How Denmark’s forgotten empire in India led to the story of L&T

Six decades later, the Copenhagen engineering firm F. L. Smidth & Co. was supplying industrial technology to India. Its corporate history records the delivery of its first cement plant in 1904. By the 1930s, Danish engineers Henning Holck-Larsen and Søren Kristian Toubro were working in British India through this industrial network. In 1938, they established a small enterprise in Bombay that became Larsen & Toubro, or L&T, one of the major institutions of Indian engineering.

These episodes, however, should not be collapsed into an uninterrupted history of colonial continuity. L&T did not inherit the authority of the Danish colonial state. It was founded in India, became an Indian company, and developed within the political economy of late colonial and postcolonial industrialisation.

Holck-Larsen went on to become an Indian citizen in 1950, giving up his Danish citizenship.

The connection nevertheless raises a larger question: how did the Danish engagement with India change after Denmark ceased to possess Indian territory? Addressing that question requires recognising Denmark-Norway as a colonial power in its own right. Its Indian empire was limited in territory, population, military resources and fiscal capacity. But its limited scale did not make it inconsequential or benign. Danish power operated through fortified enclaves, commercial brokerage, separate jurisdictions, neutral shipping, maritime coercion and extensive dependence on Indian intermediaries. It also extended into missionary, scientific and textual enterprises that gathered and circulated Indian knowledge through European institutions.

A small empire inside an Indian Ocean economy

Historical precision requires the term Denmark-Norway for the composite monarchy that lasted until 1814. Its principal Indian base was established at Tranquebar, present-day Tharangambadi, on the Coromandel Coast in 1620. Serampore, known under Danish rule as Frederiksnagore, became its major Bengal settlement from 1755. Danish factories and ventures also appeared at Balasore and elsewhere along Indian Ocean routes.

These settlements have often appeared as marginal European outposts, especially in Indian historiography. More recent scholarship instead situates them within dense intra-Asian circuits of commodities, credit, labour and political negotiation.

Holck-Larsen on a 2008 stamp of India (Wikipedia)

Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam located the early Danish East India Company within the Coromandel economy rather than treating it simply as an extension of Copenhagen (Subrahmanyam, 1989). Danish anthropologist Esther Fihl and Indian historian AR Venkatachalapathy approach Tranquebar through movements of people, texts and institutions across South India and beyond (Fihl & Venkatachalapathy, 2014).

Tranquebar was not vacant land onto which Denmark projected a European colony. It was an Indian coastal settlement embedded in fishing, agriculture, textile production, regional politics and maritime commerce. The Danish presence rested on an agreement with the Nayak state of Thanjavur and remained dependent on Indian merchants, brokers, translators, artisans and political intermediaries. Europeans formed only a small proportion of the population over which the colonial administration claimed authority.

This was an unequal colonial order sustained through continuing negotiation with Indian society. Denmark’s limited resources constrained its authority, but also encouraged commercial adaptation, jurisdictional bargaining, selective coercion and reliance on existing networks. Danish companies repeatedly experienced undercapitalisation and institutional breakdown, and their settlements were not consistently profitable. Yet the value of colonial possession exceeded immediate revenues. A fort, a flag, a harbour, a treaty and a separate jurisdiction created possibilities unavailable to merchants without territorial protection.

In other words, possession created options.

Sovereignty as a commercial resource

The late eighteenth century shows particularly clearly how Denmark converted limited power into economic advantage. During European wars, Denmark-Norway often remained neutral. Neutrality was not simply a diplomatic posture. In the commercial world of the period, it could become a legal and economic asset.

Danish historian Ole Feldbæk’s work demonstrates how merchants operating under the Danish flag benefited from conflicts among Britain, France and the Netherlands (Feldbæk, 1969). Ships belonging to belligerent powers faced seizure and disruption, while neutral carriers could sometimes move goods, capital and remittances through dangerous waters. British private merchants and East India Company servants accumulated fortunes in India but faced restrictions and practical difficulties in transferring private wealth to Europe. Danish channels offered one means of remittance.

The value of Danish shipping therefore lay not only in carrying goods, but also in the jurisdictional protection and neutral status under which that movement occurred. Sovereignty itself acquired exchange value. A minor state that could not dominate the Indian Ocean could profit from its positioning between larger powers.

Serampore was central to this system.

Historian Arpita Bose shows Serampore as a commercial and urban space inseparable from Bengal’s wider economy and the expansion of nearby Calcutta (Bose, 2022). Its importance derived not from rivalling the British metropolis but from occupying a distinct commercial and jurisdictional position within its orbit. Limited sovereignty was not a constraint. Under particular conditions, it became an economic resource.

Coercion without large-scale conquest

Commercial flexibility did not make Danish power peaceful. In 1642, the Danish East India Company entered into a conflict with the Mughal Empire. It formally persisted until 1698.

