Greenland

At a glance

What was colonial Greenland?

A Danish project on the west coast of a huge island, run for most of its life as a state monopoly. Denmark claimed sovereignty over the whole island but administered only the inhabited west coast, where the hunting districts lay between the ice and the sea. There were no plantations, no settler colonies and no land seizures; the Greenlanders remained the overwhelming majority of the population, living by sealing, whaling, fishing and hunting, and trading with the state store for the goods they could no longer make.

That makes Greenland unusual among colonial possessions and explains the shape of the entry: the story is not conquest but administration — who set the prices, who wrote the language, who decided how many people there were, and who owned the island.

Why did Denmark go back?

Because a Norwegian priest thought the Norse were still there. Hans Egede had read about the medieval Greenland colony and believed it had survived, cut off from Europe and still Catholic. In 1721 he obtained royal support, sailed on 2 May with the ships Haabet and Anne Christine, and landed on 3 July at Kangeq, near the site of the old Eastern Settlement, where he found no Norse at all — only Inuit.

The mission was not quite a state venture. It was funded by a private mission board, the Missionskollegiet, while the Crown paid the missionary's salary and granted a trade monopoly to a Bergen company; the two interests were never properly separated. Egede moved to the site of Godthåb in 1727–28 and founded the town that became Nuuk. He was recalled in 1731, leaving fifteen people behind, and returned to Denmark to train missionaries. The colony survived him.

His problem was that the Greenlanders had no interest in his god. Conversion was slow, the language was hard, and the mission's economics depended on trade. The breakthrough came by catastrophe: in 1733–34 smallpox, probably carried by Greenlanders who had been taken to Denmark and returned, swept the west coast. Egede put the dead at "above 2,000 persons"; Crantz, writing later, said "between two and three thousand". Either figure is a disaster for a population that may have been 8,000. The epidemic broke the old religion's credibility and filled the churches.

How was the colony run?

Through two boards and a monopoly. The mission board ran the church and schools; a trading company, replaced in 1776 by the Royal Greenland Trade Department (KGH), ran the commerce. The KGH was a state monopoly with a network of trading stations in thirteen districts, each with a manager, a store and a hierarchy of Danish officials and Greenlandic staff.

The governing document was the Instruction of 19 April 1782, fifteen chapters long, which set out how trade, hunting, the church and the courts were to work. It was paternalist and explicit: the Greenlanders were to be protected from the market, kept to their hunting, and discouraged from adopting European habits that would make them dependent. Coffee and sugar were restricted, alcohol was banned (until 1955), and the colonisers were told not to exploit the people they governed. The policy was protection in the language of the time and control in practice: the trade was fixed, the prices were set in Copenhagen, and no Greenlander could sell to anyone else.

The Instruction was detailed enough to govern daily life. It laid down the duties of the manager and the missionary, the treatment of Greenlandic employees, the rules of trade, the management of the stores and the conduct of courts. It also encoded a theory of development: Greenlanders were to be taught Christianity and letters, but not to be turned into Danes, and the trade was to supply what hunting could not without creating new wants. In 1781 two inspectors were appointed, one for North and one for South Greenland, to supervise the whole coast; their reports are the best administrative record of the colony. A Greenlandic law book, the Grønlænderbog of 1792, followed — a compilation of customary rules translated for use in the local courts.

The system was reformed repeatedly and never fundamentally. Commissions sat in 1851 and later; the trade's privileges were investigated, defended and slightly loosened; and the colony edged towards the statutory definition of 1908. What did not change was the principle: Greenland was governed from Copenhagen, in the interest of the Greenlanders as Copenhagen understood it, and the people it governed had no vote on the arrangement until the twentieth century.

How did the trade work?

By barter, at royal prices. Greenlanders brought sealskins, blubber, eiderdown, fox skins, reindeer hides and, later, fish, and received in return tobacco, coffee, sugar, cloth, iron, guns and ammunition. There was very little coin: tobacco functioned as small change, and eiderdown was counted by the handful. Prices were set by a tariff — the Generaltakst — and the state store advanced goods on credit, a system that kept hunters working and indebted at the same time.

The economics were deliberately anti-market. The KGH was meant to be self-financing but not profitable; the state accepted losses to keep the colony supplied. From 1801 the trade issued credit notes, and from 1805 these circulated as a kind of paper money until 1967; coin came in 1835. The effect was a closed economy in which the price of a rifle was an administrative decision in Copenhagen, not a negotiation on the ice.

What did the colony look like?

