Children born to enemy soldiers, so-called ”children born of war”, are vulnerable to displacement. The contested repatriations of the children of Scandinavian mothers and foreign fighters from Syria in the wake of the fall of ISIS in March 2019 represent a case in point. Norway, Denmark and Sweden initially delayed and then only hesitantly or selectively supported their return – just as Norway and Denmark had done with displaced Scandinavian children born to German soldiers after World War II. The contexts differ, but the echoes in the controversies regarding the respective children’s right to return ask us to look at the histories of Scandinavian-German children’s displacement in Allied-occupied Germany in new ways and to broaden our understanding of Scandinavian children ”out-of-place” today beyond security paradigms. The main focus of this paper rests on the post-1945 Danish and, to a lesser degree, Norwegian cases of children’s displacement and repatriation from Germany. By analysing the International Refugee Organization’s meeting minutes, case files, correspondence and the documentation of two Danish repatriation family histories in the late 1940s, I trace how the specific perceptions of these children as ”children born of war” informed their national and familial affiliation, their access to IRO support as well as their final placement. Building on existing scholarship on the contested repatriations of displaced Norwegian children from Germany after 1945, my analysis adds: 1) new archival research on Danish cases of displacement, and 2) a transnational perspective on how a parental enemy stigma shaped the negotiations on the children’s repatriations between IRO staff and family members in the absence of the state showing an interest in their return. These insights shed new light on the root causes behind the controversies around the national and familial belonging of Scandinavian children ”out-of-place” that apply to the post-45 generation but also affect the region’s children of ISIS foreign fighters as ”children born of war.” The results thus open up new lines of research for future comparative scholarship on the rights and inclusion of different groups and generations of displaced Scandinavian children.
The Sweden Democrats’ white paper, announced by party leader Jimmie Åkesson in 2017, has generated significant discussion by revisiting key aspects of the party’s history. Although these issues have been addressed in previous research, their reiteration remains relevant. Authored by historian of ideas Tony Gustafsson, the white paper employs comprehensive source analysis to demonstrate the Sweden Democrats’ documented connections to National Socialism, the persistence of anti-Semitic attitudes, and the prevalence of xenophobic rhetoric. However, the scope and temporal limitations imposed by the party leadership have resulted in the exclusion of several critical topics. Gustafsson was instructed by party leadership to address only specific areas of criticism. Additionally, the report concludes in 2010, rendering the party’s more recent developments largely unexamined. Notably, the white paper provides minimal attention to the party’s criticism of Islam, which has frequently bordered on Islamophobia and has been a recurring theme since the early 2000s. The analysis also omits discussion of the Sweden Democrats as a populist party. Right-wing populist parties often employ a strategy that emphasizes national values while portraying immigrants as threats introduced by so-called national traitors. The increasing dissemination of conspiracy theories within party rhetoric, particularly as the welfare state narrative has diminished in influence, is similarly overlooked. As historical narratives such as the retrotopic welfare state have been supplanted by historical distortions, including claims that the Swedish Social Democrats inspired Nazi Germany to the Holocaust, and by conspiracy theories, there is a heightened need for critical examination of the Sweden Democrats’ ideological positions regarding nationalism, populism, and fascism.
Violence and confrontational methods have generally been regarded as undesirable within the Swedish labour movement. Yet during a brief period in the early twentieth century such tactics became the subject of intense debate within the Young Socialists, the Social Democratic Party’s first youth organisation. Distrustful of parliamentary reformism, many activists instead promoted rapid, disruptive interventions in public life – what they termed ”propaganda of the deed”. After a split in 1903, when a more party-loyal faction left, Scania (Skåne) emerged as the movement’s stronghold for the remaining radical groups, and between 1906 and 1908 several spectacular actions involving violence were carried out there. This article focuses on three incidents: Two antimilitarist demonstrations in Helsingborg in 1906 that led to long prison sentences under newly introduced legislation against antimilitarist propaganda; a postal train robbery near Staffanstorp in 1907 in which a postal worker was seriously wounded and that resulted in two Young Socialists being sentenced to life imprisonment; and the 1908 bombing of the strikebreaker ship Amalthea in Malmö harbour, which caused one death and several injuries and led to two Young Socialists being sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. These events provoked widespread political and media debate and deeply alarmed the Social Democratic leadership. Using these cases, this study analyses how violence as a political instrument was discussed by local Young Socialists, asking what ”propaganda of the deed” meant in practice, how internal and external debates unfolded, and where the boundaries of legitimate political action were drawn. The article situates these discussions within broader historiographical debates on Swedish political culture and political violence, challenging portrayals of the labour movement as uniformly reformist and of twentieth-century Sweden as dominated by a consensual political tradition. Drawing on concepts such as framing and boundary activation, it explores how political culture shaped both the justification and rejection of violent methods within the movement.
The Editor in Chief discusses the current issue. A list of contributors can also be found here.
