"Stormakten växer fram" (The Great Power Arises) is a short book by Swedish history professor and popularizer-in-chief Dick Harrison, published in 2020. The contents overlap with two other Harrison specials, "Drottning Kristina" and "Ett stort lidande har kommit över oss". The book deals with Sweden´s remarkable rise from peripheral kingdom in the far north of Europe to a regional great power with interests in both northern and central Europe. This period (circa 1600 to 1718) is known as the "Great Power Period" in Swedish history writing, and is mostly associated with two warrior-kings, Gustavus Adophus (Gustav II Adolf) who intervened in the Thirty Year War, and Charles XII (Karl XII) who fought in the Great Northern War. Harrison´s book deals mostly with the former, since it concentrates on the rise and zenith of Swedish power during the 17th century. There are also chapters on Charles IX (Karl IX) and Charles X Gustav (Karl X Gustav). Unsurprisingly, a large portion of "Stormakten växer fram" deals with the Swedish intervention in Germany, Bohemia and Moravia during the Thirty Year War.
Harrison begins the story with a thorough character assasination of Charles IX (who ruled Sweden from 1599 to 1611), clearly not one of the author´s favorites! Duke Charles became regent and later king by overthrowing his nephew, Sigismund (Zygmunt Waza) who was king of both Sweden and Poland. Since Sigismund was a Catholic (Sweden was Lutheran) and associated with the high nobility, Charles could appeal to the clergy, burghers and peasants to overthrow him. This was simply a clever manouevre. Harrison regards Charles IX as a brutal dictator, perhaps even a paranoiac and sociopath, before whom nobody was safe. His foreign policy was scarcely any better. When the king died, he had "succeeded" in making enemies of essentially all Sweden´s neighbors: Poland, Russia and Denmark-Norway. The defeats against the Polish and the Danes were particularly humiliating. The Swedish army was no match for the Polish Hussars, and after the defeat against Denmark, Sweden was forced to pay a huge ransom to get back certain occupied territories. Ironically, however, it was precisely these defeats that made Sweden - or rather the new Swedish rulers - motivated to reform the political, military and fiscal system from top to bottom. Under the new king, the legendary Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden became the most militarized state in Europe. "Sweden wasn´t a nation with an army, but an army with a nation". Essentially everything was subordinated to the demands of war. The swift mercantilist economic development of Sweden during this period (made possible by skilled immigrants from Wallonia and the Netherlands) was really a way to collect new revenues for the military. A highly centralized state apparatus collected exorbitant taxes, drafted soldiers and carried out intrusive censuses of the population. The Church of Sweden, which had priests in every village, functioned as a de facto part of the state machinery. Meanwhile, the Swedish army was modernized and adopted battle tactics that were relatively new in Europe at the time. The Sweden of the Great Power Period became a kind of early modern state par excellence.
Harrison marvels over the fact that no peasant rebellions took place in Sweden during the period in question. In the rest of Europe, civil wars and popular rebellions were common during the 17th century. They had been common in Sweden, too, during the 16th century. Despite the severe hardships imposed on the peasantry, Sweden became a nation of obedient soldiers and tax-payers. Why? While I don´t think there is any simple explanation, Harrison does point to a few factors. One was that the Swedish peasantry had their own representatives in the Diet or Parliament. They also had an amount of local self-government through the "socknar" (a kind of parish councils doubling as secular local councils). While the peasantry didn´t have any *real* influence over the course of national politics, the system thus had "safety valves" which permitted the peasants to at least voice their grievances. In most European polities, peasants had exactly zero possibility to do this. Another factor is that Gustavus Adolphus (perhaps reluctantly) agreed to share power with the nobility. This created political stability. It was also a welcome contrast to the arbitrary rule of Charles IX. Finally, there were personality issues which made the Swedish administration run smoothly. The king´s chief minister Axel Oxenstierna was extremely competent at everything from grand strategic designs to micro-management, and although he and Gustavus were polar opposites on a purely personal level, they nevertheless agreed to work together as a team. Oxenstierna was considered one of the greatest European statesmen by his contemporaries.
This unprecedented mobilization of resources turned Sweden - one of the smallest kingdoms in Europe in terms of population - into a feared military adversary in just a few decades. Another factor should also be mentioned. During the Thirty Year War, Catholic France paid enormous subsidies to Lutheran Sweden to keep the Swedish military operations going. The reasons were pure Realpolitik: France was encircled by the equally Catholic Habsburgs, who ruled both Germany, Italy, Spain and the area today known as Belgium. An anti-Habsburg alliance with the "heretical" Swedes was pure common sense for the likes of Cardinal Richelieu. Of course, Sweden wouldn´t be of interest to one of Europe´s true great powers without the previously mentioned mobilizations.
While all this is impressive, in a sense, the end results are not. Sweden lost one third of its male population to war during the period 1618-1718. The Thirty Year War, in which Sweden played such a crucial role, devastated Germany as foreign and domestic armies systematically plundered and killed the civilian population en masse. Poland didn´t fear any better when Karl X Gustav decided to devastate that nation. Of course, Sweden´s enemies were just as bad - these were bad times. One thing that struck me when reading Harrison´s account of the Thirty Year War in particular was the opportunism of many of the involved parties. Whatever the Thirty Year War may have been, it certainly wasn´t a "war of religion"! Many Protestant princes didn´t want Swedish "aid", both Protestant and Catholic polities switched sides on a semi-regular basis depending on who had the upper hand in the war (but somehow forgot to switch their religion in the process) and Gustavus Adolphus (hailed as "the Lion of the North" by some German Protestants) had to allow Catholics freedom of worship in order to get those French subsidies...
The last chapter of "Stormakten växer fram" deals with Sweden´s colonial adventures in North America and West Africa. Sweden is sometimes portrayed as a downright incompetent colonial nation (or even as somehow benign), but judging by Harrison´s description, the problem was rather that Sweden´s attempts at colonial expansion were nipped in the bud by stronger competitors. There was nothing inherently bad with the Swedish plans, per se. In West Africa, the Swedes built a trading fortress called Carolusburg at the Gold Coast and found a suitable market for slave export at Sao Tomé. It was even possible to export slaves to the Carribean, but before the expansion could begin in earnest, the Swedish Africa Company was betrayed by its former superintendent, Heinrich Carlof, who entered Danish service and started attacking the outposts of his former employers. I´m not sure if the fate of New Sweden in North America illustrates the author´s thesis, though. He admits that Sweden seldom sent ships with food, guns and reinforcements to its North American colony, and I assume the low population of Sweden made it difficult to find prospective settlers for an overseas venture. I suppose you *could* call this incompetence, or at least an original form of imperial over-reach!
And speaking of imperial over-reach, Sweden eventually lost its great power status, but that´s another book (also by Dick Harrison).
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