This dissertation is about war captivity in the early eighteenth century. It is also about the ways in which early modern local communities negotiated their boundaries towards the outside world. The resident populations’ interaction with prisoners of war (POWs) offers unique perspectives on how local communities handled wartime migrants. The dissertation studies three towns forced to receive POWs during the Great Northern War: Aarhus, in the kingdom of Denmark, Torgau in the electorate of Saxony and Uppsala in the kingdom of Sweden. It represents the first attempt to situate this conflict within the larger field of research on early modern war captivity. The dissertation uses a broad range of sources—including official correspondence, POW muster rolls, town council minutes and parish records—to reconstruct the movements and actions of individual POWs. These reconstructions show how their position in the community changed over time, a perspective that represents a distinctly new approach for studying early modern war captivity. The results underline that the local community played a crucial role in organising war captivity and, consequently, how the situation of the POWs became closely intertwined with other challenges facing the community at the time. The state strove to delegate costs and administrative responsibilities associated with housing, supporting and guarding POWs. These attempts were a forceful claim on local resources. Thus, the administration of war captivity was part of an ongoing negotiation regarding the relationship between the local community and the state. At the same time, the everyday interactions of war captivity were shaped by the fact that the status of POW lacked distinct social and legal meaning in the local context. The state showed little interest in regulating the POWs’ relationship to local institutions, such as the congregation and the legal system, leaving such questions to be negotiated on the local level. With little or no previous experience of interacting with POWs, the local community treated these people much the same as well-known and already established social groups, such as billeted soldiers and servants. The POWs’ position in the community was therefore not a great deal different from that of other groups of migrants, and the level of local belonging which POWs were able to achieve depended fundamentally on their individual ability to live up to local social norms. Of particular importance was the fact that POWs were employed in local households as servants, which provided them with a widely accepted social position in the community. However, building up a local social network, cultivating relationships with influential local patrons and marrying a local woman were processes that took time, generally requiring that the POW was able to remain in the community for several years.The experience of war captivity in Aarhus, Torgau and Uppsala demonstrates how a stranger could relatively easily achieve a basic degree of belonging in early modern towns. The threshold to full belonging, however, was steep. The dissertation argues that, particularly in Aarhus and Uppsala, the war served as an engine of social integration. Wartime mobilisation of economic and human resources destabilised these communities, creating vacant social and economic niches which some POWs were able to fill.

The chapter studies how host communities in the Danish town of Aarhus and the Swedish town of Uppsala approached the question of providing security in everyday interaction with prisoners of war during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Blomqvist argues that the prisoner policy of the Danish and Swedish crown tapped into established systems of public hospitality, modeled on the billeting of military personnel. The crown employed norms of hospitality to mobilize local resources for the war effort, delegating the cost of feeding and guarding the prisoners onto the host community. At the same time, negotiations between the state and the host community regarding the legitimacy of the prisoner policy redefined the very notions of hospitality. The prisoner policy relinquished the idea that public hospitality was founded on a fundamental solidarity between members of the community of the realm. Prisoners of war were entitled to hospitality, despite the fact that they were not members of the realm, but, quite the opposite, identified as enemies. Instead, the prisoners were expected to compensate their host by performing labor. Through service arrangements, the prisoners were formally placed in a subordinate position to their hosts and employers, expected to serve and obey. This negotiated hospitality served both as an integrative and an excluding force in the two towns.

Migrant, officer and traitor to the motherland: the death sentence against Fredrich Sahlgård and perceptions of national belonging in Sweden during the Great Northern WarIn September 1717 a Swedish court martial accused the Danish officer Fredrich Sahlgård of treason, and during this trial defining Sahglård’s nationality was a focal question. Sahlgård had been born in Sweden, but had moved to Norway as a child and the defendant therefore claimed that he could not be considered a Swede. His judges, however, argued that Sahlgård was a Swede by birth and therefore bound by both god and nature to protect his native land. Based on this argument the court sentenced Sahlgård to death and a few days later he was shot.This court martial from the great northern war reveal the limitations of studying perceptions of national identity through normative sources. Student of national identity in early modern Sweden have primarily focused on what ideas of swedishness were communicated in state propaganda and elite discourse. Several authors have claimed that contemporary perceptions of loyalty were strongly centred on the person of the monarch and expressed through the politically potent term "fatherland" (sw. fädernesland). These sources, however, tell us little of how notions of nationality were applied in practice. During Sahlgård’s trial the military court defined swedishness in a way that not just ran counter to, but expressly rejected, contemporary norms. The judges disavowed the foundations of natural law, despite its status as contemporary legal dogma, and formulated an essentialist definition of nationality, based around the concept of “motherland” (sw. fosterland) – completely disregarding the royal propaganda.On the one hand, the case study suggests that the intense military mobilization in early 18th century Sweden had a significant impact on perceptions of national identity within the Swedish army, as the arguments of the court stands out from both contemporary Swedish and European norms defined by previous research. On the other hand, the study questions what actual role national identity played during the court martial. Sahlgård was sentenced to death for being a Swede, but notions of oaths and rank seem to have been just as important in defining bonds of loyalty as definitions of nationality – if not more so.