War, Merchants, and Commodity Markets in the Baltic Sea Region, 1740–1745

This article examines how Prussia and Sweden organized their procurement of foodstuffs for their armies and how this created ties with military entrepreneurs. The study combines a transnational perspective with a contractor state approach to capture the flows of information, goods, and capital, and the mutual relationship between states and merchants. The analysis shows that the Baltic Sea region functioned as a transnational commodity market with several nodes. Unlike previous research, which has focused on trade through the Sound and on the merchants’ global connections, the results in this article show a vigorous regional trade in army supplies. The Swedish state depended to a greater extent on this market than Prussia to get hold of goods, mainly because fewer local resources were available in Finland. The Prussian state utilized to a large degree resources from its own warehouses and goods acquired from Silesia through a forced tax called contribution. Over time, though, Prussia had to broaden the geographic focus of its procurement, and its interactions with merchants, by also purchasing goods from territories not involved in the war. All in all, merchants played a substantial role in organizing warfare in Prussia and Sweden. State power increased over time, and the eighteenth-century contractor had to deal with a much stronger state bureaucracy as compared to the seventeenth century.