It was the squirrel pelts that set my mind awhirr.  A score of small brown pelts—a startlingly fresh testament to a score of tiny slaughters—bundled for use as currency a few centuries ago, and now displayed in a narrow gallery of the Kansallismuseo in Helsinki.  Finland’s Smithsonian has a reputation for being a rather plodding, old-school tour of the nation’s past, but as a history teacher, I would not have dreamed of missing it.  An intriguing book, a friendly contact, and a $332 airfare had brought me to the Baltic on a lark; I didn’t know what to expect, except that it would be very different from home.  What I found in Helsinki, to my surprise, was a corner of Europe whose culture and history resonated powerfully with that of my natal Great Lakes region and with my historical specialty, early America.

The fur trade that rewrote the history of northern New England, eastern Canada, and the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pitting indigenous nations against one another, forging alliances between them and European traders, starting wars, ending lives, and introducing copper kettles, smallpox, and Christianity to the American interior, had its counterpart on Europe’s eastern edge.  This much I knew; for years, I have been telling students about the Rurik and Romanov conquest of Siberia, titillating them with photographs of scrappy, toothy minks, and pointing out the parallels between Imperial Russia’s relationship with the peoples of Siberia and French and British colonizers’ relationship with the First Peoples of America.  I have even, with the help of a nineteenth-century engraving of a Russian trader taking his wares to a German market, prompted my students to consider how the conquest of Siberia helped Russia integrate itself into Europe.  But it was only when I stood in the Kansallismuseo gallery, staring at the squirrel pelts, that I fully realized how much the historical circumstances surrounding those two fur trades mirrored each other.

Down the hall from the squirrel pelts was a small room of maps.  Andreas Boreus’ 1626 map of Fenno-Scandinavia intrigued me because, while the southern half is neatly and densely labeled, the northern half is nearly empty.  Murmansk Oblast appears as a blank white bulge edged in purple.  Looking at the map, I had to chuckle.  Clearly, Boreus did not know what was there, any more than mapmakers of the same era knew what lay in the inland regions of North America.  At least Boreus was honest about it.  At home on my bedroom wall stands a reproduction of an early eighteenth-century French map of North America, filled with natural features that are, in some cases, more than half guesswork, and with curious names that never took, such as “Lac Erie ou Lac du Chat.”

Boreus was a Swede, revered as the father of Swedish cartography, and his map of Fenno-Scandinavia reminded me that early modern Finland belonged to the Swedish empire.  In fact, seventeenth-century Finland had never really been an independent state: before the twelfth century it was the domain of unorganized pagan tribes living in more or less autonomous settlements, and by the end of the Middle Ages it was an integral part of Sweden.  Such effective government as Finland had between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries came from Sweden, from Catholic authorities, or, after the Reformation, from the Lutheran Church.

The themes that dominated late medieval and early modern Finnish history—expansion of settlement, struggles with the physical environment, the creation of trading and communications networks, the tenuous negotiations of power between metropolitan centers and frontier boots on the ground—echo the themes of early American history.  So, in some ways, does the plight of the Sami in this era echo the plight of the First Peoples of North America.  There seems never to have been a question of incorporating the Sami into the emerging Scandinavian states.  Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians scuffled over their rights of overlordship to the Sami, but chiefly for the sake of collecting tribute; as these states crystallized, the Sami were pushed northward and northward again, hamstrung by mixed messages.  On the one hand, they were souls to be saved and were pressured to convert to Christianity; on the other hand, they were sufficiently ethnically different to sometimes be considered candidates for enslavement.  

Water—the sea water, lake water, rivers, and chains of lakes that suffuse Finnish geography and identity to this day—is another point of connection between the histories of early modern Finland and early modern North America.  The British, Dutch, and French project of developing North America, like the mostly Swedish project of developing Finland, was fueled by commercial motives, and water carried trade.  In the early modern centuries, the only way of getting to Finland from Europe or anywhere else was by water; even today, though Finland has a large network of small airports, the ferries that ply the Baltic are not just for tourists.  They provide essential transport connections to Sweden, Estonia, and Russia; the one I took contained, within the bowels of the ship, a sauna specifically for cargo drivers—a clubby amenity that speaks volumes about Finnish culture.  Seldom have I seen a working harbor as busy as the harbors of Helsinki, except around the Great Lakes, which also continue to carry a hefty load of shipping.

