This panel seeks to challenge that marginalization by bringing together scholars who explore the governance, knowledge production, and reform efforts that shaped the Danish Empire. To what extent can Denmark’s global reach—despite its relative poverty and limited resources—expand our understanding of early modern empires? This panel expands our knowledge of smaller European empires by integrating Denmark’s overseas dominions into comparative imperial history.

By approaching Danish history from distinct historiographical and methodological perspectives, we hope to foster a dialogue between scholars of Scandinavian and the Anglophone historical community. The limited exchange between these groups—partly due to linguistic barriers, as few U.S. historians read Scandinavian languages—has left important historiographical gaps. We hope to encourage greater engagement with Scandinavian sources and perspectives in global historical scholarship by bridging this divide.

Three presentations will be given. Matthías Aron Ólafsson will examine how investigative commissions were used as a tool to govern disparate territories across the Danish Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jón Kristinn Einarsson will argue that Denmark’s abolition of their transatlantic slave trade in 1792 was embedded in a broader imperial program of reform that spanned the Danish colonial world. Dann Grotum will demonstrate how meteorology and climatology became imperial sciences in Denmark in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.