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Debating the Mercantile Background to Early Modern Swedish Empire-Building: Michael Roberts versus Artur Attman

of the nineteenth century, in analysing the motives and driving forces behind this political and military success story most historians adopted contemporary patterns of explanation such as the ’salvation of protestantism’ or the ’aggrandizement of power and glory’. In the early twentieth century, however, two more sophisticated explanations emerged. One focused on the necessities of security policy as the triggering factors of expansion; according to representatives of this historiographic current (which later was called the Old School) the ultimate goals of Sweden’s wars in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were determined by defensive thinking. This explanation was soon challenged by a New School, which stressed economic and financial factors pushing SwedenFinland steadily towards expansion; the struggle for control of the main arteries of East-West trade in order to siphon it off was said to be of primary importance. From the mid-twentieth century on, the chief protagonists of the respective schools were the British historian of early modern Europe, Michael Roberts, and the Swedish specialist of international and Swedish economic history, Artur Attman. Contrary to what one might expect, however, the