Civilians and Military Supply in Early Modern Finland | Helsinki University Press

<p>During the early modern centuries, gunpowder and artillery revolutionized warfare, and armies grew rapidly. To sustain their new military machines, the European rulers turned increasingly to their civilian subjects, making all levels of civil society serve the needs of the military.</p><p>This volume examines civil-military interaction in the multinational Swedish Realm in 1550–1800, with a focus on its eastern part, present-day Finland, which was an important supply region and battlefield bordered by Russia. Sweden was one of the frontrunners of the Military Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. The crown was eager to adapt European models, but its attempts to outsource military supply to civilians in a realm lacking people, capital, and resources were not always successful.</p><p>This book aims at explaining how the army utilized civilians – burghers, peasants, entrepreneurs – to provision itself, and how the civil population managed to benefit from the cooperation. The chapters of the book illustrate the different ways in which Finnish civilians took part in supplying war efforts, e.g. how the army made deals with businessmen to finance its military campaigns and how town and country people were obliged to lodge and feed soldiers.</p><p>The European armies’ dependence on civilian maintenance has received growing scholarly attention in recent years, and <i>Civilians and Military Supply in Early Modern Finland</i> brings a Nordic perspective to the debate.</p><p><b> Petri Talvitie</b>, PhD, is Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Helsinki. </p><p><b>Juha-Matti Granqvist</b>, PhD, is Visiting Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki. </p><p>The contributors of the book are historians specialized in early modern Finnish and Swedish society.</p> <h3>Correction notice</h3> <p>One correction has been made to Chapter 4 of this book: Talvitie, Petri. The Sales of Crown Farms and State Finances 1580–1808. Footnote 1 has been added to reflect that the chapter is partly based on an earlier work (Talvitie 2020), thus changing the original numbering of the other chapter footnotes by one. Said publication has been added to the chapter’s bibliography. Original release date: June 22, 2021. The publication has been reloaded in its corrected form on March 8, 2022. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.</p>