Converging World Views: The European Expansion & Early-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Swedish Contacts (Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 207)

This is a doctoral dissertation. In 1805 two Scottish missionaries were stranded en route to India - in Copenhagen. Shocked by the Godlessness of the Scandinavians, they decided to stay: to deploy their evangelical energies in northern Europe instead of in Asia. As they explained in a letter home, "We pity the inhabitants of Bengal and Otaheite because they worship idols, but what better are Europeans who worship no God?" This study investigates in which conceptions and experiences of the non-European world came to influence inter-European relationships - in particular, those between Britain and Sweden during the early-nineteenth-century.

Although the Anglo-Swedish contacts were marked by conflicts and tensions, they still contributed significantly to the development of a pan-Protestant European view of the non-European, non-Christian world. With its transnational focus this study illuminates previously overlooked aspects of European, as well as of British and Swedish history.