Jan Glete . Swedish Naval Administration, 1521–1721: Resource Flows and Organisational Capabilities . (The Northern World, number 46.) Boston: Brill. 2010. Pp. xxiv, 816. $293.00.

Abstract

Jan Glete's book ranges far beyond what the title reveals. Although he had already penned more than a dozen monographs, Glete intended to write additional books on Swedish naval technology and imperial expansion, as well as at least one tome on how organizational capacity promoted early modern European state formation. Deteriorating health compelled him to conflate these complex subjects into a solitary, ultimately posthumous volume. While navies provide a common denominator for the nine chapters, the permeating theme is how resource allocation enabled Europeans to harness various forms of power in order to become conquerors, colonizers, and imperialists. Population and wealth did not necessarily make a state powerful. Organization and deployment of resources were critical in state formation. Rulers who cultivated technical and organizational competencies “transformed resources into structures with new capabilities” (p. 3). A medium-sized but ambitious maritime state might acquire sufficient human and physical resources to build a standing navy, “the most centralized and complex organization that early modern states could run” (p. 668). That intersection of human initiative (the expansionist desires of the Vasa dynasty in the case of Sweden) and material reality (the physical and human geography of Sweden) created circumstances in which an entrepreneurial state wielded greater power than its more populous and affluent neighbors.