Project output

The project has published the edited volume Administration, and knowledge across borders (Routledge 2026). Moreover, it has resulted in several publications in academic journals and edited volumes.

Edited volume: Administration, Mobility, and Knowledge across Borders

The volume Administration, Mobility, and Knowledge across Borders (Routledge 2026) examines the interplay between knowledge-making and governance in early modern Sweden (1500–1800). It explores how state-related knowledge shaped administrative practices, extended power, and circulated within and beyond the vast realm around the Baltic Sea.

The book offers insights into the dynamics of knowledge production and mobility that underpinned state-building processes in early modern Europe. The chapters explore matters such as foreign intelligence, land surveying, colonisation, and international trade, demonstrating how diverse actors and practices contributed to the development of central administration in Sweden.

A valuable contribution to the fields of administrative history and the history of knowledge, this book is ideal for scholars and students of these topics. It will more specifically appeal to researchers studying state-building processes and transnational knowledge networks as well as those exploring the early modern Swedish state and its role in the Baltic region.

In the volume, members of the project have contributed with four chapters: In the volume introduction, Orrje and Jansson present a general framework for analysing admininstrative mobility in early modern Europe).

Moreover, the volume contains these contributions by project members:

Jacob Orrje: "The mobile official’s knowing body: cameral work, travelling, and administrative knowledge in the Swedish mining administration 1600–50"

In the early seventeenth century, Swedish mining governance was carried on horseback. Councillor Carl Bonde, charged with overseeing the kingdom’s most strategic resource, rode long circuits between copper and silver works, descended into shafts, and negotiated furnace charges with miners and foreign experts. His candid letters to Axel Oxenstierna reveal a mode of government in which authority depended on the movement and coordination of bodies: insomnia, fatigue, and broken roads marked the limits of a polity that sought to govern at a distance. Yet these same journeys also exposed the strain of that arrangement, as decisions faltered in the absence of intermediaries, materials, or reliable routes. In response, itinerant practice was progressively reorganised. By the late 1630s, Bonde’s solitary circuit gave way to a cadre of assessors whose itineraries stretched from the forests of Nasafjäll in the far north to the saltworks of Muskö and onward to the Harz and the Low Countries, importing techniques while binding loyalties across the Baltic world.

Olof Karsvall: "Land Surveying, Legibility, and State Power in Early Modern Sweden, 1628–1699"

This chapter examines Sweden’s seventeenth-century land survey as a pioneering state project that transformed a fragmented landscape into an administratively legible territory. Beginning with Gustav II Adolf’s 1628 directive to survey all villages and farms, it traces how geometrical mapping, grounded in direct measurement, standardisation, and mathematical precision, became a central instrument of governance. Over the following decades, surveyors produced more than 20,000 large-scale maps of Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic provinces, facilitating resource management and territorial control.

Surveyors emerged as crucial agents of state formation: mobile experts who linked central authority with local communities, negotiated boundaries, and translated lived landscapes into spatial knowledge. Rather than a purely technocratic exercise, the survey was a negotiated enterprise balancing central, provincial, and local interests. Long before Enlightenment-era cadastral reforms, it stood out as one of Europe’s earliest and most ambitious state-organised mapping initiatives – an enactment of power that created a durable infrastructure of territorial knowledge preserved in an exceptional map archive.

Måns Jansson: "Manufacturing improvement: craftwork, mobility, and administrative knowledge in eighteenth-century Sweden"

In mid-eighteenth-century Sweden, the improvement of manufacturing was a mobile and negotiated project, shaped by the movements of people, work techniques, and regulatory practices. This chapter explores how state-sponsored foreign travelling, domestic inspection tours, and artisanal migration formed a distributed infrastructure of “manufacturing expertise,” linking provincial craftwork to central administrative ambitions. Rather than a linear march toward bureaucratic order, improvement emerged through contingent encounters: between local producers and itinerant officials from Kommerskollegium and Manufakturkontoret, but also between foreign models and domestic adaptations, and between visions of utility and work activities. Focusing on how actors perceived and enacted the “spread and planting” of manufacturing, the chapter’s first section examines how œconomy was practiced through movement, observation, and reporting – revealing how householding ideals were integrated with administrative knowledge-making. The second section turns to practical efforts to reorganise production, tracing how foreign models were adapted to Swedish conditions. In dialogue with previous studies, the chapter argues that technical and work-related knowledge became a mode of governance, negotiated through embodied skill, institutional ambition, and transnational comparison. It shows how improvement was co-produced by mobile actors and mutable infrastructures, making manufacturing a deeply political and spatially embedded endeavour.

Uppsala Mining History

Project output

Edited volume: Administration, Mobility, and Knowledge across Borders

Other peer reviewed articles and book chapters