Like a scatter of small stations, not a territory. The KGH ran thirteen districts, each with a manager, a store, a cooperage, a blubber house and a handful of Danish staff, and each station was a little island of Danish order on a coast of Greenlandic settlements. The buildings were timber, tarred and turf-roofed; the store was the largest, with a counter, a scale and a ledger; the manager's house had a parlour, a stove and a flagpole. The church, the school and the mission house stood nearby, and the Greenlandic families lived in their own houses around the station.

Transport was by boat and sled. The umiaq carried families and goods in summer; the kayak was the hunter's; in winter the dog sled moved freight and people along the ice. There were no roads between districts, and the post went by ship once a year, which is why the colony was administered on annual instructions and why a decision taken in Copenhagen in spring might be obsolete by the time it arrived.

Who were the Kalaallit?

The Inuit of west Greenland, living in small winter settlements and moving with the seasons. Winter was spent in communal houses of turf and stone, hunting seals at the breathing holes; spring brought the umiaq — the large women's boat — and the open-water hunt; summer was caribou, birds and fishing; autumn was the return to the winter house. Kayaks, harpoons, bladder floats and dog sleds were the technology, and the household, not the individual, was the economic unit.

Religion was shamanic: the angakkuq travelled to the sea spirit in trance, the drum dance settled disputes and made contact with the dead, and taboos governed hunting and death. Conversion was gradual and uneven. The missionaries banned the drum dance and the shaman's practice, and the old beliefs survived inside Christian practice — a pattern familiar across the Arctic.

The colonial economy changed the hunt. Trade goods created demand for sealskins and fox furs, guns changed the hunt, and the state's protection of hunting as a way of life froze a social order that might otherwise have changed. The Greenlanders were not passive: they traded, worked for the stations, learned to read, and by the nineteenth century were producing catechists, teachers and artists who shaped a national culture.

How did Greenlanders and Danes live together?

In a hierarchy that was racial in practice and paternalist in language. The colonial administration distinguished between Greenlanders, Danes and the children of mixed marriages, and gave the last group a semi-official status: they were employed as catechists, teachers, interpreters and clerks, and they became the intermediary class through which the colony was governed. The category was not a compliment; it was an instrument of administration, and it shaped who could hold which job.

The mission ran the schools, and schooling was in Greenlandic for the lower classes and in Danish for the officials' children. That produced a literate Greenlandic population with limited access to Danish employment — a classic colonial arrangement, and one that generated the first generation of Greenlandic writers and politicians.

Local government was gradually created. In 1857–58 the first Forstanderskaber — district councils — were established, and they became permanent in 1862–63 under the direction of the Danish inspector Hinrich Rink. They were advisory and controlled by the administration, but they gave leading Greenlanders a formal role, and they were the ancestors of the provincial councils of 1911.

Marriage between Danish officials and Greenlandic women was common, and the families that resulted were central to colonial society. The Danish state's attitude to them shifted over time — from encouragement to suspicion of a "mixed" population that blurred the categories — but the reality was that the colony was run by people who were often related to the people they governed.

What did the Moravians do?

They arrived in 1733, three missionaries of the Moravian Brethren from Herrnhut in Saxony, and built the mission station of New Herrnhut near Godthåb on 20 May 1733. More followed: Lichtenfels in 1758 and Lichtenau in 1774. The Moravians were Pietists, more patient with the language than the Danish church, and they made converts where the Lutherans had struggled — partly by living in the settlements, partly by translating hymns and teaching reading.

Their influence outlasted them. The choirs and the colour-coded ribbons of the Moravian congregations survive in Greenlandic national dress, and the mission stations are among the country's oldest buildings. The Moravians withdrew in 1900, handing their congregations to the Danish church, but the style of Greenlandic Lutheranism — hymn-singing, lay reading, the choir — is Moravian in origin.

How did Greenlandic become a written language?

Through the mission. The first spelling book appeared in 1739; Poul Egede, Hans's son, published the Gospels in 1744, a dictionary in 1750 and the New Testament in 1766. Samuel Kleinschmidt, a Moravian, produced the orthography of 1851 that remained standard for more than a century, and the seminaries founded in 1847–48 trained Greenlandic catechists and teachers. By the late nineteenth century Greenland had a literate population and a written literature — hymns, catechisms, genealogies, newspapers — long before many European peasantries did.

That literacy had a political consequence. A population that could read could also write, and by the early twentieth century Greenlandic writers and editors were arguing for their own interests in print. The colonial state had created the instrument of its own critique.

How did the mission change Greenlandic society?

Slowly, and then completely. The missionaries did not simply convert; they reorganised time, space and status. Baptism required a Christian name, which disconnected people from the name-stock of their families; marriage required a Christian ceremony, which changed inheritance and household formation; the drum dance and the shaman's séance were banned, which removed the two institutions that had regulated dispute and contact with the dead.

