Anglo Swedish Commercial Connections And Diplomatic Relations In The Seventeenth Century

This is the first study to analyse the relationship between England and Sweden across the entire seventeenth century. It emphasises the importance of commerce and diplomacy working in tandem. The book contains five chapters arranged chronologically, all based on original and innovative archival research, and traces the economic aspects of the relationship in both a qualitative and quantitative context. It draws upon a number of unique incidents to detail the variety and extent of commercial and diplomatic connections that became of primary importance for the welfare and success of both nations over the century.

New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions. The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.

This book explores the development of the fur trade in Chesapeake Bay during the seventeenth century, and the wide-ranging links that were formed in a new and extensive transatlantic chain of supply and consumption. It considers changing fashion in England, the growing demand for fur, at a time when the Russian fur trade was in decline, examines native North Americans and their trading and other exchanges with colonists, and explores the nature of colonial society, including the commercial ambitions of a varied range of investors. As such, it outlines the intense rivalry which existed between different colonies and colonial interests. Although the book argues that fur never supplanted tobacco as the region's principal export, noting that the trade declined as new, more profitable sources of supply were opened up, nevertheless the case of the Chesapeake fur trade provides an excellent example of how different elements in a new transatlantic enterprise fitted together and had a profound impact on each other.

England's relationship with the Baltic trading area has remained a generally neglected aspect of English commercial development in the seventeenth century. The spectacular colonial ventures have traditionally attracted more historical attention, although the Baltic trade in this period was more fundamental to the English economy: it supplied precisely those naval commodities, such as flax, hemp, timber, pitch and tar, which facilitated the creation of fleets for the colonial trades. Medieval English trade had been conditioned by a search for markets, and the predominantly agricultural economy of the Polish Commonwealth proved to be an ideal target for cloth exports. By the early seventeenth century, however, this traditional relationship was changing. The growing English fleets demanded steady supplies of naval stores which Poland was increasingly unable to supply, while the Polish economy, weakened by wars and entering a period of decline, could no longer afford the luxury of cloth imports from England.

Hamlet's Moment identifies a turning point in the history of English drama and early modern political culture: the moment when the business of politics became a matter of dramatic representation. Drama turned from open, military conflict to diplomacy and court policy, from the public contestation of power to the technologies of government. Tragedies of state turned into tragedies of state servants, inviting the public to consider politics as a profession-to imagine what it meant to have a political career. By staging intelligence derived from diplomatic sources, and by inflecting the action and discourse of their plays with a Machiavellian style of political analysis, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, and Marston transformed political knowledge into a more broadly useful type of cultural capital, something even people without political agency could deploy in conversation and use in claiming social distinction. In Hamlet's moment, the public stage created the political competence that enabled the rise of the modern public sphere.

A reassessment of the Anglo-Dutch wars of the second half of the seventeenth century, demonstrating that the conflict was primarily about trade.