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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS