3     1648: The Beginning of the Great Leveling

Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.

—Abba Eban

The greatness of this realm stands and falls with the Falun mine.

—Queen Christina of Sweden (1640)

The tensions between church and state descended from an uneasy mutual dependency into a spiral of competition and conflict. The successor rivalry between public and private power followed a similar trajectory, even if the means of conflict were often subtler and the need for collaboration has remained much stronger. The reasons for both the similarities and differences between this later power struggle and that which preceded it can be traced back to the period during which the church-state battle was coming to a head and large corporations were first coming into existence.

That period also witnessed a tectonic shift in history that resonates to this day. That tremor might be characterized as the beginning of the great leveling, a centuries-long process of both rethinking and redistributing public power. It reversed a system of power in the Western world that was essentially an ongoing struggle for local and regional supremacy reflected and institutionalized via layer upon layer of constantly reordered hierarchies. Its flaws, fractures, and collateral damage—illustrated most clearly through the chain of conflicts we now call the Thirty Years’ War—ultimately moved not only the West but also the rest of the world to a system that has been marked ever since by a continuous redistribution of power and an ever-increasing emphasis on the rule of law rather than that of force. While the consequences were unintended, the primary beneficiaries of this “leveling” were not the aristocrats, or even the common citizens who championed it over the centuries, but rather private enterprises, “artificial” individuals that used the changes to accumulate power and to challenge efforts to constrain their growing influence.

Force is still with us, of course. But as its costs have risen and legal institutions have grown stronger, a perceptible shift has occurred in how competing powers have asserted themselves and attempted to resolve their disputes. Further, as a result of the legal systems taking root and key legal principles winning universal or widespread acceptance, the old hierarchic view of the world began to crumble, as did the ancient hierarchies themselves. By the mid-seventeenth century, the notion of empires or religions possessing universal power was supplanted by the idea of a world of separate and equivalent sovereign states. By the mid-eighteenth century, the concept of sovereign rulers was undercut by the idea that the true wellspring of sovereign power was the people themselves. By the mid-nineteenth century, the rise of an industrial era saw a massive redistribution of economic power to private enterprises and a concurrent effort to shift hierarchic economic power away from capitalists to workers or shareholders. By the mid-twentieth century and continuing through to the first years of the twenty-first, all these struggles advanced further, with nation-states that had once been empires seeing colonies break off, the number of nations grow, and, simultaneously, development after development occur that either reduced the powers of the state or strengthened those of would-be challengers to states, be they private, supranational, or transnational.

As Gustav Vasa Lay on His Deathbed

Dark, cool and still, the first few hours of September 29, 1560, in Stockholm’s royal palace were tense. The king, who had through the force of his will transformed Sweden into an independent modern kingdom, was taking his last breaths, and uncertainty hung in the air. In his last years, Gustav Vasa’s great red beard had grown gray, and as it lay lank across his bedclothes with each rise and fall of his chest, observers wondered what would come next. Would the king’s sons be able to hold together what he had fought to build? Was this dying sixty-four-year-old man personally essential to what had been made of the fragmented kingdom that had been pulled at for generations by foreign rulers and the church in Rome? Was it his genius or his own special brand of fury? His generalship? His brutality? His micromanagement, which included hundreds and hundreds of detailed letters to his subjects advising them precisely how he wanted his kingdom to be run?

Or was something else in play? Was he—like Henry VIII in England, another monarch who had also rebuffed Rome and asserted his sovereignty—part of a broader historical trend? That trend reflected the decline of the Catholic Church and the ascendancy of nations built on the back of a new economy in which merchants, millers, tradesmen, and farmers were using new technologies and growing trade to foster growth—and Gustav, like Henry, had seen and seized an opportunity to better tap into the revenues that the new economy was generating. Did Gustav’s last thoughts bring him back to the days of his arrival on the national stage? To his being held hostage overseas, or to his return to Stockholm in time to witness—but avoid—the wholesale slaughter of the Swedish nobility (including his father and brothers) at the hands of Denmark’s king Kristian II? Or to the uprising he then led, with the assistance of the men of Dalarna, to rout the foreign occupiers that led to his election as king a year later, when he was only twenty-five? Were his tumultuous relations with those men of Dalarna on his mind, perhaps evoked by the glint of candlelight off a bit of copper or bronze in the palace, a soldier’s pike, or a servant’s kettle? They had lifted him up, and when he then sought to impose his will, they had pushed back. He had asserted himself at the end of a sword, but throughout, he knew he depended upon them and their mine, gradually taking over direction of Stora Kopparberg’s copper exports and much of its operations—though the mine masters were damnably difficult to control and maintained a frustrating degree of autonomy throughout his reign.

In the end, Gustav Vasa knew, success as a king was as much linked to economic fortunes as it was to cunning or ruthlessness or wisdom. Sweden was a state because he had pushed out the Catholic Church and seized the revenues that went to it, and because he had the mine producing exports to all Europe that provided much-needed hard currencies. While his translation of the Bible into Swedish and his following the formulas of the Reformation to create a Protestant nation would be seen by others as having a spiritual element, he knew that for him the transformation was most important for what it said about the state and its king, and for what it brought to the national treasuries.

