Petri Karonen

Marko Hakanen

Internationally, the case of early modern Sweden is noteworthy because the state building process transformed a locally dispersed and sparsely populated area into a strongly centralized absolute monarchy and European empire at the beginning of the 17th century. This anthology provides fresh insights into the state-building process in Sweden. During this transitional period, many far-reaching administrative reforms were carried out, and the Swedish state developed into a prime example of the early modern ‘powerstate’. The contributors approach Sweden’s rise to greatness from the point of view of personal agency. In early modern studies, agency has long remained in the shadow of the study of structures and institutions. This novel approach enables us to expose the difficulties, setbacks and false steps that the administration had to deal with. State building was a more diversified and personalized process than has previously been assumed. Numerous individuals were also crucially important actors in the process, and that development itself was not straightforward progression at the macro-level but was intertwined with lower-level actors. Each chapter in this volume employs partially different methods depending on the source material and subject. This means that both qualitative and quantitative material is combined, different ways of making sense of it (i.e. research traditions) are brought together and a multi-method design is used in analyzing source material. One of the central methods is the systematic use of previous biographical research. We want to give the individuals and their actions under discussion a background that reflects the contemporary structures of individual life cycles. With the existing biographical research, it is possible to create a comprehensive set of data that provides the general outlines of individual lives or the career tracks of various estates or social groups, and even to construct collective biographies of certain groups.

Personal Agency at the Swedish Age of Greatness 1560-1720

Martti Lehti

Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm

Janne Kivivuori

Mona Rautelin

Dag Lindström

Guðbjörg S. Bergsdóttir

Jónas O. Jónasson

Sven Granath

Mikkel M. Okholm

Nordic Homicide in Deep Time draws a unique and detailed picture of developments in human interpersonal violence and presents new findings on rates, patterns, and long-term changes in lethal violence in the Nordics. Conducted by an interdisciplinary team of criminologists and historians, the book analyses homicide and lethal violence in northern Europe in two eras – the 17th century and early 21st century. Similar and continuous societal structures, cultural patterns, and legal cultures allow for long-term and comparative homicide research in the Nordic context. Reflecting human universals and stable motives, such as revenge, jealousy, honour, and material conflicts, homicide as a form of human behaviour enables long-duration comparison. By describing the rates and patterns of homicide during these two eras, the authors unveil continuity and change in human violence. Where and when did homicide typically take place? Who were the victims and the offenders, what where the circumstances of their conflicts? Was intimate partner homicide more prevalent in the early modern period than in present times? How long a time elapsed from violence to death? Were homicides often committed in the context of other crime? The book offers answers to these questions among others, comparing regions and eras. We gain a unique and empirically grounded view on how state consolidation and changing routines of everyday life transformed the patterns of criminal homicide in Nordic society. The path to pacification was anything but easy, punctuated by shorter crises of social turmoil, and high violence. The book is also a methodological experiment that seeks to assess the feasibility of long-duration standardized homicide analysis and to better understand the logic of homicide variation across space and over time. In developing a new approach for extending homicide research into the deep past, the authors have created the Historical Homicide Monitor. The new instrument combines wide explanatory scope, measurement standardization, and articulated theory expression. By retroactively expanding research data to the pre-statistical era, the method enables long-duration comparison of different periods and areas. Based on in-depth source critique, the approach captures patterns of criminal behaviour, beyond the control activity of the courts. The authors foresee the application of their approach in even remoter periods. Nordic Homicide in Deep Time helps the reader to understand modern homicide by revealing the historical continuities and changes in lethal violence. The book is written for professionals, university students and anyone interested in the history of human behaviour.

Lethal Violence in the Early Modern Era and Present Times

Nordic Homicide in Deep Time

Ville Kivimäki

In most European countries, the horrific legacy of 1939-1945 has made it difficult to remember the war with much glory. Despite the Anglo-American memory narrative of saving democracy from totalitarianism and the Soviet epic of the Great Patriotic War, the fundamental experience of war for many Europeans was that of immense personal losses and often meaningless hardships. The volume at hand focuses on these histories between the victors: on the cases of Hungary, Estonia, Poland, Austria, Finland, and Germany and on the respective, often gendered experiences of defeat. The chapters underline the asynchronous transition to peace in individual experiences, when compared to the smoother timelines of national and international historiographies. Instead of a linear chronology, both personal and collective histories tend to return back to the moments of violence and loss, thus forming continuous cycles of remembrance and forgetting. Several of the contributors also pay attention to the constructed and contested nature of national histories in these cycles. The role of these "in-between" countries - and even more their peoples', multifaceted experiences - adds to the widening comparative European history of the aftermath, thereby challenging the conventional dichotomies and periodisations in national historiographies. In the aftermath of the 70th anniversary of 1945, it is still, unfortunately, too early to regard the post-war period as mere history; the memory politics and rhetoric of the Second World War and its aftermath are still being used and abused to serve contemporary power politics in Europe.

Post-war Europe between the Victors after the Second World War

Continued Violence and Troublesome Pasts

Heikki Ylikangas

Eric H. Monkkonen

Most people associate Nordic countries with peace, tranquility, civility, high living standards and generally progressive social arrangements. It is these very qualities that get Nordic countries rejected as policy models because they are too peaceful - what happens there is too remote and too easy compared to the harsh outside world.

Five Centuries of Violence in Finland and the Baltic Area

Petri Karonen

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