In Swedish history, the 17th century is usually named stormaktstiden (Great Power Age) and Sweden of the time is called a stormakt (great power). This terminology is not evident and it has a history. Before the middle of the 19th century, historians did not denote the 17th century as an age of any specific greatness, although king Gustav II Adolf was lauded for his performance in the Thirty Year’s War. The concept ”great power” came into being at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and was used about contemporary European foreign politics. In Sweden, it came into use common use in the 1850s. Around 1870, stormakt and stormaktstid were used to denote the Swedish 17th century and that usage made its way into historical works in the next decade. Originally, historians seem to have been aware of the fact that this was a symbolic use of a terminology of contemporary politics, but soon in the early 20th century, it had become a commonplace to name 17th century Sweden a great power and see the Great Power Age as an age of Swedish greatness. The use of this terminology has since than accelerated, while the positive connotations of Greatness largely disappeared in the middle of the last century. Instead, the negative consequences of Sweden’s projection of power outside its borders, both for its neighbours and its subjects, are often stressed. There is a lack of precision and clarity in the use of this terminology. ”Great power” is seldom defined by historians. There are diverging statements as to just how great the Swedish great power was. Some historians state that Sweden was one of the leading powers in Europe, while others, more realistically, confine it to a leading role in the Baltic area. None of these claims are, however, based on any deeper arguments about Sweden’s place in a European political context. Since Sweden in the 17th century took lively part in the development of the emerging European state system, a system of global historical significance since it has come to cover the entire earth, studies of Sweden’s power politics in a transnational perspective could bring important contributions to the scholarly field of global history.
This article describes a pilot study in which records from the Swedish National Archives concerning the colony of New Sweden (1638–1655) were transcribed, translated, and summarised using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) via Transkribus and the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT. The project was carried out within the framework of ”Empire”, a research project at Trinity College Dublin that examines Ireland’s role in the building of the English empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aim was to test how effectively these tools could be used to process this extensive material (over 130 folio pages) with documents in Swedish, German, Dutch, and Latin. The article explains the choice of HTR models, particularly how a combination of Transkribus and transformer-based models such as ”Text Titan I” and ”Swedish Lion I” were used to optimise speed and reach a level of acceptable accuracy. An important aspect was to assess the ability of LLMs to summarise and translate fragmentary and partially illegible texts, as well as to weigh accuracy against efficiency. The article also presents an example from a 1643 court case between Governor Johan Printz and the English merchant George Lamberton, demonstrating the method’s potential for interpreting complex sources. Finally, the author discusses the future potential of this technology and possible avenues for further development, emphasising that although the technology requires human oversight, it is a powerful labour-saving tool that can transform how historical material is made accessible and analysed.
This article examines a collection of over 300 private letters by three different writers from 1918 to 1921, inherited from the Swedish noble family of Hjärne. It aims to microhistorically understand the widow Amalia Hjärne (1859–1944), her opinions, values, and influence on her two sons’ engagements. First, it retells a mésalliance between the future Chancellor of Justice Karl-Gustaf Hjärne (1892–1977) and a peasant’s daughter from Dalarna, Skräddar Anna Larsdotter (1892–1946). Second, a more ideal or typical engagement between a lieutenant, Bo Urban Hjärne (1889–1978), and a younger, bourgeoisie banker’s daughter in Halmstad, Karin Afzelius (1899–1987). In the latter case, the letters between the engaged couple are extant and interpreted, while only Amalia’s letters remain to examine the former. Through her letters, it becomes apparent that she values social and cultural capital more than economic capital in her son’s choices of fiancées, even though the Hjärne family is seriously indebted. This confirms and elaborates on previous historical and ethnological research on nineteenth-century Swedish nobility, showing that manners, language, education, and culture became more important than wealth in maintaining their declining social standing. The article also demonstrates Amalia’s agency within her own family, as she laments and opposes the engagement with the farmer’s daughter. Simultaneously, she supports the engagement with the banker’s daughter economically and as a new mother and mentor to Karin, who deals with the sudden loss of her parents. Comparisons are made in part with early twentieth-century Swedish literature. Although Amalia, Urban and Karin are partially contextualized as representatives of their classes, they are also treated with empathy as individuals with their distinct personalities and voices. This is done in the spirit of microhistory, existential history, and hermeneutics, research traditions whose similarities are discussed within a Swedish frame.
The field of Swedish fashion history is expanding more than ever before, but it remains a small and vulnerable environment. Few researchers devote themselves to fashion history as their main area of expertise. Fashion history is a relatively new field of research with roots in ethnology, art history, and museums. Today, there is a Swedish fashion history network, but the environment needs to be strengthened with doctoral projects and more collaboration. For a long time, fashion was associated with superficiality in both everyday life and in academia. Fashion was therefore not seen as an important social phenomenon until the 1980s, when British researchers published significant studies. This also influenced the emergence of the field in Sweden. For a long time, fashion historians focused on studies of fashion in relation to constructions of femininity, while men’s clothing was overlooked. Since the end of the 2000s, this has changed, both internationally and in Sweden. Today, a great deal of research is being conducted on men’s fashion in Sweden, given the size of the field. The main criticism, however, is that fashion history research is Eurocentric, both in terms of the places studied and the narrative of fashion’s development. For a long time, the idea that fashion only existed in the Western world has characterized research. This has been debated since ”the global turn”, and has resulted in a broadening of the field of fashion history.
