ABSTRACT
It would be a mistake to regard the period from the Middle Ages up to the eighteenth century as static. The expansion of Sweden’s international trade drew the country into a process of international capitalist growth. The rural peasant communities became part of an expanding export sector and in the cities the country blacksmiths, for example, were forced to place themselves under the supervision of foremen in centralised armament factories. But this capitalism, still in its infancy, lacked the strength to break down the powerful resistance of the household-based market economy with the village community and the peasant household as its foundations. In all important respects, an economy that rested on individual financial management, with some distribution of labour and market contacts, continued to be predominant. Of course, at bottom, this economy had relations with an ‘outer’ world of politics and the state. In this context it is important to bear in mind the fact that, from a subordinate perspective, the increase in capitalist features appeared to be deliberate interventionism in which the government, not least, played an important part. This view, that capitalism is something imposed by government and other centres of power, is not without foundation. It is a system which often acts as the very antithesis of the simple market economy. In its exchange of surplus products and local specialities, the simple market economy finds its own paths. Capitalism, by contrast, requires regulation, often at the national level, which places constraints on the way the householdbased market economy operates; farmers are forced to make charcoal, they are not allowed to forge in their own workshops in the rural areas, they are banned from maritime trade, etc. This process is usually driven by a vigorous government that attempts to gain benefit for itself-but regulation and coercion are as essential to the new capitalist actors as the very air they breathe.
