During the early modern centuries, gunpowder and artillery revolutionized warfare, and armies grew rapidly. To sustain their new military machines, the European rulers turned increasingly to their civilian subjects, making all levels of civil society serve the needs of the military. This volume examines civil-military interaction in the multinational Swedish Realm in 1550–1800, with a focus on its eastern part, present-day Finland, which was an important supply region and battlefield bordered by Russia. Sweden was one of the frontrunners of the Military Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. The crown was eager to adapt European models, but its attempts to outsource military supply to civilians in a realm lacking people, capital, and resources were not always successful. This book aims at explaining how the army utilized civilians – burghers, peasants, entrepreneurs – to provision itself, and how the civil population managed to benefit from the cooperation. The chapters of the book illustrate the different ways in which Finnish civilians took part in supplying war efforts, e.g. how the army made deals with businessmen to finance its military campaigns and how town and country people were obliged to lodge and feed soldiers. The European armies’ dependence on civilian maintenance has received growing scholarly attention in recent years, and Civilians and Military Supply in Early Modern Finland brings a Nordic perspective to the debate.

During the early modern centuries, gunpowder and artillery revolutionized warfare, and armies grew rapidly. To sustain their new military machines, the European rulers turned increasingly to their civilian subjects, making all levels of civil society serve the needs of the military. This volume examines civil-military interaction in the multinational Swedish Realm in 1550-1800, with a focus on its eastern part, present-day Finland, which was an important supply region and battlefield bordered by Russia. Sweden was one of the frontrunners of the Military Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. The crown was eager to adapt European models, but its attempts to outsource military supply to civilians in a realm lacking people, capital, and resources were not always successful. This book aims at explaining how the army utilized civilians - burghers, peasants, entrepreneurs - to provision itself, and how the civil population managed to benefit from the cooperation. The chapters of the book illustrate the different ways in which Finnish civilians took part in supplying war efforts, e.g. how the army made deals with businessmen to finance its military campaigns and how town and country people were obliged to lodge and feed soldiers.

Based on empirical studies, this book investigates the particular urban history of the North from the 17th century until today in a comparative, Northern perspective. Urban Life in Nordic Countries is the result of a conference on "Urbanity in the Periphery" held in Stockholm on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Urban History at Stockholm University, aimed at establishing the field of the urban history of the North and creating a network of urban historians of the North. With a broad range of contributions from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Estonia, the volume seeks to further discourse on the region within national and transnational lenses, and to highlight possibilities for new cooperation among researchers. Urban history is a transdisciplinary subject, engaging not only historians but also ethnologists, sociologists, urban planners, and cultural geographers, and this book targets all scholars whose work requires a historical understanding of the Northern town. European urban historians outside the region will also find this text valuable as one of the few studies to consider the urban history of the continent from a North-centered viewpoint.

This book examines how migration and mobility were controlled, supported, and restricted in early modern Europe and European colonies. The aim of the book is to investigate how different actors, such as rulers, regional lords, local authorities, and corporations tried to regulate different forms of mobility and how those on the move reacted to these attempts. The book examines the agency of both the authorities and the migrants, shifting focus between the macro and the micro level. The chapters will also illuminate the ways gender, religion, language, ethnicity, occupation, and socioeconomic status were entangled in the regulations concerning mobility. Control of migration is inextricably linked with power relations. In this book, mobility is seen as a wide social process, which covers daily or seasonal movement as well as less or more stable migration.

In the early modern era, two Nordic countries that are neighbours today, Sweden and Finland, formed one realm. Yet, modern history writing has largely ignored this unity, instead developing analysis and discussion in close connection to nationalistic ideas, national politics, and processes of state-building. Historians of both countries have therefore mostly approached their common past separately and academic history in both countries has taken its own course of development, leading to different emphases. This volume explores the common early modern history between Sweden and Finland from the Middle Ages to beginning of the 19th century, and how this history has been created in professional historiography (1860–2020), which methods have been used, and which themes studied. Based on extensive source material, including a database of history publications in different fields in both countries, this book offers a fresh scholarly approach to the study of historiography through a unique comparative perspective. This book is an excellent resource for students and professional researchers alike through providing an alternate view on the history of Sweden and Finland and providing key insight into the historiography of these two countries, and the similarities and differences they showcase.

Military Revolution and the Thirty Years War 1618–1648 investigates change and decline in military institutions during a period of protracted and destructive European warfare. Conceptual background is provided by the Military Revolution thesis, which argues that changes in military technology and tactics drove revolutionary transformation in the way states organised and waged war in the early modern era. This transformation of military institutions became evident during the long and destructive Thirty Years War in 1618–1648. The outcome of the Military Revolution was the centralised fiscal-military state that possessed a strong claim to the monopoly of violence within its territorial boundaries. The book examines how the Thirty Years War accelerated and even initiated transformation in four military institutions that defined land warfare: feudal cavalry services, militias, regular armies, and war commissariats. The regional scope of the investigation covers the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, and the Dutch Republic. The book combines military-historical inquiry with ancillary sciences of sociology and economics. It argues that the Military Revolution of the Thirty Years War stimulated institutions capable of increased complexification and specialisation while curtailing those that were locked in stasis and immutability. The institutional legacy of the Thirty Years War was the emergence of complex military organisations that are characteristic to the modern society and its self-renewing social subsystems. Previous scholarship on the Military Revolution has concentrated on military technicalities and the wider process of early modern state formation. This book proposes an alternative way of viewing early modern military transformations from the perspectives of institutions and systems. System-analytical survey of change and decline in the military institutions of the Thirty Years War introduces qualifications to the Military Revolution theory and offers a novel way of conceptualising early modern military history.

In the 16th century, warships engaged at close range, sometimes with yards touching, and small arms fire and hand-to-hand combat were at least as important as the "great guns." As time went on, the big guns became more decisive and increased in destructive power, range and accuracy. This book explores how naval armament, armor, ballistics and gunnery evolved from the 16th to 20th centuries from a scientific and technological perspective. It examines the functional aspects--the guns and their distribution on warships, the propellants, the projectiles and so forth--and examines the development of each.