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During the seventeenth century Sweden rapidly changed from a small insignificant country in Europe's northern periphery to a great military power. The navy was a crucial part of the expansion, but to maintain a standing navy was a demanding task for a comparatively poor and sparsely populated country. One of many difficulties was to recruit skilled and competent seamen. Sweden had no large merchant fleet that could serve the navy with experienced men, and to hire professional crews would have been too expensive. The solution was to recruit poor men from the lower strata of society in coastal villages and towns through what is known as the allotment system (in Swedish: indelningsverket). Those men normally had very little experience of handling large sailing vessels but were soon trained for the task. Once conscripted in the navy they lived two lives. In the summer during the sailing season they were naval seamen. During winter they became farmhands, workers and craftsmen ashore. Thus they constructed a maritime culture of their own, with ideals and values that sometimes were closely linked to a broader maritime culture in Europe and sometimes had more in common with a Swedish rural community culture. This article investigates how this maritime/rural culture was shaped; to what extent the seamen adjusted themselves to a military order and finally what happened when the seamen's values and ideas collided with the hierarchy and power relations within the navy.

During the long eighteenth century, European navies saw the emergence of a class of highly specialised and professionalised naval officers. These officers were in command of ships and squadrons at major naval battles, led explorations, and in some countries also served ashore as administrators of admiralties and dockyards. Officer training differed from country to country, and careers in different navies were subject to a variety of systems of ranks and promotions that relied both on cultural and on systemic factors. This article explores how the three northern European nations of Sweden, Denmark and Britain developed systems suited to the particular demands of their social and political situations. It presents the results of new research in a comparative context to examine the factors that shaped the development of officer training systems and the criteria used for determining officers’ career prospects. Shore-based academies are a useful point of comparison: despite a common curriculum, the development and significance of each navy’s academy varied widely. All three navies struggled with the tension between the fundamental demands of life at sea and the behavioural and educational expectations of gentlemen officers. By focusing in particular on officer training, this article provides a variety of perspectives on the origins, emergence, and development of professionalism and expertise in the eighteenth-century maritime world.

This dissertation investigates how social order was created in the Swedish navy at the end of the Swedish imperial age (1670-1716).  During the period the Swedish navy went through many changes that led to an expanding and re-structuring of both the administration of the Admiralty and the naval activities. These changes contributed to shape the life on board ships and at shipyards in more fixed ways than before. The dissertation analyses the social order on the basis of three overlapping themes, inspired by Michel Foucault’s theories on power relationships and the exercise of power. First it investigates how the navy upheld its hierarchy and formed the relations between superior officers and subordinate men, second how the Admiralty and officers exercised power in order to make the subordinates behave in the desired way and third how the subordinates reacted to the control; especially how they formed different strategies of resistance to challenge or escape it. Using micro-history methodology, in-depth analyses have been made of individuals and situations mostly found in judicial cases from the navy’s own court (the admiralty court).

    Social relations were however not only a result of naval control. They were also highly guided by social orders that existed in civil society. Thus naval rank emerged with marital status, age, experience and masculinity ideals into a complex and shifting hierarchy that was constantly questioned. The dissertation shows that upholding naval social order was dependent on the fact that the Admiralty and officers used both productive and repressive power strategies simultaneously. The naval order offered opportunities and careers to those who were obedient and skilful but could threaten the disobedient troublemaker with severe punishments. The order was also highly dependent on individual relations and situations. Since order primarily was challenged in face to face- situations the superiors had to devise power strategies to control those situations. By doing that they at the same time reduced all resistance to separate, single events and repeatedly rejected the slightest implication of any criticism towards the general social order. The power relations thus were a delicate theater were both superiors and subordinates pretended their actions meant something else than it did. From the point of view of the subordinates the social order always was about obligations and rights but from the superiors’ perspective social order basically was the main difference between chaos and control.