In this presentation I will talk about my current book project where I provide a new history of the Greenlandic Danish relationship in the decolonization era. Immediately after the Second World War, Danish politicians were faced with the global challenge of decolonization. Maintaining Greenland’s colonial status seemed unsustainable, and politicians, civil servants, and experts began to envision and plan the future of Greenland, not as a colony, but as an integral part of the flourishing Danish welfare state. The extensive postwar reform programs in Greenland, which entailed massive investments by the Danish state in welfare-oriented fields such as housing, health, and education, was the Danish response to the challenges posed by the decolonization agenda. Analytically the book centers on several welfare themes: housing, health, and welfare institutions (schools, kindergartens, nurseries, and nursing homes).  These themes have been chosen to yield insights into how welfare-oriented policies were implemented and worked in Greenland. Moreover, social problems – linked with the rise in population, the urbanization, and the social uprooting - which occurred in the reform period prompted responses that entailed welfare investments as well as authoritarian public health campaigns. The book is about the planning and implementation of these initiatives and the reactions they generated until the introduction of Greenlandic Home Rule in 1979 marked the official end of the epoch in which integration into the Danish realm was the goal.

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