This article investigates popular perceptions of Swedishness in early 17th century Sweden. The starting point is the well-known fact that ordinary people used concepts such as Swedes and Danes to describe themselves and others. The empirical basis of the survey is popular narratives recorded in protocols from six Swedish county courts bordering the kingdom of Denmark during the period 1600-1658. The overall question is whether these expressions reflected a political or imagined cultural (ethnic) community. The result of the survey shows that, besides being perceived politically and judicially, on an everyday popular level Swedishness was also imagined as a cultural community. The ethnic dimension of this was not religious, and probably not linguistic, but consisted of an imagined community of being native-born and having kin and friends in a common emotionally associated fatherland.

Under the peace treaty of Brömsebro in 1645 the largest island of the Baltic Sea, Gotland, became a part of the Swedish Kingdom. Until then it had been under Danish control, and since the late fifteenth century the Danish authorities had pursued the economic, judicial, administra-tive and ecclesiastical incorporation of the island. This policy was continued, and its scope wide-ned, by the Swedish state after 1645 Both Danish and Swedish approaches to incorporation involved bureaucratization, including the regulation of the local administration, and the legal and tax systems, combined with a more professional corps of state servants. Written documents were increasingly used as an instrument of control. The main purpose of this dissertation is to study the process of incorporating Gotland viewed from ’below’. Central are the Gotland peasants’ own thoughts and patterns of political behaviour during a time of transition.

Att byta nationstillhörighet har aldrig varit helt okomplicerat. I drygt trehundra år har vi varit svenskar i sydsverige, men levde innan dess desto längre som självklara danskar. Den nationella identiteten är inget som är inristat permanent i en person eller ens ett folk, utan är utbytbar nu som då, om behovet skulle uppstå.

The notion of ‘formulaic language’ in terms of analytical tool appears relevant from a historical perspective, e.g. with respect to early-modern state building. Centralization of political power and homogeneity of legal and other institutional arrangements – two key features of the modern state – was preceded by or, as in some cases, went hand in hand with conceptual innovation, linguistic standardization, and new ways to talk and write about politics and statesmanship in diplomatic and legal context. For example, the two, emerging Nordic states – Denmark and Sweden – are cases in point. However, neither Denmark nor Sweden were homogenous entities from an ethnic and cultural point of view. Denmark enclosed both what would eventually (re-)emerge as independent Norway, as well as substantial parts of what today is southern Sweden. Seventeenth-century ‘Sweden’ included not only future Finland but also large parts of today’s Baltic Republics and slices of Northern Germany. Differentiation in terms of identity, legal definitions, and institutional arrangements was typical to the processes involved with formation of the state but also, considering the modern period, concerns about the moral improvement of the subjects. Our focus in this paper is how cultural diversity and ideas about modern nationhood and moral improvement reflect in formulaic sequences at administrative level. From an empirical point of view we hold that border regions of different types provide particularly interesting cases with respect to formulaic language. We draw on empirical illustration – petitions and so called five-year reports by local governors – from the 17th- 19th centuries and the Swedish-Danish region of Halland.