Preface

Summary

The majority of papers in this book emerged from a conference “Encountering the ‘Other’ – Understanding Oneself: Colonialism, Ethnic Diversity and Everyday Life in Early Modern Sweden and New Sweden” organized at Lund University in 2013 within the “GlobArch” network and with the support of the Crafoord Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and Elisabeth Rausing Memorial Foundation. The conference created an interdisciplinary and international forum to discuss social and cultural developments in early modern Sweden, especially its multifaceted involvement in colonial expansion – as a country having colonies of its own, procuring, exchanging and consuming colonial goods and sharing ideologies of European supremacy. The main theme of the conference was the reaction to the broadly understood newness brought about by the expansion and rise of intercontinental connections as well as the construction (ideological and material) of otherness and sameness in early modern Sweden, New Sweden and other colonies.

The conference and this collection appear at an exciting time, when the traditional national framework of research and focus on political and economic history of the Swedish “Era of Greatness” shifts towards transnational history writing, scrutinizing Sweden's entanglement with the European and global world. This shift is coupled with a greater interest in materiality within the field of history. It is also accompanied by a rapid development of post-medieval archaeology in Sweden and Finland, which offers new perspectives on a range of interesting questions, such as the characteristics of early modern culture, multiculturalism, self-fashioning through material objects, the selective nature of consumption, the rise of modernity and material engagements with novelties and imports. The collection reflects the wide-ranging research directions taken in the fields of history and historical archaeology, and their potential to rewrite the history of early modern Sweden. Our goal is to present, with an international audience in mind, a picture of early modern Sweden that is rarely considered in the available general English-language works on the kingdom: an image of an early modern Swedish society and culture deeply affected by cultural transformations, mobility and connections with the increasingly global world of the 17th and 18th centuries; a country, society and culture not left on the margins of Europe, disengaged from contemporary currents, but rather drawn into and developing dialogical relationships with the rest of Europe and the known world.