Danish overseas colonies, North Atlantic monopoly trade areas and shipping routes between Denmark and the colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century, Denmark became a colonial power, establishing the Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) trading station on the east coast of India in 1620 and a fort on the Gold Coast – in present-day Ghana – in 1659. Denmark also gained three West Indian islands in the Caribbean in 1672, 1718 and 1733 and the Frederiksnagore (Serampore) trading office in India from 1755. In the North Atlantic, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Finnmark and Greenland also belonged to the Danish-Norwegian Crown. © danmarkshistorien.dk
The existence of the Danish state had been under threat in the years immediately preceding 1660. A new threat appeared with the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815, with Denmark’s involvement stretching between 1807 and 1814). The Danish Crown joined the war on the side of the French emperor Napoleon, and therefore in opposition to Britain. It would be an understatement to say that the war did not work out in Denmark’s favour: it was only through the intervention of major powers that an amputated Danish state survived. Under the terms of the peace treaty signed in Kiel on 14 January 1814, Frederik VI was forced to cede the whole of Norway to the Swedish king. The Danish state was thus one of the biggest losers of the Napoleonic Wars in terms of land, and the country became a small state. In Norway, absolute monarchy was replaced by a constitution, signed at Eidsvoll on 17 May 1814, followed by a personal union with Sweden, which lasted until 1905. All this meant the end of the union between Denmark and Norway, which had been in place for over four hundred years. With the cession of Norway, the Danish kingdom was reduced in size from approximately 380,000 km2 to approximately 60,000 km2.
