The Swedish Empire in Louis XIV’s Europe, 1660–79

Abstract

Had the plans of Karl X Gustav come to full fruition, they would have amounted to something bordering on a diplomatic revolution. If Denmark had succumbed to the post-Roskilde onslaught, it could have been incorporated into the Swedish empire; if the war with Poland had ended favorably, the Swedish spoils in the south central Baltic rim would have included Royal Prussia at the very least. But Sweden could not attain either of these goals; the forces ranged against it were simply too great. Nor was Sweden able to maintain its tentative footholds outside Europe. The ‘New Sweden’ colony established in 1638 along the banks of the Delaware, in the present-day American states of New Jersey and Delaware, had failed shortly after Karl Gustav’s succession. The colony had expanded and prospered, albeit modestly, under the capable direction of Governor Johan Printz. When Printz’s successor, the more aggressive Johan Rising, attempted to seize Dutch settlements encroaching on the Delaware Valley, he sealed the fate of New Sweden. Dutch colonial forces retaliated in 1655, taking the main settlement at Fort Christina and dissolving the colony. The tolerant Dutch administration allowed, even encouraged, the Swedish settlers to stay, and most of them did so; but New Sweden, as a crown colony, was no more. Cabo Corso, an outpost on Africa’s Gold Coast seized from Portugal by Louis de Geer’s Swedish-based trading company in 1655, fared no better, and fell to the Dutch in 1663.¹