Real and Fictional Lithuanian Overseas Colonies

The word colony has several meanings. It can be an area which doesn’t have political and economic independence, often inhabited by indigenous peoples, but controlled by another state. The lands where immigrants – people who have moved from one country to another – settle are also called colonies. Lithuania has never been a colonial state like Spain, France or Great Britain. However, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) had several overseas colonies. In the interwar period, an adventurous plan was born in Lithuania to colonise a small territory in South or North America, or perhaps Australia, so that Lithuanians living there would not only be safe, but also enjoy a warm climate that their homeland didn’t possess.

When it comes to historical Lithuanian overseas territories, we first of all mean the colonies of the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, which was once subordinate to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. These colonies were founded by Jacob Kettler, the Duke of Courland and Semigallia, in the seventeenth century. To compete with the Dutch merchants who dominated world trade, Kettler set up a Guinean trading company in 1650 and sent two warships to the African coast in search of a suitable location for a trading port. In 1651, the duke bought the uninhabited St. Andrew’s and Banjul Islands. The fort built on St. Andrew’s Island – a fortress of 4 bastions – was made the center of the colony and trade was organised from there. Although the slave trade was the most flourishing business in seventeenth-century West Africa, there is no evidence that the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was involved in it. Success in the Gambia was achieved because the Curonian colonists maintained friendly relations with the local tribes.

The island of Tobago in the Caribbean was another GDL colony. Kettler received this island as a gift: the rights to the island of Tobago were handed over to the Duke by King Charles I of England in 1639 to repay his debt. Sugar cane and tobacco grew well on the island, so Curonian merchant ships transported sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton and also ginger, indigo, rum, cocoa, turtle shells, exotic birds and other luxury items from the colonies to European ports. The success of the Curonians in the colonies was interrupted by the war in Europe. In 1658, Kettler and his family were imprisoned in Riga, Tobago went to the Netherlands and the Gambian colony went to the English.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, colonisation was replaced by migration – Lithuanians voluntarily went to foreign countries in the hope of earning some money. This is how Lithuanian colonies were formed. There were a lot of them in the United States: on the eve of World War I, almost half a million Lithuanians lived in the triangle of Chicago, Boston and Baltimore.

During the interwar period, Kazys Pakštas, a professor at Vytautas Magnus University, suggested replacing unorganised emigration with planned colonisation. According to Pakštas, Lithuanians had been going abroad in large groups from  the nineteenth century onwards because Lithuanian cities were too small and rural residents were unable to settle and find work there. In addition, Pakštas hoped to save Lithuania from its threatening neighbors – Germany, Russia and Poland. Pakštas combined the ideas of colonisation and escape from enemies, and proposed to establish a backup Lithuania in an overseas country. He even came up with a name for it – Dausuva. Dialectically, the word dausos means heaven or paradise: so the professor hoped to find paradise on Earth. Dausuva was planned to be developed in Southern Brazil, Canada, South America (Argentina, Brazil), Africa, Australia or Oceania. However, Pakštas’ plans were not supported by the government and the banks, so they remained unimplemented. I wonder what Lithuanians and Lithuania would be like today if we had moved to Australia, for example?