Hanna Hodacs

Short presentation

I obtained my doctorate in 2003 at Uppsala University. Since then, I have worked at Warwick University, the University of Birmingham and Dalarna University (among others). In 2021, I returned to Uppsala, where I am now a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Ideas and Science. My research areas are concerned with slavery, inheritance, globalization, natural history, East India trade and the consumption of exotic goods (and their substitutes) in the early-modern period.

Biography

Since 2021, I have been employed as a senior lecturer at the Department of History of Ideas at Uppsala University. Before that (from 2016 onwards), I was a senior lecturer in history at Dalarna University. At the same time, and before that, I have been involved in several different research projects at universities in Sweden and the United Kingdom, including the University of Warwick.

I have received research funding for three major projects for which I served as the principal investigator.

• “Slavery as legacy – tracing lineage, heirs and fortunes from British Guyana to Sweden in the long nineteenth century”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2025–2028.
• “Nordic naturalists as fashionistas – interpreting taste and substituting global goods with local in the long 18th century”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2020-2024.
• “Social Mobility and the Mobility of Science – Swedish naturalists in London 1760-1810”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2011-2015.

I have also worked as a researcher on three major projects:

• “Intoxicating Spaces. The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe, 1600-1850”, Stockholm University, Dept. of History, 2019-21, (part-time 20%). Funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), Stockholm University.
• “Trading Eurasia – Europe’s Asian Centuries 1600-1830 (devised and led by Professor Maxine Berg, funded by the European Research Council), University of Warwick, Centre for Global History and Culture, Department of History, (2010-2014).
• “Teaching and Learning in the Name of Science – a Study of Carolus Linnaeus and His Students”, based at the Department of History, University of Uppsala, led by Åsa Karlsson, and funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), 2003-2005.

Research

On-going research

Below is a description of my latest research project, its starting points and main questions:

Slavery as legacy – tracing lineages, heirs, and fortunes between British Guyana and Sweden in the long-nineteenth century

Purpose, aim, and questions:

This project explores new ways to write a history of Atlantic slavery in the long-nineteenth century by turning to the many legacies linked to the Swedish slaveowner Jonas Filéen (1745-1822). At the time of his death Filéen owned three plantations and over 900 enslaved people in Demerara, (Guyana today) at an estimated value of £300,000. Largely forgotten today, the inheritance held the early-nineteenth century Swedish public spellbound. Newspapers reported on the case. Jonas Love Almqvist, one of Sweden’s most prolific authors, incorporated it into his novel The Emerald Bride (Smaragdbruden, 1845), in which he also linked the origins of Filéen’s fortune to the lost legacy of the Lambert family. Their ancestor, Jonas Lambert, had perished in the 1730s somewhere in the Dutch Atlantic Empire. Inspired by the novel, Lambert’s relatives took to court to retrieve what they believed was an enormous inheritance. Meanwhile, government ministers were tasked with recouping Filéen’s fortunes on behalf of the main heir, something which involved negotiating various colonial succession laws and authorities. In return, roughly a quarter of the inheritance was endowed to the Swedish public and put to use in credit schemes, and also to fund hospitals, pensions, and university stipends. These aims reflect the nature of parliamentary discussions at the time, concerned with the lack of credit and the need for public investment. They also corresponded to the liberal vision of the hero/heir in The Emerald Bride, who invests his colonial fortunes in Swedish railways and female education. Forgotten too, and more hidden in documents archived in connection to the Filéen court cases, are references to Filéen’s child(ren), including the son who, at the age of five, was sent to Bolton/Manchester in England to receive an education, and his enslaved mother Brandina. Her significance can be further sensed in Filéen’s will; in it, he frees her and transfers the ownership of two young female slaves, Lovisa and Hanna, to her. They were likely Brandina’s daughters, and perhaps Filéen’s.

