Modernization on the Northern Fringe of Europe

• Main Authors: Herva, Vesa-Pekka, Naum, Magdalena, Nordin, Jonas M., Ojala, Carl-Gösta
• Other Authors: Symonds, James
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2018
• Subjects: Fennoscandia; Lapland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199562350.013.56

The Atlantic world looms large in discussions of how the modern world emerged, and what modernization was about; but there have been calls to engage with these topics from the perspective of ‘margins’. Covering large areas of Fennoscandia, the seventeenth-century Kingdom of Sweden represented a northern end of urban Europe, but also encompassed the mythical Lapland, homeland of the Sámi and of natural and supernatural wonders—a contested borderland between the European ‘western’ and Russian ‘eastern’ worlds. This northern fringe of early modern Europe saw dynamic arenas of interaction where new cultural forms were generated. These localized transformations and the transmutations of modernity are the subjects of this chapter. Studying early modern processes of modernization from the perspective of the northern peripheries can provide new insights and challenges, not only into the understanding of the early modern history of the Swedish kingdom, but into the general perception of these processes.