Contents:
Introduction - Mathias Persson and Annie Mattsson
Carrot and Stick: The Nordic Foreign Policy of Sir Robert Walpole - Phillip Sargeant
Competition and Cooperation: Swedish Consuls in North Africa andSweden’s Position in the World, 1791–1802 - Fredrik Kämpe
Communities, Limits and the Ability to Cross Borders: Two Swedes’Experiences in Constantinople during the Eighteenth Century - Karin Berner
Johan Leven Ekelund – Equerry, Traveller and Writer - Anna Backman
The Roast Charade: Travelling Recipes and their Alteration in the LongEighteenth Century - Helga Müllneritsch
Bringing Into the Light, or Increasing Darkness With Darkness: Jacob Wilde’s Rewriting of Samuel Pufendorf’s Account of Swedish Ancient History - Tim Berndtsson
L’Amour Raisonnable: Précieuse Perspectives on Love –Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht and the French Seventeenth-Century Salon - Vera Sundin
This article examines the effects of globalization on changing notions of the 'savage'. We compare discussions taking place in different contexts in the late 18th century concerning two Swedish scholars and travellers to Africa: Anders Sparrman (1748-1820), a naturalist and Linnaean disciple, and Carl Bernhard Wadstrom (1746-99), an engineer and economist. Both moved in Swedish Swedenborgian circles, and both became involved in the British abolitionist movement. Nevertheless, their images of African 'Others' diverged in crucial respects, reflecting differences in their ideological outlooks, institutional affiliations, and understandings of how the world was changing. More specifically, we argue that the perception of global change brought about by a new economic framework of production and consumption provides a key for reading and comparing Wadstrom's and Sparrman's texts. Comparing their divergent uses of 'savagery', the article also highlights the versatility of the savage as a tool for presenting distant parts of the world to a domestic audience.
This dissertation analyzes the representations of Swedish learning and politics in the well-known review journal Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen during the time period 1753–1792. The overarching purpose is to investigate how a European country could be imagined and put to use in a nearby state, where it had the status of a proximate “other”. The dissertation conceptualizes Anzeigen as a collective agent, as a node in the vibrant Swedish–Hanoverian networks, and as a conduit for the interaction between cosmopolitan and patriotic sensibilities in the eighteenth century. The analysis shows that Sweden and Swedish men of erudition were usually represented in a positive manner due to the potential or actual usefulness of inspirational and imitation-worthy Swedish experiences, the transnational network exchanges, and Anzeigen’s identification with Swedish estate society, especially its upper echelons. In addition, the journal perceived Sweden as closely related to Germany in terms of history, culture, and language, which meant that the northern kingdom was both “the same” and “the other”. Anzeigen thus identified with Sweden on several levels, although its nature and climate, the Lapps, and the remaining Baltic provinces–Swedish Pomerania and Wismar–constituted a basis for representations of Sweden as “the other”.
From a theoretical point of view, the dissertation challenges traditional, nation-oriented history writing as well as research efforts characterized by the explicit or implicit axiom that representations of otherness are necessarily negative and oppressive. The investigation into Anzeigen’s reporting on Sweden also suggests the existence of a transaction system alongside the Hanoverian–Swedish networks, a “patriotic–cosmopolitan economy”, through which national and particularistic experiences could become universal phenomena and be transferred to different, equally national and particularistic, settings.
Det villrådiga samhället belyser Vetenskapsakademiens politiska och ekonomiska synsätt under perioden 1739–1792 mot bakgrund av organisationens täta förbindelser med samhällsledningen – inte minst det under frihetstiden framträdande hattpartiet och den autokratiske Gustav III. Boken ger vid handen att akademien överlag hade en slagsida åt det traditionella och att ledamöternas föreställningar om samhället var påtagligt färgade av kopplingarna till makten.