Literacy changed the social order from within. Catechists and lay readers became local leaders, and the ability to read gave ordinary Greenlanders access to the Bible, the hymn book and eventually the newspaper. By the late nineteenth century a Greenlandic public sphere existed in print — small, supervised and Christian, but real.

The mission also changed how people dressed and lived. The national dress that emerged in the nineteenth century is a hybrid: sealskin and beads, but also the colour-coded ribbons of the Moravian choirs and the cut of Danish rural costume. What is now presented as immemorial tradition is largely a colonial-era creation, which is true of most national dress.

How many Greenlanders were there?

This is one of the hardest questions in the period, and the answer depends on whom you believe. Hans Egede estimated 10,000; some later writers proposed 30,000; the modern reconstruction by Ole Marquardt puts the 1721 population at about 8,000, falling to about 6,000 by the late eighteenth century. The 1789 and 1799 counts, taken by the colonial administration, found about 5,100.

The decline is not in doubt — smallpox, tuberculosis, venereal disease, alcohol and the disruption of hunting all took their toll — but its scale is. The safest formulation is that the west-coast population was probably between 5,000 and 8,000 in the eighteenth century, that it fell, and that the colonial state's own counts are the best evidence for the later period. Any claim of 30,000 is a hypothesis about pre-contact numbers, not a count.

What did the colony produce?

Sealskins, blubber, eiderdown and fox furs for most of its life, with cod and halibut growing in importance in the nineteenth century. The trade's value lay in fur and down, not in minerals, until the middle of the century, when the cryolite deposit at Ivittuut began to be mined — first small shipments in 1854, then industrial scale, because cryolite was essential to aluminium smelting. For a time Greenland was the world's only commercial source.

The cryolite mine changed the colony's strategic value and its labour market. It was a Danish-run industrial operation with a Greenlandic workforce, and it tied the colony to Danish industry in a way the fur trade never had. In 1940 it became a war objective: the mine was the reason the United States and Canada cared about a Danish colony in the Arctic.

Fishing replaced hunting in the twentieth century, and the transition was brutal for the hunting districts. Cod, then shrimp, then halibut; trawlers, processing plants and wage labour; and a state policy that eventually encouraged Greenlanders to leave the small settlements for the towns. The colonial economy had protected hunting; the post-colonial economy dismantled it.

Who owned Greenland?

Denmark, but the legal route is more interesting than the answer. By the Treaty of Kiel of 14 January 1814, Norway was ceded to Sweden — and Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes were excepted from the cession. Greenland was never transferred to Denmark by that treaty; it stayed with the Danish crown as a Norwegian dependency that Denmark kept when Norway left. The 1819 Stockholm convention and the 1826 treaty later recorded the arrangement.

The nineteenth century was informal: no statute defined Greenland's status until 1908, when Act No. 139 described it as a colony for the first time. In 1911 two provincial councils (Landsråd) were created, one for north and one for south Greenland, and in 1912 they were merged. The First World War brought the United States into the question: the 1916 Lansing declaration recognised Danish sovereignty over the whole island as part of the deal for the Danish West Indies.

In 1919 the Danish minister in Oslo, Ihlen, told the Norwegian government that Denmark would not oppose Norwegian claims to Spitsbergen — and that Denmark considered Greenland its own. On 10 May 1921 Denmark issued a decree extending its sovereignty to the whole island. Norway protested, and the dispute went to the League of Nations and then to court.

What was Greenland to Denmark?

A small, expensive, romantic possession. The colony never paid for itself, and the state accepted the loss because Greenland mattered in other ways: as the last remnant of the Norse past, as a mission field, and as proof that Denmark was an Arctic power. Nineteenth-century Danish national identity was built partly on the medieval Greenland sagas, and the colony was presented as a trust rather than a business.

The twentieth century added exploration and science. Knud Rasmussen's Thule expeditions crossed the ice cap and mapped the north; the Danish state sponsored research, and Greenland became a laboratory for Arctic science and a stage for Danish prestige. The 1931–33 conflict with Norway was fought as much over national honour as over the ice, and the Hague judgment was received in Denmark as a vindication.

That romantic framing explains the tone of the colonial record. Danish officials wrote about the Greenlanders as children to be protected, and the policy of shielding them from the market was justified in their interest. It was also a way of keeping them in their place, and the Greenlandic critique of the period — that protection was a form of exclusion — is now the standard scholarly reading.

What happened in 1931–33?

Norway occupied East Greenland. On 27 June 1931 a party of Norwegian hunters raised the flag at Myggbukta and proclaimed "Erik the Red's Land"; on 10 July the Norwegian government issued a royal resolution claiming the area between 71°30′ and 75°40′ north. The following year Norway occupied a second stretch, between 60° and 63°. The justification was that the area was terra nullius — unoccupied territory — which Denmark had never effectively administered.

