The Swedish ‘Power State’: Society, Culture, and the Burden of War

The seventeenth century is frequently described as an age of ‘crisis’. Though historians have hardly come to any consensus as to what that entails, few scholars would deny that — for much of Europe — the century was characterized by economic contraction rather than growth. The salient features of the late sixteenth-century European economy — rapid population growth, a decline in agricultural productivity, rampant inflation — combined with the growing demands of the state and of war to produce a volatile economic situation by the middle of the next century. The result of this equation, together with the overall destructive nature of the Thirty Years’ War, was considerable social and political upheaval.