New sweden

Sweden’s failed colonisation of the Delaware, 1638 to 1655
Under Gustav II Adolf Sweden seemed to acquire a keen taste for conquest, an integral part of what historian Sven A. Nilsson refers to as Sweden’s ‘policy of aggrandisement’. Adhering to this general policy Sweden sought to increase her standing in Europe and indeed the world. Therefore, one could view Sweden’s attempt to found a colonyin North America as a symptom of a national policy designed to increase Swedish prestige. However, the short history of New Sweden, as Sweden’s colony on the Delaware came to be known, is ultimately one of frustration and failure.
With a few exceptions, Sweden’s efforts to establish global trading posts under the General Trading Company, the Old South Company and then the United South ShipCompany, had been met with disappointment. However, despite this the idea was revived under Gustav Adolf during a ‘lull in the wars’, and amid the economic fears of costly wars and a ‘sharply declining’ Baltic trade. In 1632, with Sweden under the six year old Queen Christina, Axel Oxenstierna assumed the brunt of power in policy-making in the country. By 1635 Oxenstierna, along with Dutchman SamuelBlommaert, had resolved to found a colony to be guided by another Dutchman, one Peter Minuit, the former director of the New Netherland Company. In 1638, with the arrival of the Key of Calmar and the Griffin in the Delaware, the men realised their dream of founding both a colony and a ‘rival company under Swedish protection’. Only seventeen years later this dream was destroyed by a Dutch invasionand the conquest of New Sweden.
Ultimately it was the Dutch, who had long ‘looked upon the Swedes as interlopers’, and their use of direct military action which ended Swedish control of the Delaware. However, though the Dutch bear this ultimate responsibility, and there were some difficulties with the English to the north and south, the failure of New Sweden was in many ways self-inflicted. Ashistorian Hans Norman points out, before the Dutch invasion the colony was already in a ‘state of decay’, in large part due to the general neglect it had suffered at the hands of the mother country. Though there was ‘generally a wish to preserve’ New Sweden, internal disputes, the prioritisation of domestic issues, and the ‘overshadowing dictates of military policy and war-financing’ resulted infailures to provide the colony with the resources, supplies, finances, leadership, and people it needed. Therefore, I shall analyse the demise of New Sweden by examining internal factors, such as Sweden’s inability to adequately populate the colony, alongside external factors, such as the actions of the English and Dutch in New Sweden, or the military offensives against Sweden from Russia andDenmark. Furthermore, I shall separately examine New Sweden and Sweden, analysing the extent to which problems in the colony can be attributed to the home country.
The first factor to consider in the failure of New Sweden is the role of the Sweden’s domestic leadership. The leadership must in many ways accept much of the blame for the myriad of problems New Sweden had to endure before the Dutchinvasion; after all it was they who were responsible for overarching policy and strategy, upon which the colony’s survival depended. As previously mentioned, much of the original ‘initiative’, ‘capital’, ‘knowledge and experience’ which drove the New Sweden venture came from Dutchmen. Therefore in 1642, after nationalism and lower than expected profits galvanised a Dutch withdrawal, policy underwent adramatic shift as the enterprise became wholly Swedish, and the government was brought into ‘direct involvement’. Historian Stellan Dahlgren describes this phenomenon as a shift from the “English-Dutch” colonial model, which prioritised ‘merchant interests’, to the “French-continental” colonial model, which relied upon royal intervention. The crucial outcome of this shift to complete Swedish...