Switzerland was never a colonial power, yet through its traders, mercenaries, anthropologists and missionaries, it contributed to colonial expansion, sparking debates about how to confront this lesser-known aspect of the nation’s past.
A new exhibition at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich is shedding light on this chapter in the Alpine nation’s history, in a bid to understand how Switzerland benefited from the colonial era.
“Swiss citizens and companies were heavily involved in the colonial system from the 16th century onwards,” the exhibition says.
Photo courtesy of Swiss National Museum via AFP
Entitled “Colonial: Switzerland’s Global Entanglements,” the exhibition presents objects and artifacts that bear witness to the landlocked country’s participation alongside the seafaring major European colonial powers.
It includes 18th-century cotton cloth used by Swiss traders as currency to buy enslaved people, sacks for loading goods such as cotton and cocoa onto ships, and a uniform jacket from a Swiss mercenary regiment that served the Dutch East India Company before switching to the British crown.
The regiment fought with the British alongside the future Duke of Wellington in the 1799 Siege of Seringapatam in India that overthrew Tipu Sultan of Mysore.
The exhibition also includes a collection of butterflies assembled by a wealthy merchant involved in a coffee plantation in Cuba cultivated by slaves, and the cap and whip of a Swiss national recruited as a civil servant in the Congo Free State in the early 20th century.
“It’s a difficult subject,” Swiss National Museum director Denise Tonella said. “It’s not easy to tackle an unflattering topic [but] it’s an important issue for today’s society.”
“Since the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been a lot of debate about colonialism and Switzerland,” Tonella said, with the exhibition aimed at providing the means to understand the issues.
In the wake of protests in the US in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, and the tearing down of a statue of a slave trader in the British city of Bristol, the Swiss city of Neuchatel was shaken by a controversy surrounding its statue of David de Pury, an 18th-century banker and merchant.
A major benefactor of his hometown in northwestern Switzerland, his statue was sprayed with red paint in 2020 and a group questioning his connections to the slave trade launched a petition to have it removed.
A compromise was reached, with the local authorities opting for an explanatory plaque and the installation alongside it of a critical artwork representing the statue upside down, with its head buried in the base.
“Different periods elicit different perspectives on history,” professor Georg Kreis wrote in the exhibition catalogue, adding that these issues had long “been repressed” at the academic level.
Since it had no colonies, Switzerland perceived itself “outside the wider European history, occupying a special status” as an “innocent country,” the historian said. “After the turn of the millennium, however, Switzerland’s focus on its colonial past took a different turn,” with academic study increasing over the past 20 years.
Drawing on this research, the museum set out to reflect on all facets of Swiss involvement, starting with the trade in raw materials and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that saw merchants and plantation owners rack up immense fortunes in the 18th century.
The exhibition, which opened on Friday and runs until Jan. 9, also sheds light on the Swiss naturalists and anthropologists behind racial theories used to justify colonialism.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS