Swedish ships actively participated in the slave trade in the Mediterranean in the year 1700s. Many of the slaves who were shipped in Swedish ships were women who risked ending up as sex slaves in Istanbul and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. – It was a brutal human trafficking was going on and now we know that Sweden was also a link in the chain. 

The similarities with today’s so-called human trafficking is striking, says Joachim Ostlund, a researcher at the Department of History at Lund University. 

While working on a forthcoming book about Swedes in North Africa discovered Joachim Ostlund to his surprise, the documents showing that Swedish ships at least seven occasions were “Negroes” in the hold when they left the port of Tripoli, Libya in the present. 

The information contained in old ships lists from the Swedish consulate in Tripoli, documents remained forgotten for over 250 years

– I was slightly shocked when I realized what this meant. The fact that Sweden played a big role in the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and America.

The Destination of the Swedish ships were usually Smyrna (Izmir in modern Turkey) but also Constantinople (Istanbul). The ships were common trading ships, which in addition to other cargo also transported people. One of the Swedish slave ships were hunting “St. Erick”, under the command of one Peter Power. According to the ship list, the ship left Tripoli, April 4, 1748 with only “Negroes” in the load. 

Another Swedish ship, the brig “Amila”, sailed from Tripoli November 25, 1758 with “ballast and a large number of Negroes.” Tripoli was at this time part of the so-called Barbary (Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli), which formally ruled by the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul but was essentially independent.