The Swedish ‘Absolutist’ State, 1679–97

Abstract

Until relatively recently, historians rarely debated the utility of the terms ‘absolutism’ or ‘absolute monarchy’ when discussing the European state of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There was little need to define what was meant by ‘absolutism’, since it was readily apparent. One recognized absolutism when one saw it: Louis XIV’s France was an absolutist state, while England after the Glorious Revolution most definitely was not. Over the past two or three decades, however, historians of early modern Europe have begun to retreat from this self-assured if vague position. Some, like Nicholas Henshall, do not see a fundamental constitutional difference between the princely autocracies of the later sixteenth century and the ‘absolute monarchies’ of the next century.1 Others have avoided the debate altogether, focusing instead on alternative concepts in their attempts to explain the growth of central authority in most of the European polities between 1600 and 1750. In Scandinavia, for example, scholars have revived Otto Hintze’s concept of the ‘power state’ (Machtstaat), based around the argument that the development of strong and intrusive central government was based on the need to mobilize national resources to support the needs of a military establishment engaged in prolonged warfare. Scandinavian economic historians have emphasized changes in fiscal administration, perceiving in the seventeenth-century Nordic lands a deliberate shift from a central authority whose income derived primarily from crown lands (the ‘domain state’) to one whose main revenues came mostly from regular taxation (the ‘tax state’).