Internationally, Denmark (and Scandinavia as a whole) is often Flanderised into the "happy social safety net country." It's no surprise that people outside the country seldom consider how the wealth that made this society possible was created.
There is, however, also a tendency for us (white Danes) to imagine the colonial aspect of our nation's past as less substantial than it was.
There are several reasons for this. Among them are
1) Denmark is (particularly today) a small country and not a big player on the international scene, which, for its inhabitants, makes it more difficult to imagine it as powerful enough to be a colonial nation of much consequence
2) The colonies of Denmark mostly consisted of smaller islands (eg US Virgin Islands) and trading posts (eg Tranquebar in India, Danish Gold Coast in West Africa) rather than big landmasses which would become countries in their own right during decolonisation. The voices of those marginalised under a Danish flag do not have the backing of a state to make themselves heard to us. The US Virgin Islands have been more successful in this regard in recent years, which has coincincided with this history being taught more in school (I was in the first generation of school kids to be taught about it in any depth, I believe)
3) Apart from Greenland* it has been over a century since Denmark held any of these colonies and apart from in Greenland, Denmark has also not really dealt with any decolonisation movements, since most colonies were transferred to other colonial powers when Denmark ceased holding them. Those that are no longer under colonial rule gained their freedom from colonial power in struggles against other nations.
Danes understand that our nation was a slaveholding, colonial power, but the realities of that are relegated to something far away, something a bit... smaller. Not quite a detail but certainly less crucial than it really was. Denmark was a minor player in the colonial space, in the grand scheme of things! Comparisons to England or Spain provide cover. It's a cheap, but often used tactic ā point to bigger countries with larger scale atrocities so that the atrocities of your country seem less galling by comparison.
This image of the nation's past shatters once one realises just how large a percentage of the profit made in Copenhagen in the early modern period was directly tied to colonial extraction. I half remember something about it being 70% for some of that period, but I'd have to find a specific section in a book again to confirm. Regardless of the specifics, the wealth of the modern Danish state was initially created through colonial processes to a much, much larger extent than the public imagines it to be.
