ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the organization of saltpetre production in Sweden during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More specifically, it addresses the question of how changing conditions for farming influenced the meeting of military requirements. It will be shown that it is not enough to highlight scientific, technological or military interests when studying the militarization and demilitarization of different sectors of society. Other interests may play an equally or even more important role in these transformations. Saltpetre production in eighteenth-century Sweden had traditionally been a more or less centrally organized form of production, typically pursued by landless farm hands. Then the introduction of alternative methods of preparing the soil for the evaporation of saltpetre led to calls for new institutional conditions for its production. In one respect the changes had their origin in different scientific and economic views of saltpetre production, to understand which it is necessary to take into account the social and economic changes that affected Swedish country life in general throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