Historian Kathryn Wellen, in her article, The Danish East India Company’s war against the Mughal Empire, 1642–1698 (2015), shows how disputes over commercial losses and compensation developed into a prolonged confrontation in which Danish actors used privateering and maritime coercion against Mughal shipping.

The asymmetry was extraordinary. The Danish company could not plausibly conquer the Mughal Empire and lacked the armies and fiscal resources that later underpinned British expansion. Yet it could attack commerce at sea, seize vessels and use violence to sustain claims against a far more powerful state. Territorial weakness did not eliminate coercive capacity; rather, it redirected it towards maritime routes and vulnerable shipping.

Tranquebar 1790 (Wikipedia)

The movement of enslaved people reveals a darker dimension. Historian Jorge Simón Izquierdo Díaz has documented the acquisition through Tranquebar of people transported to Denmark and incorporated into elite households as racialised servants and objects of prestige (Izquierdo Díaz, 2019).

Danish maritime historian Benjamin Asmussen’s study of a 1696 document from Porto Novo examines a proposal considered at Tranquebar for transporting enslaved people across the Indian Ocean on Danish vessels (Asmussen, 2025). The evidence does not necessarily establish a trade on the scale of the Atlantic system, but it firmly places Danish India within wider Asian circuits of coerced mobility.

Danish historian and global development scholar Preben Kaarsholm has likewise traced the intersections of slavery, bonded labour, missionary criticism and humanitarian discourse around Tranquebar (Kaarsholm, 2020).

These histories place violence and coerced movement within, rather than at the margins of, Denmark’s Indian presence. Mission, commerce and maritime coercion belonged to the same colonial formation.

Caste, jurisdiction and the politics of knowledge

The social history of Tranquebar also unsettles any account centred only on European command. Danish historian Niels Brimnes’s study of right-hand and left-hand caste formations shows Danish administrators drawn into disputes over status, procession, occupation, honour and access to urban space (Brimnes, 1999). Indian communities petitioned colonial authorities, mobilised collective pressure and used competing jurisdictions strategically. Such action did not abolish colonial inequality, but it meant that authority was continually negotiated rather than exercised through complete European control.

The surviving population registers reveal this relationship from another angle. By recording households, occupations and demographic categories, they preserve traces of Indian social life while exposing the administrative impulse to classify populations and render them legible to colonial rule. The archive is therefore both evidentiary and disciplinary.

The Danish-Halle Mission, established at Tranquebar in 1706, offers a parallel history of unequal collaboration. Missionaries learned Tamil, opened schools, translated religious works and developed printing activities connected to Protestant networks in Halle, Copenhagen and London. Yet print did not arrive in an intellectually passive society. Venkatachalapathy shows that it entered a rich Tamil textual world shaped by palm-leaf manuscripts, scribal practices and established scholarship (Venkatachalapathy, 2014). Missionary printing depended on Tamil scholars, translators, compositors and artisans, even though European archives preserved their names less consistently than those of missionaries.

The same imbalance shaped encounters with medicine. In 1798, the Danish surgeon T. L. F. Folly recorded the practices of Tamil medical specialists described in European records as “Malabar doctors”. Danish historian Niklas Thode Jensen demonstrates that these accounts relied on substantial Indian therapeutic knowledge (Jensen, 2005). What occurred is best understood as translation under unequal conditions. Indian expertise entered documentary systems in which European observers decided what to record, how to classify it, and where it would circulate.

Danish colonial power therefore operated through more than trade, taxation and shipping. It also shaped the collection, translation and reorganisation of knowledge. These encounters were collaborative in practice but unequal in authority.

Serampore and the power of a minor jurisdiction

Serampore demonstrates how limited sovereignty could acquire significance through jurisdiction. Situated on the west bank of the Hooghly but governed by a different European authority, it created room for activities that did not fit comfortably within East India Company policy.

Serampore College (Wikipedia)

The British Baptist missionaries William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward developed their major printing and educational operations there partly because Danish rule offered protection unavailable under direct British authority. Yet to describe this as a Danish achievement alone would obscure the wider networks that sustained it. The missionaries were British, the political shelter was Danish, the social and linguistic setting was Bengali, and the intellectual networks extended beyond any single national empire.

English literary scholar Saugata Bhaduri’s concept of “polycoloniality” captures this overlapping field of jurisdictions, European powers and mobile actors (Bhaduri, 2020). Print and education depended on Indian languages, labour, technical skill and readerships, while Indian actors appropriated these institutions in ways that exceeded missionary intentions. The significance of a minor empire therefore lay not only in the territory it controlled, but also in the institutional openings produced by separate jurisdiction.