Back in the galleries of the Kansallismuseo, I stumbled across another thumbnail sketch of Finnish culture—eighteenth-century, this time—in the drawing room of Jakarilla Manor, removed from its original setting and installed whole in the museum.  It is a strange, awkward room, dim without cosiness, grand without polish, the décor a little too rough, the ceiling a little too low: aspirational but not quite pulling it off.  It reminded powerfully of the eighteenth-century American rooms I have encountered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, and in historic homes around the eastern United States: the homes of moneyed colonists in North America, big fish in small ponds, living on the edge of civilization as they knew it, trying very hard.  Bernard Bailyn once remarked, in an essay called “Politics and the Creative Imagination,” that eighteenth-century Americans’ idea of grandeur was a rough-and-ready one: the buildings that passed as gracious, imposing, even luxurious in Revolutionary America were bland and clumsy compared to English provincial country houses of similar date.  The evidence of Jakarilla Manor suggests that the same might be said of eighteenth-century Finland, its leadership struggling with the same conundrum that the American founders did, of dreaming bold dreams in what was, for them, a cultural backwater on the edge of the world.

These comparisons make sense if we consider early modern Finland to be a colony of Sweden, a chronological counterpart to the European colonies in North America.  Should we?  I traveled to Helsinki assuming yes; I came away with more complicated feelings.  On the one hand, it is indubitable that Finland became an independent state only in December 1917, after a century of Russian rule and, before that, several centuries of Swedish domination. Swedish and Finnish culture are distinct, and Finnish is not even an Indo-European language, but an import from, probably, the region around the Ural Mountains.  From the Middle Ages on, there was a good deal of Swedish, Danish, and Western European migration to Finland, of a type that, to modern ears, sounds imperialist: missionary campaigns, commercial ventures, the establishment of political fiefdoms.  

On the other hand, modern Finnish culture grew up hand-in-hand with Sweden.  Finland’s educated classes were Swedish-speaking for centuries, and ethnically mixed in the sense that early modern people did not make crisp distinctions between Finnish, Swedish, Danish, and German identities.  Swedish politicians treated Finland as an integral, if distant, component of Sweden.  The vision of Finland as a culturally distinct region, destined to become a separate state, seems to have been born only in the eighteenth century, when nationalist feeling was on the rise and Swedish power—including the power to protect Finland from Russian expansion—was on the decline.  Finland was a liminal region; though its identity sprang in part from its distinctive language and geography, it was also forged by the push-and-pull dynamic between Sweden and Russia.  In fact—as I learned from spending a day at a high school in Espoo—Finland teaches a social studies curriculum that is light on history but heavy on politics, with a mandatory course in international relations.  The centrality of politics and international relations to the Finnish worldview says something vital about the origins of Finnish culture.

All of this set me thinking about early America.  We speak of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America as a colonial society, but applying that term to Europeans in a new place, or even to a European creole society, is problematic.  It seems strange that we use the same language to describe what the British and other European powers did in North America that we use to describe the Spanish colonial project in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru (in all of which places the great majority of the population today is of indigenous or mestizo descent) or the British takeover of India, where the cultural influence was significant but the British contribution to the Indian population was tiny.  Early modern North America’s history is more like Finland’s: indigenous people pushed to the margins, empty or “empty” land settled, the culture growing up in a rough-and-ready atmosphere of commercial expansion and political experimentation, among a mixed but predominantly European population.  There are, of course, some big differences—North American society was molded by its entanglement with slavery, and enriched by an infusion of peoples and cultures from West Africa—but the underlying pattern of extending the European settlement zone is similar.  It was a frontier society more than a colonial one.  Perhaps it is time to take a second look at what happened on the margins of early modern Europe as we seek to describe what happened in early modern North America.

Most of the historical information about Finland in this piece is drawn from Fred Singleton, A Short History of Finland, 2^nd ed., revised and updated by A.F. Upton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), or from the permanent exhibit at the Kansallismuseo in Helsinki.  For the Bailyn reference, see Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Vintage, 2003), 9-17.