Thinking outside the Baltic : Swedish ambitions in Norway at the height of the Great Power Era

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine the seldom researched Swedish geopolitical interests inNorway in the first half of the 17th century, with the brief 1658 conquest of Trondheim as itscentral event of inquiry. Through the study of privy council protocols and chancellor AxelOxenstierna’s correspondence, the study builds a case for the confluence of security, commerce, andthe concepts of nations as the influencing factors that shaped Swedish imperial foreign policy in thedecades leading up to the dramatic war of 1658, yielding a theoretical construction of the Empire’sBaltic doctrine, or the Oxenstierna doctrine, as an explanatory model for Sweden’s early modernexpansion patterns. Subsequently through understanding of the Empire’s expansionist rationaleleading up to 1658, the conquest of the Norwegian province of Trondheim is put in a new light ashaving been an interruptive and complicated re-imagining of what the Swedish Empire should be.