Denmark took the case to the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. On 5 April 1933 the court ruled, twelve judges to two, that the Norwegian occupation was illegal. Its reasoning rested on two independent grounds: Denmark had exercised effective authority over the area — trading, policing, licensing and administering — and Norway had recognised Danish sovereignty by treaty and by its own conduct, including the Ihlen declaration. Either ground was sufficient; the court gave both.

The legal reasoning matters beyond the case. The court did not require Denmark to occupy every valley; it asked whether Denmark had displayed the functions of a state — legislation, administration, adjudication, treaties — and whether other states had recognised it. Norway's own conduct, including the Ihlen declaration, supplied the recognition. The judgment became a standard authority on the acquisition of sovereignty over thinly populated territory, and it is still cited in Arctic disputes.

The judgment settled the map. Norway accepted it, and East Greenland remained Danish. The episode is a textbook case in international law of how sovereignty over sparsely inhabited territory is established: not by presence everywhere, but by the effective exercise of authority and by the recognition of other states.

What happened in 1940?

The war cut Greenland off. When Germany occupied Denmark on 9 April 1940, the colonial governors in Greenland — the landsfogeder — had to decide where their loyalty lay. On 23 April they took over the administration under §10(3) of the 1925 Act, and on 3 May 1940 the two provincial councils at Godhavn passed a resolution declaring their loyalty to the Danish crown and their willingness to resist. The preamble of the 1941 agreement later recorded that resolution as the basis for what followed.

That spring the United States and Canada were anxious about the cryolite mine at Ivittuut, the only major source of the aluminium ore in the Americas, and about German weather stations. In April 1941 the Danish minister in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, signed an agreement with the United States — "Defense of Greenland" — placing the island under American protection for the duration of the war. Copenhagen disowned him; Washington dealt with him anyway. The cryolite was mined under guard, the coast was patrolled, and the weather war in the Arctic became part of the Battle of the Atlantic.

The war changed Greenland permanently. The American presence, the airfields, the money and the exposure to a wider world broke the isolation the monopoly had maintained, and after 1945 the colonial system was no longer defensible.

The American presence was enormous by Greenlandic standards. Airfields were built in the south and at Søndre Strømfjord, weather stations were strung along the coast, and thousands of American servicemen passed through a country whose entire population was about 20,000. The war brought money, radio, refrigerators and a view of the outside world that the monopoly had deliberately restricted, and it made the colonial system look both shabby and unnecessary.

What ended colonial status?

The 1953 constitution. Greenland ceased to be a colony and became a county (amt) of Denmark, with two seats in the Folketing. The change was ratified in Copenhagen and endorsed by the UN General Assembly, and it was presented as decolonisation. Whether it was is still argued: Greenlanders did not vote in a referendum on the constitution, and the county status transferred real power to Copenhagen while leaving the Greenlandic language and society subordinate. The colonial period ended in law in 1953; the argument about its legacy did not.

The end of colonial status did not end the relationship. The 1950s brought a development programme — hospitals, schools, power stations and the resettlement of families from small settlements into towns — that was presented as modernisation and experienced by many Greenlanders as disruption. Home rule in 1979 gave Greenland its own parliament and control of most domestic policy; self-government in 2009 added the right to the country's mineral resources and recognised the Greenlandic people as a nation under international law. Independence is now a question of economics, not principle: the annual Danish block grant is roughly a fifth of Greenland's public finances.

What is left?

A language, a church, a dress and a political argument. Greenlandic is the official language of a self-governing territory, and the orthography that Kleinschmidt fixed in 1851 was reformed in 1973 but still underpins the written language. The national dress, with its beaded collar and sealskin boots, carries the Moravian colour-ribbons of the congregations; the choir tradition, the hymn-singing and the lay reading are the mission's most durable legacies.

The colonial economy left a different legacy: a hunting culture protected and frozen by the monopoly, and a fishing industry that replaced it. The transition from seal to cod and shrimp, and from hunting to wage labour, was the great social change of the twentieth century, and it happened largely after the colonial period ended.

The political argument is live. Greenland became a county in 1953, obtained home rule in 1979 and self-government in 2009, and every Danish election now includes a debate about independence. The colonial period is remembered as a time of protection and poverty, and the question of whether Denmark's rule was benign or simply small is still argued in Nuuk and Copenhagen.

Common myths about colonial Greenland

Timeline of colonial Greenland

What the map shows next

At 1721 on the map the mission is just beginning and the Norse colony has been gone for nearly three centuries.

At 1940 on the map Greenland is a Danish county-in-waiting, Canada is at war beside it, and the United States is about to garrison the island.