|Queen Margaret I|
The religious disputes that followed the spread of Protestantism caused a setback for Danish power but new alliances were made and in time Denmark was back to being the most prosperous and powerful of the Scandinavian countries. They took a sting in the Thirty Years War and then a rather serious drubbing from Sweden. A number of subsequent wars failed to restore Danish supremacy over the region or to break Swedish power which grew considerably thanks to a number of very gifted military leaders. However, you cannot keep a good Dane down and in time Denmark was again a model of prosperity, confident enough to start looking beyond Europe for opportunities to grow. Thanks to the union with Norway the Danish Crown already held Iceland and Greenland as well as some other smaller islands in the North Sea but under King Christian IV, Denmark began looking to plant the oldest national flag in Europe on warmer shores. In 1620 the Kingdom of Denmark established its first official overseas colony in India, the subcontinent that was so attractive the Portuguese, Dutch, British and French were all competing to make claims. The Danish foothold was established at Tranquebar (now called Tharangambadi) which remained a Danish possession until 1845 when it was sold to Britain.
|Ft Christiansborg in Africa|
Efforts were made to establish plantations in Africa but these were not successful and eventually the interior was seized by African powers hostile to Denmark and as public sentiment was eventually turning against the idea of slavery the Kingdom of Denmark withdrew from Africa and sold its forts to Great Britain in 1850. They served no purpose by that time as the slave trade had long been mostly suppressed thanks to the British and in 1848 the Kingdom of Denmark abolished the use of slave labor. The Danes had already seen that slavery could prove detrimental to the masters as well as to the slaves when there was a massive slave rebellion on the island of St John, where African slaves outnumbers Danish colonists by 5 to 1, which was only suppressed with the help of France. However, though Denmark was congratulated for the abolition of slavery this also meant that most of the plantations in the Danish West Indies went out of business and the local economy went downhill fast. Rather than being self-sufficient or profitable, the islands became a drain on the Kingdom of Denmark. So, in 1916 (when the Danish economy itself was in trouble due to World War I) there was little regret when Denmark sold the islands to the United States who wanted to use them to establish naval bases to guard against those troublesome German submarines. The following year the former Danish West Indies became the U.S. Virgin Islands.
|Queen Margaret II in the Faroe Islands|
With Iceland going republican, Greenland and Faroe Islands remain the only vestiges of the Danish colonial empire and these are each self-governing, autonomous members of the “Danish Realm”. In fairness it should also be pointed out that these islands were originally Norwegian possessions which came under the Danish Crown during the union of Denmark and Norway via the Treaty of Kiel of 1814. However, unassuming as the Kingdom of Denmark may appear today, there was a time when the Danes were the dominant force in far north Europe and at various times the rule of the Danish monarchy stretched across Finland, Sweden, Norway, England, northern Germany, Latvia, the North Atlantic, down to the Caribbean Sea, the Gold Coast of Africa, southern India and as far east as the Nicobar Islands in the Sea of Bengal (sold to Britain in 1869). Although today the Danish colonial empire may not be as well remembered as the more extensive realms of other colonial powers, for a time it was one that had to be taken into account with the Danish flag flying over parts of America, Africa and Asia.