Still, he recognized that for all he had achieved, the battle between the princes of the church in Rome and across Europe and the native-born princes of the patchwork of nations and duchies and free states and empires was still ongoing. He no doubt could imagine that his sons might one day battle for his throne in the same way that every man with true power in Europe battled others who coveted what he had and sought to take advantage of his weaknesses.

Shortly after the old king finally expired that early September morning, it became clear that he had thought ahead, seeking to bring at least some modicum of stability to the kingdom he had done so much to build. His funeral, carefully planned prior to his demise, was the most elaborate Stockholm had ever seen. Its size and extravagance sent a message about the strength of the state: unrest should not get out of hand. Gustav lay in bed while his sons, led by Prince Erik, helped orchestrate a two-day-long procession of symbols of the power, scope, and hierarchy of their kingdom. Effigies of the king and two of his three wives (with only three over his lifetime, this is one area in which he clearly lagged behind his English contemporary) were displayed, as were arms, armor, banners, flags, and symbols of all that was Swedish. The liturgy was that of the reformed church, but the eulogy, delivered by the latest Bishop Peter of Vasteras, a friend of the king, was carefully calibrated to send a message of both praise and defense of the idea that the kingship of Sweden should be passed on through heredity rather than election. Peter and the others close to the king were seeking to send the message that stability and the welfare of the state turned on keeping it all in the Vasa family, to convey the idea that sovereignty could and should be the birthright of a single family. While it would be two and a half centuries before this idea was successfully challenged, for the time it represented a step forward—the concept that somehow the fate of nations should be determined within the borders of those nations with a minimum of foreign interference.

Gustav was buried in the Cathedral of Uppsala with all three of his wives. His son Erik succeeded him, and almost immediately many of the problems so typically associated with hereditary rule began to manifest themselves. Gustav’s three sons spent the rest of their lives grappling with one another for power. One was mentally unstable and ended his days in prison. The next was a Catholic who married a devout Pole, both of whom stirred religious resentment among Sweden’s nobility. Third came Charles, who assumed the throne in 1604.

Charles is seen by history as having achieved two primary accomplishments during his seven-year reign. First, he restored many of his father’s Protestant reforms. Second, he was father to perhaps the greatest of all Swedish monarchs, the man who built upon his grandfather’s idea of a strong Swedish state and, with the vital assistance of the miners of Falun, turned it into one of the great powers of Europe—and, in so doing, set in motion a chain of events that would eventually enshrine into international law the idea of national sovereignty advanced by Gustav Vasa.

A Headlong Leap into Either the Arms of Mary or a Mountain of Dung

The historical moment that established Charles’s son Gustavus Adolphus as perhaps the greatest of all Swedish monarchs (and as a vitally important European leader and one of the great battlefield generals of history) was also linked to the unresolved struggles that had created the opening for his grandfather, Gustav I. The Reformation had weakened the church, but it and its allies were still a formidable force across Europe. Kingdoms and principalities were divided between Catholic and Protestant. Claims and counterclaims on revenue, land, and privileges triggered conflicts apparently without end—bloodsoaked days like those at Worringen in 1288 came and went with the frequency of full moons in the three and a half centuries that followed. Some battles were framed as personal. Some were portrayed as historical grudge matches. Some were draped in religious explications and justifications. It hardly mattered. The system for determining who was in charge—which means the system for determining who got what—was unstable. Europe was swept up in economic, religious, and political tides of change, and the result was great swirling uncertainty and looming catastrophe.

For some, like the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors who were sometimes their allies and sometimes their rivals, the path to stability lay with restoring a paramount power in Europe. Both claimed do so in the name of history and of God, and by the early years of the seventeenth century, both found themselves allied again in a struggle against a counterforce that was not so much a unified power as it was a unifying desire among many to assert their independence.

Perhaps the rawest source of tension on the divided continent came in the area we think of today as Germany. It was an important part of the homeland of the Franks, the people united by Charlemagne, the man who sought to restore order to Europe through his own supremacy as the first Holy Roman Emperor in A.D. 800. And it was also the birthplace of the Reformation, thanks to the writings and activism of Martin Luther. The interests of the Catholic Church in the region were manifest in a variety of principalities including Bavaria, but the principal force on behalf of the church was still the Holy Roman Empire, led in the region by a Habsburg dynasty that harbored as one of its central ambitions the re-Catholicization of Germany. The empire had been weakened greatly by the Reformation, of course, especially now that its effects had reached places as remote as Sweden and England. At the same time, by the early years of the seventeenth century, the Protestant rivals of the empire had become emboldened.

In 1609, a forty-two-year-old nobleman and veteran officer of the empire’s campaigns against the Turks named Heinrich Matthias Graf von Thurn und Valsassina, who also happened to be born of Protestant parents in Bohemia, led a group of his fellow Protestant nobles into the inner chambers of the emperor Rudolf II. The group had been explicitly forbidden to confront the emperor, but they were implacable. The empire ruled over Bohemia, and it enacted repressive policies toward Protestants. Thurn and his allies, known as the Defensors, demanded that Rudolf sign what came to be known as “the Letter of Majesty.” This document guaranteed greater religious freedom to Bohemian Protestants, including the rights of Bohemian lords, knights, and towns to choose freely between Protestantism and Catholicism. It also sought to protect these rights through the election of ten defenders and the creation of a Protestant militia.

