New research grant

Together with my colleagues Dag Avango and David Nilsson here at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, I received a new large research grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the most important Swedish funding agency in the social science and humanities field next to the Swedish Research Council (VR). The grant is for a project with the title “Colonial Natural Resources and Swedish Foreign Policy.” It will form the basis for the second phase in our long-term strategic effort of exploring Sweden’s colonialist history from a natural resource perspective (see earlier posts on this theme!). As in our ongoing VR project, we intend to explore Swedish natural resource-related activities from a business and political point of view in three major colonial regions of the world: West Africa, Central Asia/Siberia, and the Arctic. Whereas our VR-funded project deals with the period 1870-1930, our RJ-funded project will target the “short twentieth century,” or the rough period 1914-1989. In other words, we will take our earlier research into the late Interwar era, the Second World War, and in particular the Cold War period. Read more about the project here.