The project examines the various meanings of the term legacy, encompassing norms and practices associated with inheritance, acts of endowment, and explanations of change and the framing of narratives. The aim is to investigate how these elements can be employed in a study of Atlantic slavery in the long-nineteenth century, within the context of a global history that connects Sweden to Demerara. The project draws upon the Filéen case to address the following questions:

 1. On which basis were rights to inherit formulated, claimed, denied, or approved as the process of administering and transferring Filéen’s legacy from Demerara to Sweden, via London, evolved?

2. Where did the donations end up once enslaved people and plantations were converted into cash and endowed to the Swedish state, and how can we understand the impact they had on the receiving institutions and their clients?

3. How did Filéen’s inheritance shape notions of the Atlantic colonial world, and the opportunities arising from using capital raised there for public investments in nineteenth-century Sweden?  

Previous research:

Globalisation processes with Scandinavian connections have been at the forefront of much of my research.

Within the project: ‘Nordic naturalists as fashionistas – interpreting taste and substituting global goods with local in the long 18th century’, I focused on coffee and tea substitutes in 18th-century Sweden. The most representative result from that research project is the article: Substituting Coffee and Tea in the Eighteenth Century: A Rural and Material History with Global Implications”, Journal of Global History, 2023.

In my contributions to the project “Intoxicating Spaces. The Impact of New Intoxicants on Urban Spaces in Europe 1600-1850”, I studied the coffee bans in Stockholm during the 1790s and early 1800s (together with Anna Knutsson). Together, we wrote the article “When coffee was banned: strategies of labour and leisure among Stockholm’s poor women, 1794–1796 and 1799–1802”. Scandinavian Economic History Review, (2023).

Much of my previous research has focused on the East India trade. My monograph Silk and Tea in the North – Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth Century Europe (Palgrave, 2016) deals with Scandinavian East India trade in the 18th century. The colours of fabrics and the flavours of tea are at the forefront and help to explain both trade in China and consumption in Europe.

The book is the result of the project "Europe's Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia 1600-1830" (University of Warwick, Centre for Global History and Culture), led by Professor Maxine Berg. You can also read more about the European tea trade in Canton in the anthology Goods from the East, 1600-1800. Trading Eurasia, ed. Maxine Berg, Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs & Chris Nierstrasz (Palgrave 2015). Various groups, including families, became wealthy through illegal and legal means. In the special issue ‘Crossing Companies’ in the Journal of World History 2020, I discuss how several generations of the Scottish Irvine family made money in various ways from the Swedish East India Company.

I have also studied Carl von Linné and his students in various contexts. Most recently, Linda Andersson Burnett and I have written several texts together about Lars Montin and his journey to Sápmi in 1749. In an article written together with Staffan Müller-Wille, we compare Linnaeus and Montin's travelogues and how their descriptions of the Sami capture different ways of understanding history (Writing history into the economy of nature: Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) and Lars Montin (1723–1783) on the Reindeer Warble Fly (Hypoderma tarandi L.)

I have also researched the trade in natural history collections in the 18th century, which I have written about in the chapter "The Price of Linnaean Natural History: Materiality, Commerce and Change” (in Linnaeus, Natural History and the Circulation of Knowledge, ed. Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphane Van Damme (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2018). The work on the chapter was based on research I conducted within the project “Social Mobility and the Mobility of Science – Swedish naturalists in London 1760-1810.

I have also studied natural history travel and career paths in Sweden during the 18th century, including in the book Naturalhistoria på resande fot. Om forska, undervisa och göra karriär i 1700-talets Sverige (Nordic Academic Press, 2007), which I wrote together with Kenneth Nyberg. It was the result of the VR project “Teaching and Learning in the Name of Science – a Study of Carolus Linnaeus and His Students”.

As a doctoral student, however, I was working on something completely different. My thesis dealt with the relations between Sweden and Great Britain (Converging world views: the European expansion and early-nineteenth-century Anglo-Swedish contacts, Studia Historica Upsaliensia). It can be downloaded from this link.

Supervision expertise

I am happy to supervise students who are interested in the Atlantic world of the 19th century, natural history, travel and collecting, early modern trade, preferably with a focus on material history.

Media

Research presentation part of the "What's your poison" seminarieserie

Research presentation

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/clandestine-coffee-and-a/