Community, Commodity and Commerce: The Stockholm-Scots in the Seventeenth Century

The chapter challenges the received understanding that the two ‘reserved places’ on the Gothenburg city council automatically assigned top-significance to the Gothenburg-Scots within Sweden. In fact the Stockholm community, despite the lack of institutional structures such as stranger churches, an established trading company or factory, or even an ethnic guild was six times larger and carried far more commercial and political significance. What appeared to be a civic advantage in Gothenburg turns out to have been a restriction. The Stockholm-Scots operated through stealthy integration into the host society with implications for Swedish, Scottish and also English history in this sphere.

This chapter discourses the complex subject of community formation, integration and collapse. It not only reveals a hitherto unidentified community of Scots but, more importantly, contextualises their presence through comparisons with other migrant groups (Dutch and Germans) and Scots elsewhere. It tests assumptions about ethnic, political and confessional allegiances with surprising results. Their significance to Scandinavian commerce and to Swedish politics becomes evident, as does the importance of social networks across ethnicity and political borders. By following ethnic integration into Swedish society this chapter has pertinence to scholars of community formation and integration regardless of the ethnicity of the study-group.