You are right to find the author's claims puzzling and unusual. The article is in my view pretty awful in terms of quality - it seems to be misrepresenting its sources to make a political point, and deploying facts selectively without putting them into their proper historical or political contexts. Whilst it is right to say Sweden is far from the paradise it is sometimes make out to be in popular American political discourse - no country is perfect - the author is making very bold claims that she has failed to adequately defend.

There are roughly 200,000 Africans and people of African descent living in Sweden, who make up 2% of the country’s 9.6 million population. But the UN found that Sweden did not properly address or acknowledge its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

First of all, the author is implying a link here between two entirely unrelated claims. As her own source notes, Sweden's modern-day African-descendant population owes its existence to a wave of voluntary immigration from the continent between 1970 and 1990; much of this is explained, according to the United Nations, by Sweden's historic willingness to welcome refugees and asylum seekers from the various conflicts that have plagued parts of Africa since then. The UN does not make any claim whatsoever, as the article author seems to be trying to suggest, that an historic relationship with slavery explains the presence of so many African-descended people in modern-day Sweden. In fact, they explicitly reject that idea on page 4 of the report.

The report does mention that Sweden had an involvement in slavery in the form of its ownership of Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean. Saint Barthélemy was an (originally French) Swedish colony from the 1780s to the 1880s and it was absolutely involved in the slave trade. Yet one of the remarkable things about the colony is how non-essential slavery was to its development and progress; a comprehensive study of the island published in 1995 notes that slavery was "hardly an indispensable element" in the island's success and that it evolved "as an isolate, an atypical society" in the Caribbean (see Lavoie, Fick and Mayer, "A Particular Study of Slavery in the Caribbean Island of Saint Barthelemy: 1648 - 1846", Caribbean Studies 28, no. 2 [1995]: 369 - 403)

With regards to the trade itself, the volume of Human cargo that Sweden accounts for is incredibly small. Estimates of the total number of slaves transported by Scandinavian and Baltic vessels stand at a little over 110,000 persons; or just 0.9% of all estimated slave trading traffic between 1501 and 1866. And I must stress, that is a figure for all traffic involving Scandinavia and the Baltic, not just Sweden. Even if the historical record is leading us to grossly under-estimate Sweden's role in the trade, it is still certainly not going to be anything comparable even to, say, France or the Netherlands. Saint Barthélemy may have played a role as a facilitator of the slave trade on the part of other nations but so did their own colonies. The slave trade would have gotten on just fine without Saint Barthélemy.

Certainly, Sweden did gain some benefit from the slave trade financially but it would be very disingenuous to suggest that as a nation it shares equitable responsibility with countries like Britain or the United States. The UN report emphasises that its concern is because Sweden did not play such a significant role compared to the US or Britain, it has never really tried to get to grips with the racist ideology that allowed it to justify slavery; it does not feel the need to educate its citizens about its involvement in slavery because it is considered a small part of history. They suggest - as one of many proposals - that more widespread understanding of Sweden's colonial past would go a long way to tackling racism against African-Swedes, by making people aware of the historic racism that has permeated European culture, including that of Sweden.

In my mind, this is very different to what the author of the article on Quartz is doing. She seems to be suggesting that Sweden played a massive role in transatlantic slavery and tries to draw an implied connection between Sweden's not-insignificant African population today and that involvement in slavery. I appreciate that could just be ill-considered structuring of an article, but other facts are misrepresented as well. She talks about the electoral success of the Sweden Democrats but fails to note that similar parties (some more extreme, some less) have fared just as well or better in terms of vote-share (in polls or actual elections) in Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Austria. Someone who has even a basic grasp of comparative European electoral politics would be aware that the trend in Sweden is part of a broader pattern of political change in Europe, one that - in my view at least - cannot be understood solely in a national context.

The article itself reads to me almost like a kind of hatchet job; a poorly constructed attempt at a 'wake-up call' critique of a country the author knows is held in high regard in a lot of popular left-wing American political discourse. Whilst she - or rather, the United Nations - are very much right to highlight the fact that slavery was a transnational enterprise that included a whole host of actors, including Sweden, she has gone about it in a very poor way IMO and squandered the chance to make what could have been a very important, significant point about racism in Sweden and Europe as a whole.

So yes, Sweden certainly did play a role in the slave trade, but it was not a major player as either a facilitator or an instigator. The United Nations is probably right to say Swedish society has failed to get to grips with its colonial and racial history, and that there is still a legacy of racism to be addressed through education; after-all, the abolition of slavery in 1847 does not mean that the racist world view that made it possible also disappeared over night. Yet I think it would be very disingenuous to suggest that all of the contemporary problems Sweden struggles with can trace their origins back to slavery in any meaningful way; many other factors must also be considered, and the UN report seems to say as much.