A numinous and programmed cosmos: Religion and science in Peter Nilson’s Projekt Nyaga. By Mathias Persson. The purpose of the thesis has been to demonstrate one instance of interaction between popular science and science fiction. This demonstration has focused on the Swedish writer Peter Nilson, whose science fiction novels Nyaga and Rymdväktaren in many respects allude to his numerous essays on humanity and the universe. The thesis identifies four themes of a numinous character in the novels – one technological (omniscient super quantum computers), one mathematical or virtual (computer simulations of God), one evolutionary (god-like aliens), and one theistic (the design argument). When taken together, these not only indicate a harmonious relationship between science and religion, but between Nilson’s popular science and science fiction books as well. The contours of the world-view conveyed in Nyaga and Rymdväktaren are also traceable in the essays, which points to a coherent and enduring conception of reality on behalf of the author. Even if Nilson’s adherence to the modern, cosmology-based design argument cannot be definitively proven, much of what he has written suggests his acceptance of a natural theology wherein the beauty, intricacy, and order of the cosmos combine to display the existence of a Grand Programmer. Hence, Nilson provides a computerisation of the universe insofar as he characterises it as a program or a programmed artefact, made intelligible and accessible primarily by sophisticated computers in the service of a reformed, technologically superior Catholic Church.
This article aims to shed light on early modern images of intra-European 'others' and the interface between the transnational public sphere and politics of the time through an investigation of how the periodical Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung framed Prussia's adversaries Austria, France and Sweden during the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The global struggle was accompanied by intense wars of words and in print, but not all representations of the enemy 'others' in the Berlin periodical were negative in tone-some reports on the antagonistic powers were neutral or even positive. The pro-Prussian drive of the Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung was therefore not, it appears, a comprehensive propaganda campaign; rather, it was the sum of a multitude of biased accounts that corresponded to the preferences of King Frederick II and his government. While the analysis corroborates the claim that the Seven Years War was primarily a political conflict, it simultaneously demonstrates that religious arguments were by no means obsolete. On the contrary, religion and politics were intimately intertwined in a master narrative defined by a sequence of dichotomies between 'self' and 'other'. Even so, the article overall reveals the looser, more porous quality of identities in a period when religious essentialism had been decisively weakened and the rise of nationalism had yet to occur.
The publicist Carl Christoffer Gjörwell (1731–1811) was an important figure in the Swedish eighteenth-century public sphere. Besides collecting and disseminating news, he served as a propagandist for first the ruling Hat Party, then King Gustav III (1746–1792). This article highlights Gjörwell’s double function as publicist and propagandist by investigating how he represented Gustav III at the beginning and at the end of the ever-more autocratic monarch’s reign; more specifically, the renderings of Gustav’s coup d’état (1772) and the war against Russia (1788–1790). On a more general level, the analysis explores an oft-neglected facet of the early modern public sphere, namely the presence of the powers that be in the expansive media landscape. In so doing, the study contributes to the ongoing revision of Jürgen Habermas’ thesis about an autonomous and oppositional public sphere, which has rightfully been criticised for not recognizing the substantial role played by the state.
This article interrogates how the entangled concepts of civilisation and savagery were envisioned and brought into play in the globetrotting Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman’s (1748–1820) southern African travel account, how far and along which lines the dichotomy between them was tempered and challenged, and to what extent exposure to a foreign continent encouraged critical and destabilising introspection. The analysis deals with his representations of the inhabitants of Africa in the form of colonists, slaves, and Khoisan, as well as with his renderings of the Europeans. The investigation sheds further light on the erudite construction and employment of ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery’ at the threshold between early modern and modern. It also provides a fresh take on Sparrman himself, while addressing the scholarly debate on his human-related conceptions and proposing a new approach to them.
Eugenics has often been rendered in terms of a secular faith or civic religion, albeit historians have generally abstained from actually probing the depths of eugenical metaphysics. This thesis analyzes eugenics as a semi-religious creed in the writings of four renowned eugenicists active during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century: Francis Galton and Caleb Williams Saleeby in Great Britain, Wilhelm Schallmayer and Alfred Ploetz in Germany.
The study of sacred eugenics is closely aligned with an investigation of the kindred metaphysical theme of race, since the eugenicists displayed a world view profoundly infested with biological idealism, hereditarian determinism, and racial science. Even though primarily a ”class” rather than ”race” phenomenon, eugenics – simultaneously progress-oriented and degenerationist in outlook – at all times, directly or indirectly, focused on race taken as an improvable, qualitative feature. Without a well-bred and proficient race, neither nation nor empire could endure in the fierce and unceasing interracial struggle for survival. Hence, eugenics was given not only religious but also scientific meaning in societies troubled by rapid internal transformation, imperial anxieties, and ghastly interpretations of the arrow of time.