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This article aims to analyse credit as a core element in the political changes and processes of state formation that took place in Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth-century. The study focuses on discussions within the Council of the Realm and at the Diets about how to use the two Swedish seventeenth-century banks as creditors to the state. The two banks were essential parts of an elaborate attempt to shift public debt regime from one based on private creditors and the personal credit of the king and the men in the government to a regime based on institutional creditors and the credit of the Estates of the Realm. The outcome of the procesess was contingent upon some of the core topics of early modern Europe's political and financial discourses: the nature of the sovereign, the relationship between private interests and the public good, and the role and functioning of representative assemblies. This process was the beginning of a development in which sovereign borrowing became a public concern, which eventually strengthened the Estate's position vis-a-vis the government, and is a significant example of the interconnectedness of politics and credit.

In 1657, Sweden saw the creation of its first bank, the private royal-chartered Stockholms Banco. It crashed a few years later and was reconstructed as the Bank of the Estates of the Realm. The intention here is to show how a bank could (re)open so soon after a disastrous crash and to point at some key factors in its success. The main argument posits not only that the principals of the new bank required an adequate institutional framework to make a credible commitment, but also that the prosperity of that bank depended upon said principals’ ability to control the narrative of the crashed bank and to recruit a good staff with strong personal credit, whose self-interest it could harness and credit it could use.

We use a unique source from the Swedish royaldemesnesto examine the work and relative wages of women insixteenth-century Sweden, an economic laggard in theearly modern period. The source pertains to workers hiredon yearly contracts, a type more representative of histori-cal labour markets than day labour on large constructionsites, and this allows us to observe directly the food con-sumed by workers. We speak to the debate on the ‘littledivergence’ within Europe, as women’s work and genderdifferentials in pay is a key indicator of women’s relativeautonomy and seen as a cause for the economic ascen-dency of the North Sea region during the period. Wefind small gender differentials among both unskilled andskilled workers, indicating that Sweden was a part of the‘golden age’ for women. We argue that despite superficialequality, women’s economic outlooks were restrained inmany other ways – including their access to higher-skilledwork and jobs in the expanding parts of the economy –adding important nuance to the discussion about the rela-tionship between women’s social position and economicgrowth in the early modern period

Inom nordisk, och kanske särskilt inom svensk, historisk forskning om den tidigmoderna statens utveckling har rumsliga metaforer länge spelat en framskjuten position. Frågan huruvida statsformeringsprocessen drevs ovanifrån (av aktörer inom staten och/eller olika elitgrupper) eller underifrån (med bönderna i samförstånd med de styrande) har varit källa till en aldrig sinande ström inlägg. Tvång eller interaktion är ett annat motsatspar som flitigt används för att beskriva samma förhållande. Det senaste tillskottet till denna diskussion är antologin Bringing the people back in. State building from below in the Nordic countries 1500–1800 under redaktörskap av historieprofessorer från tre länder: Knut Dørum från Norge, Mats Hallenberg från Sverige och Kimmo Katajala från Finland. Då antologin består av 19 bidrag inklusive inledning och två kommenterande texter av Michael Braddick och Marjolein t’ Hart kommer denna anmälan att fokusera på antologins utgångspunkter samt några bidrag som kan belysa det som anmälaren uppfattar vara antologins styrkor och svagheter.

Att läsesalarna håller öppet tre timmar i veckan har gjort många forskningsprojekt omöjliga att genomföra. Det är i förlängningen ett hot mot demokratin, skriver fyra historiker som kräver att Riksarkivet öppnar för bokade besök och en dialog med forskarsamhället.

Uppgifter om mäns och kvinnors försörjningsaktiviteter i kämnärsrättens protokoll, Västerås (Västmanland), har transkriberats och analyserats, och källtext och källtrogna variabler registrerats bokstavstroget, av Marie Ulväng, Caroline Lindroth, Linnea Henningsson, Sarah Vorminder, inom forskningsprojektet Gender and Work.

Kvalitetskontroll är utförd av Sofia Ling och Christopher Pihl.

Analys av källmaterialet har gjorts av Marie Ulväng, Caroline Lindroth, Linnea Henningsson, Sarah Vorminder inom projektet Gender and Work https://www.uu.se/gaw

Materialet är sökbart i databasen GAW - https://gotham.ddb.umu.se/

Early modern European credit markets are often described as based on personal trust and on private, or informal, credit. They are contrasted with modern markets, which are based on trust in institutions and on formal credit relations. The prevalent narrative of the Swedish credit market, as well as of many other credit markets in Europe, claims that it developed in a linear manner from personal to institutional credit during the long nineteenth century.

This article aims to qualify this narrative by studying the transformations of the credit market in seventeenth-century Stockholm. In this period, an institutional actor, The Bank of the Estates of the Realm, founded 1668 in Stockholm, started to play a significant role both as a lender and as receiver of deposits. Previous research has mainly studied the exchanges of the nobility and the iron industry with the bank. This study takes a broader approach and looks at the bank’s total lending business with a special focus on smaller loans and the credit market in Stockholm.

The bank extended small loans against both real property and chattels quite extensively. In probate inventories from Stockholm nearly one fifth of the households were debtors to the bank in the 1690s. Loans were taken by the members of the urban community to invest in real property – to buy or improve houses and plots – and by craftsmen to buy raw materials, but also to a lesser extent to finance life-cycle ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. In terms of the number of loans, rather than the sums extended, lending against movables, mainly objects of silver, was an important branch of the bank’s business. More people had access to pawnable movables than to real property and in a society with a very rudimentary juridical framework around mortgage lending the bank often preferred movables.

The activities of the Bank of the Estates of the Realm show how institutions of various kind both pooled and lent money, activities commonly associated with banks, long before the nineteenth century and that the importance of institutional credit varied with time and place in early modern Europe.