Historisk tidskrift 128:4 • 2008
Innehåll (Contents) 2008:4
Uppsatser (Articles)
Borgaren och militärstaten. Den tidigmoderna stadens politiska
kultur
Karl Bergman
Fulltext (pdf)
Summary
The burgess and the military state: The political culture
of the early modern state.
The investigation of the establishment of the naval base in
Karlskrona in the years 1682 to 1693 serves as a case study
of how Swedish burgesses’ confronted representatives of the
Swedish military state. It demonstrates how despite limited
numbers the citizens of Karlskrona nonetheless had a strong
position in their negotiations with the state because of their
integration in a Baltic and Dutch network of cities and citizens.
This network of cities and citizens had developed a communicative
practice characterized by openness, rationality and the faith
in, and use of, written do- cuments. The Swedish military state
needed access to this network in order to develop and maintain
the navy and therefore could not adopt too authoritative measures
to alter its practice of communication.
But the state also negotiated from a position of strength.
A dialogical order was establish on the basis of a configuration
of power. This meant that the state could influence and displace
power relations in the sphere of the burgesses to its advantage.
The discourse on private and public was displaced and the pu-
blic exercise of power pushed back conceptions of the private.
The investigation invites discussion about the roots of the
modern in an early modern political culture where the interaction
between the burgesses and an authoritative state was important.
Keywords
The early modern era, public sphere, absolutism, burgesses,
urban history, Karlskrona, communicative practice, military
state.
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