My paper for the conference in Berlin, March 2004, is intended to be a presentation of my ongoing PhD-project and some key concepts within it. The project focuses on the role of the military establishment in the social reproduction of the upper stratas of Swedish (thereby also including roughly present-day ...
(Show more)My paper for the conference in Berlin, March 2004, is intended to be a presentation of my ongoing PhD-project and some key concepts within it. The project focuses on the role of the military establishment in the social reproduction of the upper stratas of Swedish (thereby also including roughly present-day Finland) and Danish society during the period 1730-1800.
The main focus of previous research done on early modern military history with ambitions bordering to social history, has quite often put emphasis on questions like ”what role did different social groups play within the military establishment?” ”How did the military as a corporation / guild work? And: ”How did the early modern state-formation - often stressing the role of warfare and the formation of a standing army and navy - affect society?”
My thesis, in relation to the above mentioned ambitions, focuses instead upon what the military could do for the (sometimes different) social groups and their social reproduction that were involved in the officers corporations, rather than asking what different groups did for the military and their country. The project in its approach, therefore has similarities with present-day research done on the function of elite schools as reproductive tools of the upper classes in modern European and American society.
Two concepts are essential for the understanding of the overall outline of the project and thereby also the understanding of the conditions of upper strata early modern life, namely the concept of redistribution and the quite broad concept social reproduction. These two concepts are on an abstract theoretical level two rather separate ones. In the actual early-modern life of the upper stratas, however, they were heavily intertwined.
The idea of comparing Denmark and Sweden in this aspect is motivated by the fact that the military in both countries had a rather important role in society in general and in the redistributive system in particular. There are however also differences between the two countries, that makes a comparison favourable. Denmark was during the whole period an absolute state in a political sense, which is not true for Sweden (until the period 1772-1809). Another difference is how the officers were paid – mostly in kind in Sweden, and in cash in Denmark. A third difference is the groups involved in the two countries military establishments. In Sweden the nobility held a rather dominant position. In Denmark, on the other hand the noble influence was, as a part of Danish absolute politics, curtailed. This means, in short, that the groups involved and the possibilities of using the military, as an arena of social reproduction were quite different.
The conference-paper will be written in an English and a german version.
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