The idea of Denmark ceding a colony to the US is obviously offensive. The hysterical reactions to the Trump administration’s advances towards Greenland, which have now been running 24/7, clearly testify to that.
Admittedly, the world’s largest island formally changed its status from a colony to a self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty over seventy years ago. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the colossal Arctic territory has been treated rather unfavourably by Copenhagen. The current arrangement offers a few quirks, such as Greenland being part of NATO but not the EU. You wouldn’t think the latter, given the commitment that the EU’s institutions have put into the matter, but the union apparently wants to be in charge of everything on the planet.
But even if we don’t make a strict distinction between a full-blooded colony and an ex-colony that today is a kind of class B Denmark, there is a historical precedent for Denmark ceding territory to the US. Many historians and other generally well-read people must know this, but few of them are perhaps tempted to remind us of it when their surroundings go bananas in a blaze of indignation.
The fact remains that Denmark had a colony called the Danish West Indies in the Caribbean from 1754 to 1917. It consisted of the three islands of St Thomas, St John and St Croix. The Norwegian Wikipedia provides a short and concise historical outline:
The Danish company Vestindisk-guineisk Kompagni annexed the two uninhabited islands of St Thomas in 1672 and St John in 1718. In 1733, St Croix was purchased from the French West India Company. In 1754, the three islands were sold to the King of Denmark-Norway. The Danish West Indies were occupied by Great Britain from 1802-03 and 1807-15.
There were, to put it mildly, not only honourable things the Danes did in the Caribbean:
The purpose of Danish colonisation in the West Indies was to exploit the profitable triangular trade, which involved exporting firearms and other industrial goods to Africa in exchange for slaves, who were then transported to the islands of the West Indies to man the sugar plantations. The final stage of the triangle was the transport of sugar to the home country. The economy of the Danish West Indies was entirely based on slavery.
Thorkild Hansen has described this story in the “Slavenes kyst” trilogy, which is on many Norwegian bookshelves, not least because it was published by Bokklubben several years ago. Unless the entire reading population of Norway is suffering from dementia, this is therefore something a significant number of Norwegians know.
The end of slavery was the beginning of the end of the Danes’ Caribbean adventure:
After the abolition of slavery in 1848, the Danish West Indies entered an economic downturn and in 1852 a sale of the Danish West Indies was first debated in the Danish Parliament.</p
Denmark made several attempts to sell or exchange the Danish West Indies at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, to the US and the German Confederation respectively. The islands were eventually sold for $25 million to the United States, which took over administration on 31 March 1917 and named them the U.S. Virgin Islands.
One might ask why Denmark should be so damn much more interested in Greenland today than it was in three Caribbean islands at the beginning of the 20th century.
And it’s not in the Arctic wasteland that Denmark’s future will be decided. And it seems a slightly misguided prioritisation of intellectual and mental energy to get so excited about America’s appetite for Greenland, while Islam’s appetite for Denmark itself does not generate anything close to the same outrage and commitment.
Copenhagen – and most other Western European capitals – should perhaps be a little more concerned about mosques, Islamists and massive Muslim communal prayer in front of Christiansborg than about its security guarantor’s desire to make the West a safer place. What will happen to Greenland if Denmark falls? Is it the case, as Giulio Meotti suggests, that the Danes are planning to flee to Greenland once Danish Koranic law has mutated into full sharia in Jutland, Zealand and Funen?
If you’re not Danish, it’s hard to understand how pride in the sovereignty of Greenland can run so deep that you don’t want to make a profitable deal with the US, which could then strengthen the entire West. Most rational people prefer win/win to lose/lose. As Carlo Cipolla said: He who does good both to himself and to others is intelligent; he who harms both himself and others is stupid. In short, the sale of Greenland should be a no-brainer.
The US purchase of the Danish West Indies is far from the only time the Americans have expanded their territory in this way.
The US bought Louisiana from France in 1803, a territory that at the time was enormously larger than what is now the state of the same name. Florida was purchased from Spain in 1819, twenty-one years after the US had expanded its territory through the Spanish-American War, which was the beginning of the end for the Spanish Empire. Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867. The list is not exhaustive.
The Danes can be said to have had an empire a thousand years ago, but perhaps it was time to recognise that this is now a closed chapter?
It’s not as if today’s territorial boundaries have been frozen in perpetuity by an omnipotent moral god, as it appears in the narrow mental box many people today use as a substitute for a brain. History is very much about shifts in power over territories, and as we know, we didn’t get the promised end to the story. Now it has woken up again, and for the USA, Spain is not the main opponent in 2026 as it was in 1898.
On the other hand, it’s China – you know, the country Erna grovelled to when Beijing was pissed off because we’d given the Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident. The terrible head of government signed a submission agreement with the world’s largest mafia empire to be taken to task and allowed to sell salmon again, and they were proud to have managed to hold a nice dialogue with Xi Jinping’s regime, which violates human rights with the same obviousness as the rest of us buy milk and bread.
The fact that this regime is allied with Russia, which has now become an enemy, is apparently of no concern to anyone. Doublethink is swallowed raw for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Our main ally’s president, on the other hand, is treated as a pariah. Are our so-called leaders just good old-fashioned stupid, or are they bought and paid for?
Who the story makes its protagonists – they’re not necessarily elegant, but not all of them are cruel – is not something decided by talking heads either. What’s more, the course of history carries a very different weight to that of everyday politics.
Does anyone know what Donald would pay for Queen Maud Land?
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