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When Swedish civil servants took possession of the Caribbean island of St Barthélemy in1785, they discovered a complex medical landscape in which Black healers played important roles. They competed with white physicians for patients and formed an itinerant community—both voluntary and forced in nature—which travelled throughout the archipelago exchanging remedies and practices. The healers' work was not associated to revolt and rebellion as in many other Caribbean territories and the Swedish court of law treated them with less cruelty than in many other colonies. The healers' activities cannot be simply reduced to acts of resistance to slavery; many of them gained the trust of large parts of both Black and white communities. Their interactions with people on the surrounding islands show how Caribbean colonial historiography gains from a wider geographical contextualisation, allowing a better understanding of the Black population's role in healing and medicine.

Summary
When Swedish civil servants took possession of the Caribbean island of St Barthélemy in 1785, they discovered a complex medical landscape in which Black healers played important roles. They competed with white physicians for patients and formed an itinerant community—both voluntary and forced in nature—which travelled throughout the archipelago exchanging remedies and practices. The healers' work was not associated to revolt and rebellion as in many other Caribbean territories and the Swedish court of law treated them with less cruelty than in many other colonies. The healers' activities cannot be simply reduced to acts of resistance to slavery; many of them gained the trust of large parts of both Black and white communities. Their interactions with people on the surrounding islands show how Caribbean colonial historiography gains from a wider geographical contextualisation, allowing a better understanding of the Black population's role in healing and medicine.

Sweden became a slaveholding nation when it acquired its only Caribbean colony, Saint-Barthélemy—a.k.a. St. Barths or St. Barts—from France in 1784. When the island was retroceded in 1878, the records created during ninety-four years of Swedish Caribbean rule were left behind and are now held in France. Examining the history of this archive that stands as a metaphor for Swedish colonial amnesia, this essay discusses the reluctance in Sweden to recognize a past that goes against a self-image untainted by slavery and colonialism. The essay also discusses a project that aims to open the archive to a larger audience through digitization.

AbstractThis article attempts to widen the debate on the removal of antiquities from the Ottoman Empire around 1800. The removals are often seen in an Anglo-French perspective with the result that other voices are erased, both those of the local populations and of other foreign observers. I show that objects that now neglected were once highly valued by both local inhabitants and collectors, and that their removals were repeatedly resisted. I suggest that a more subtle interaction occurred between collectors and the local populations than hitherto has been recognized. While the local populations were accused of various "superstitious" practices—often conveniently related to objects coveted by European collectors—I propose that the removers were not uninfluenced by these practices. By introducing testimonies from Swedish observers that were critical of the removals before such critiques became frequent, I also question the stereotype of a common European attitude toward the Ottoman Empire. I discuss how such critique was related to their status as third-party observers from a nation without power or museums. By investigating the arguments of both collectors and critics, I propose that many positions in the debate today were already present at the time of the removals. Following the history of a less famous object serves to highlight aspects of early European collecting and expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean that are often overlooked in the debate on ownership and restitution claims.