Civilians and Military Supply in Early Modern Finland

Petri Talvitie, Juha-Matti Granqvist

• Publisher: Helsinki University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9789523690387
• eBook ISBN: 9789523690400

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.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.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.The European armies' dependence on civilian maintenance has received growing scholarly attention in recent years, and Civilians and Military Supply in Early Modern Finland brings a Nordic perspective to the debate.Correction noticeOne 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Military Maintenance in Early Modern Europe – the Northern Exposure
• Part I: Financing the Wars
• Part II: Military Supplies and the Countryside
• Part III: Cities and the Provisioning of Armies
• Epilogue
• Index