The Linköping, Karlskoga, and Gothenburg New Industrial Competence Blocs

Abstract

Sweden’s continued position as a major European military power during the early seventeenth century demanded an indigenous weapons manufacturing capacity. To that effect Dutch and other industrialists, as told in Chap. 2, were invited to set up shop in Sweden. With time Norrköping on the river Motala Ström developed into a major industrial city of Sweden, second in size only to Stockholm. While Norrköping of today has gone through a long period of industrial stagnation and lost the large part of its industrial backbone, in the mid-1950s, mostly textiles, little in the form of new industrial formation occurred thereafter. Neighboring Linköping, on the other hand, at the peak of Norrköping’s industrial performance, was primarily the site of the regional bishop, the royal governor, the regional government tax collector, and other religious and political industry inhibiting authorities. Since the establishment of military aircraft manufacturer Saab in 1937, Linköping has however evolved, as Norrköping did three centuries before, into a modern industrial city, and a high-technology industrial district, that has left Norrköping in its local backwaters. Again this new industrial formation, as once Norrköping, has a military and weapons manufacturing origin.