Icelanders Eastward: Sailors and the Emerging Modern World

Icelanders Eastward: Sailors and the Emerging Modern World is the first translation from Icelandic of the narratives of two men – Árni Magnússon and Eiríkur Björnsson – who explored the world in the final years of the eighteenth century, sailing from Iceland to China in the Danish colonial service. During their adventures, they observed the lives of enslaved people in Africa, fought in the Russian–Ottoman wars in the Middle East, worked on fishing and whaling ships in Greenland, and lived in Danish settlements in Tamil Nadu, India. They are on-the-ground witnesses to the expansion of European colonial states and the impact of these states on the lives of the people of Africa, India, and China, and on the Inuit of Greenland. Their stories also illuminate shipboard life for ordinary sailors, demonstrating how European trading companies and their global ambitions were affecting the lives of Europeans at home as well as in the colonies and helping to shape the colonial empire. The book explores how ordinary people gained agency over their lives in the milieux of these trading companies, and how sailors such as Árni and Eiríkur escaped the restrictions of the laws of the state and forged new lives for themselves across the globally connected world.