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’).
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Notes
Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism. Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London, 1992).
J. A. Fridericia, Adelsveeldens sidste Dage. Danmarks Historie fra Christian IV’s Død til Eneveeldens Indførelse (Copenhagen, 1894)
C. O. Bøggild Andersen, Statsomveeltningen i 1660 (Copenhagen, 1936)
Leon Jespersen and Asger Svane-Knudsen, Steender og magstat. De politiske brydninger i 1648 og 1660 (Odense, 1989).
Georg Landberg, Johan Gyllenstiernas nordiska förbundspolitik (Uppsala, 1935).
Peter Englund, Det hotade huset. Adliga föreställningar om samhället under stormaktstiden (Stockholm, 1989); Frost, Northern Wars, p. 229.
James Cavallie, De höga officerarna. Studier in den svenska militära hierarki under 1600-talets senare del (Stockholm, 1981)
Björn Asker, Officerarna och det svenska samhället 1650–1700 (Uppsala, 1983).
Per Sörlin, ‘Wicked Arts’. Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden, 1635–1754 (Leiden, 1998).
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© 2004 Paul Douglas Lockhart
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Lockhart, P.D. (2004). The Swedish ‘Absolutist’ State, 1679–97. In: Sweden in the Seventeenth Century. European History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80255-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80255-1_8
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