological preconceptions that prevent scholars from taking indigenous legalities serious as objects of study. These included eurocentrism and notions of cultural incommensurability, as well as the denigration of indigenous legal orders as mere “customs” on account of their orality.
Drawing on scholars such as Katherine A. Hermes and Tamar Herzog, Belmessous suggested the reconstruction of indigenous legal ideas, including rights, from their political and legal practice, not least in their contestation of European colonialism.[6] Proceeding from the analysis of oral, written, and material forms of indigenous law within the colonial archive, this programme eschews essentialising preconceptions of indigenous legal cultures as incommensurable with European legal ideas, including those of human rights. For our purpose here, the focus must be empirical investigations of whether non-European actors made claims that corresponded to human rights as conceptualised at the time, and whether they were recognised as such.
Much of the workshop accordingly concerned the uses of natural and human rights discourse in the context of Scandinavian connections with the rest of the world. Sessions included papers dealing with both Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian discussions of rights. The first session focused on the issue of slavery and slave trade in the Atlantic. Johan Olsthoorn (Amsterdam) discussed the writings of the antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791), born in what is today’s Ghana. Olsthoorn argued that natural rights played a key role in Cugoano’s construal of slavery and the slave trade as robbing the enslaved of their “natural rights as men”. On a similar theme and geography, Mads L. Jensen (Lund) argued that notions of natural rights, and particularly human rights, informed the moral and political criticism of the slave trade that led to the 1792 decree abolishing the Danish slave trade. At the same time, however, a discourse of human rights came to justify increasing Danish colonialism in West Africa.
The second session turned to the uses of human rights in political and economic reforms in Denmark in the decades around 1800. Markus Hansen (Lund) discussed how early proponents of agrarian reform, notably the abolition of peasant servitude, saw the manorial system as depriving the peasants of their natural, human rights. The restitution of these rights required thoroughgoing reforms, as effected in the Danish agrarian laws of 1788. Simen Hegdalstrand (KCL/Oslo) discussed the “Literary Jewish Feud”, a debate that ushered in the decision to emancipate Danish Jews in March 1814. Hegdalstrand argued that Jewish authors invoked a discourse of rights, and that discourses of patriotism remained current in both sides of the debate.
Session three turned to Swedish connections to the Mediterranean and the far north. Joachim Östlund (Lund) discussed a proposal for the regulation of the Mediterranean slave trade, which the Moroccan Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah al-Khatib presented to the Scandinavian monarchies in 1777. Situating this against the background of earlier uses of natural rights to conceptualise Scandinavian-Moroccan relations and treaties, Östlund highlighted a North African perspective on contemporary discussions of slave trade. In a very different geographical context, Andreas Hellerstedt (Sundsvall) discussed how notions of natural law and natural rights informed Swedish thinking about the colonisation of Sápmi in Northern Scandinavia. This concerned not least the status of the natural rights of the Sámi under the Swedish Crown.
Session four turned to the Swedish and the French Caribbean. Romain Cuttat (Geneve) discussed how the Swiss natural jurist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui influenced the Swedish King Gustav III, and particularly the purchase and annexation of Saint-Barthélemy in 1784 as a hub for slave trade and plantation slavery. Carl Wilén (Lund) presented the concept of “movement text” as central in the investigation of the uses of human rights discourse in the Haitian revolution. This reveals not just a hitherto largely disregarded group of actors as formulators and claimants of human rights in the revolution, but also the importance of social rights claims.
The workshop highlighted several directions for research on the history of human rights in global Scandinavia. One concerns the theoretical (philosophical and theological) foundations for thinking about human rights, which differed greatly within Scandinavia. This was also the case for thinkers drawing on natural jurisprudence. One key influence was Kantianism, but another equally influential was cameralism. In other words, there were different, rival philosophical and metaphysical foundations for human rights, tending either to secularisation or resacralisation. This had consequences not just for which natural rights were reconceptualised as human rights, but also for their political and legal significance.[7]
Another direction concerns precisely what human rights were invoked, by whom, and for what purpose. This concerns the practical codification and contestation of human rights in treaties, proclamations and declarations. As both the Haitian movement texts and the Scandinavian discussions of slavery and agrarian reform illustrate, social, rather than constitutional, issues were often at the fore in claims to human rights, notably by less privileged actors, including women. Following Saliha Belmessous’ proposal, this should also investigate how rights claims were made by and for colonial subjects in the Scandinavian colonies in Greenland, India, Africa, West Indies, and by other actors contesting Scandinavian colonialism.
These directions will be pursued in a special issue planned for Global Intellectual History, and in workshops organised in 2025 with Nicolai von Eggers (Copenhagen) and funded by Einar Hansen’s Foundation.
[1] Especially Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History: Expanded Second Edition (London: Verso, 2017); Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).
[2] For an influential formulation of the use of genealogy within modern intellectual history, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). This is revisited in Hannah Dawson and Annelien de Dijn, eds., Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[3] Dan Edelstein, On the Spirit of Rights (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).
[4] Dan Edelstein, ‘Spirit of Rights. Response to Comments’, Opera Historica 21, no. 1 (30 March 2020): 112, https://doi.org/10.32725/oph.2020.008.
[5] Christian Ulrich Detlev von Eggers, Institutiones juris civitatis publici et gentium universalis (Copenhagen: Proft & Storch, 1796), 40–42.
[6] See e.g. Katherine A. Hermes, ‘“‘Justice Will Be Done Us’: Alqonquian Demands for Reciprocity in the Courts of European Settlers”’, in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. C. L. Tomlins and B. H. Mann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 123–49; Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1287grm.
[7] For cameralist thinking on human rights in Germany before the French Revolution, see Diethelm Klippel, ‘Die Diskussion der Menschenrechte am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland’, Gießener Universitätsblätter 2 (1990): 29–40.