After the colonies

By the early nineteenth century, Britain’s expanding dominance and its occupations of Danish settlements during the Napoleonic conflicts had undermined the foundations of Denmark’s Indian empire. The value of neutrality declined, and in 1845 Denmark sold its mainland possessions to the British East India Company. Danish claims in the Nicobar Islands continued for a time, but the principal phase of territorial rule had ended.

The sale did not mean that all Danish connections with India disappeared. It did, however, end the jurisdictional basis on which they had rested. Later Danish firms and engineers entered India as commercial participants within British colonial structures, without forts, treaty privileges or administrative authority.

Fort Dansborg (National Museum of Denmark)

F. L. Smidth & Co., founded in Copenhagen in 1882, became an international supplier of cement machinery. Its institutional history records the delivery of its first cement plant in India in 1904. By the 1930s, Holck-Larsen and Toubro were stationed in India through the company, and in 1938 they established a partnership in Bombay that became L&T.

This genealogy, however, requires caution. L&T did not inherit the privileges or structures of Danish colonial rule. Founded in India, it developed into an Indian company closely associated with the country’s industrialisation. Its history is not a continuation of Denmark’s former empire.

The connection is nevertheless revealing. British India provided an extensive legal, infrastructural and commercial environment through which firms and specialists from countries beyond Britain could obtain contracts, supply technology and establish durable relationships. Danish participation no longer rested on sovereignty. It operated through machinery, technical knowledge and industrial contracting. Disruption to European supplies during the Second World War encouraged local manufacturing, gradually transforming an enterprise founded by Danish engineers into an important component of India’s own industrial capacity.

Small in scale, colonial in consequence

Denmark’s Indian empire was limited in territory, population, military strength and fiscal capacity. It was nevertheless a colonial formation in its own right. Fortified enclaves enabled commerce; neutrality acquired economic value; maritime weakness did not prevent privateering or involvement in coerced mobility; and missionary and scientific institutions channelled Tamil texts, medical practices and local expertise into European systems of circulation.

None of this was produced by Europeans alone. Indian merchants, brokers, translators, artisans and political intermediaries sustained Danish commerce and administration. Caste communities negotiated with colonial authorities, while Tamil scholars, printers and medical practitioners supplied the expertise on which missionary and scientific enterprises depended. Such participation reveals how a minor empire governed through dependence, negotiation and unequal collaboration. Denmark developed a repertoire suited to its limitations: brokerage, neutral shipping, jurisdictional niches, selective coercion and reliance on Indian networks.

The sale of 1845 ended this territorial regime. The later arrival of Danish machinery, engineers and commercial ventures belongs to a different history, not an unbroken imperial chain. Yet it shows how relationships with India were repeatedly reorganised as political conditions changed.

This article is based on research conducted at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and funded by the Swedish Research Council grant 2025-01142.

References

Asmussen, B. (2025). The letter from Porto Novo: Three insights into the Danish slave trade in India. Journal of Global Slavery, 10(2–3), 175–195.

Bhaduri, S. (2020). Polycoloniality: European transactions with Bengal from the 13th to the 19th century. Bloomsbury India.

Bose, A. (2022). History of Serampore as a Danish trading post, 1755–1845. South Asia Research, 42(3), 381–397.

Brimnes, N. (1999). Constructing the colonial encounter: Right and left hand castes in early colonial South India. Curzon Press.

Feldbæk, O. (1969). India trade under the Danish flag, 1772–1808: European enterprise and Anglo-Indian remittance and trade. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies.

Fihl, E., & Venkatachalapathy, A. R. (Eds.). (2014). Beyond Tranquebar: Grappling across cultural borders in South India. Orient BlackSwan.

Izquierdo Díaz, J. S. (2019). The trade in domestic servants (Morianer) from Tranquebar for upper class Danish homes in the first half of the seventeenth century. Itinerario, 43(2), 194–217.

Jensen, N. T. (2005). The medical skills of the Malabar doctors in Tranquebar, India, as recorded by surgeon T. L. F. Folly, 1798. Medical History, 49(4), 489–515.

Kaarsholm, P. (2020). From abolition of the slave trade to protection of immigrants: Danish colonialism, German missionaries, and the development of ideas of humanitarian governance from the early eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Atlantic Studies, 17(3), 348–374.

Subrahmanyam, S. (1989). The Coromandel trade of the Danish East India Company, 1618–1649. Scandinavian Economic History Review, 37(1), 41–56.

Wellen, K. (2015). The Danish East India Company’s war against the Mughal Empire, 1642–1698. Journal of Early Modern History, 19(5), 439–461.

*This article is part of ‘The Lesser Colonisers of India’, a series that uncovers how commercial enterprises from countries other than Britain played a significant role in shaping colonial India. The first story was about a Swedish matchbox company that shaped colonial India, followed bye the story of the Swiss company Volkart Bros, the Czech shoe company Bata.