New Sweden Texas: Swedish Settlers and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Texas

This three-year project will produce a cultural history of nineteenth-century Swedish-Texans that both recognizes their inhabitation of Texas land as a form of settler colonialism, a system of settlement in which settlers establish themselves as rightful inhabitants through the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and documents their involvement with plantation slavery.

The project extends the history of Swedish-American immigration to include the relocation of over 1000 Swedes between 1830 and 1880 to the U.S.

South and Southwest; broadens the narrative of Nordic colonialism to include Swedish engagement with North American chattel slavery; and challenges Texas exceptionalism that portrays the state’s involvement with slavery as marginal and insignificant.

The research will be carried out in U.S. and Swedish archives with materials that with few exceptions have not been analyzed, and it will be developed in residence in the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University in Växjö.

It will result in three peer-reviewed articles and a monograph to be published in high-ranking academic venues.

This project will reconceptualize the traditional history of Swedish-American immigration as a tale of industrious yeoman farmers who settled in the Midwest by showing how the success of Swedes who settled in Texas was intimately intertwined with land dispossession and plantation slavery.