The case of Adam Jacobsen. Enslavement in eighteenth-century Norway

Abstract

The article explores the life of Adam Jacobsen, an enslaved man who was trafficked from the Danish West Indies to the small town of Arendal in southern Norway sometime around 1780. By using the micro-spatial perspective the article aims to investigate how Jacobsen and others who were trafficked from America, Africa and Asia to Europe were understood within the broader processes of marketization and racialization that occurred with the development of the Atlantic slave trade. The article examines how these processes were given a localized expression through investigations of different ‘sites’: the geographical places of St. Croix and, primarily, Arendal, and the institutional sites of the household and the interrogation room. In St. Croix, Jacobsen lived in a society constructed around plantation slavery. In Arendal, he was a working member of his owner’s household residing with local servants and a local family, but he was also singled out and often racialized. Jacobsen’s life story, then, demonstrates how colonial slavery extended into Europe in a way that not only concerned capital and goods but also trafficking of people.