Colonial heritage in Switzerland

Colonial heritage in Switzerland

Introduction

Switzerland had no colonies of its own - yet there were a number of Swiss involved in slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism activities between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Swiss trading companies, banks, city-states, family enterprises, mercenary contractors, soldiers, and private individuals participated in and profited from the commercial, military, administrative, financial, scientific, ideological, and publishing activities necessary for the creation and the maintenance of the Transatlantic slavery economy. In this project, focusing on the Caribbean Community member states, we are interested in discovering the trace of the colonial past of Switzerland.

Our primary source is the CARICOM Compilation Archive written by Hans Fässler, MA Zurich University, a historian from St.Gallen (Switzerland).

Project Plan and Milestones

Date	Task
By Week 4 (07.10)	Research on potential project ideas. Initial project ideas presentation.
By Week 6 (21.10)	Study similar projects for possible methodology. Decide on primary sources for this project. Study NLP techniques and text understanding methods that can be applied to the project.
By Week 10 (25.11)	Work on text cleaning and extract relevant information. Prepare mid-term presentation
By Week 11
By Week 12
By Week 13
By Week 14

Links

Github repository: Colonial-heritage-in-Switzerland

Primary source: caricom archives

Secondary sources: Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse DHS, swissNAME3d