Rudolf agreed to these terms for a reason that might seem familiarly calculated and remote from the underlying religious or political-philosophical principles involved: he needed support against his older brother Matthias, who wanted his throne. As part of the deal, in order to cement the support of Thurn and those he led, Rudolf granted Thurn the position of castellan of Karlstadt, the royal office in charge of the crown jewels and the royal regalia, a position that was significant in that it gave the Bohemian nobleman a central role to play in future royal successions.

Those successions followed without much delay. Three years after Thurn and the other Defensors barged in on Rudolf, Rudolf died and Matthias took over. Not surprisingly, Matthias alienated the group by upholding the Letter of Majesty in only the most minimal fashion. He transferred some of his lands to the church, banned Protestant worship in two towns he determined fell under Catholic jurisdiction, and prevented peasants from attending church services on neighboring estates. While not technically in violation of the letter, these actions were certainly an affront to its spirit.

But frail old Matthias was not long for the world either. After only five years in office, he was succeeded by Ferdinand of Styria, a cousin who was an even more devout Catholic. Thurn and the other nobles were worried—with good reason—that Ferdinand would be even less inclined to honor the Letter of Majesty than his cousin had been. In fact, Thurn had been one of only two delegates in the Bohemian Diet who opposed Ferdinand’s accession as king of Bohemia. As a consequence of this opposition, he lost his position as castellan of Karlstadt. A loyalist supporter of Ferdinand named Jaroslav Borita von Martinitz replaced him. The Protestant leaders pressed Ferdinand for confirmation that he would honor his forebear’s commitments. He rebuffed them. Thurn and others drafted a petition objecting to his stance and the policies that Matthias had imposed and Ferdinand supported. While the emperor offered to travel to meet with the Protestants, Bishop Klesl, a Catholic leader who was a close adviser to the emperor, sensed an opportunity. He wrote a letter forbidding the Protestants to reconvene, and he chose the empire’s lord regents in Prague to deliver this message.

In retrospect, the lord regents of Prague may have wished he had chosen different messengers. Infuriated by the bishop’s stance and the drift of policy from the most recent two emperors, Thurn ignored the ban on the gathering of his Protestant allies. He convened the group and urged them to confront the regents directly at Prague’s Hradcany Castle. While the regents expected a civil exchange of views, Thurn had other plans. He arranged to have a captain of the castle guard let his men in, and on the morning of May 23, 1618, according to the recollection of Martinitz, they barreled into the council chamber “quite cheekily, and causing a great deal of importunity.” The angry Protestants expected a significant number of regents to be present, but they found only four plus a secretary.

The level of discontent within Thurn’s group was revealed to all present when they brandished the weapons they had concealed in the folds of their clothing. They demanded that someone take responsibility for Klesl’s offending letter. Thurn himself confronted Martinitz and kicked him to the ground. Sensing the situation, two of the regents, the Lord Supreme Burgrave and the Lord Grand Prior, immediately denied having anything to do with the letter and reaffirmed their commitment to the Letter of Majesty. It was a canny move. The two were permitted to leave the room—by the door.

That left only Martinitz, another regent named Vilem Slavata, and their secretary, Phillip Fabricius. The regents assumed that the worst that would befall them would be to be dragged out of the room and arrested. But Thurn and several of his band whipped up anti-Catholic sentiment in the room. Frenzied, they picked up Martinitz and Slavata and dragged them not to the door but to an open window on the far side of the room. At this point the two men begged for an opportunity to make their last confession. The Protestants laughed and taunted the men, then tossed the two high-placed representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor out the window. Slavata managed to grab hold of the windowsill, but one of the Protestants used the hilt of his sword to hammer the regent’s fingers and he lost his grip. Then, for good measure, out too went the only other Catholic in the room, the poor secretary, Phillip Fabricius.

Miraculously, despite being heaved out of a third-story window and falling a hundred feet, none of the three died. Catholics assert this was because they invoked the name of the Virgin Mary as they fell and she interceded on their behalf. Protestants pointed out that they had all landed in a pile of manure at the bottom of a dry moat. There’s nothing to suggest, of course, that both assessments are not true. What is indisputable, however, is that while none of the three met his end there on that spring morning, in a real sense, medieval Europe did.

The Prague defenestration was not the first in that city’s history. Two hundred years earlier, a civil uprising had ended with a dozen or so top officials being tossed out one of the city hall’s windows. In fact, it is alleged that when mobilizing his men to head to the castle, Count Thurn suggested that they would throw the regents out the window “as is customary.” But less important than the means by which the Protestants showed their displeasure with the rulings of the emperor and his supporters like Bishop Klesl is the fact that the event is seen to have triggered a three-decades-long conflict. The Thirty Years’ War marked the real end of the efforts of the Catholic Church and its allies to assert political supremacy in Europe and the beginning of a new order based on the idea that the state rather than the church was the ultimate sovereign.

That Thirty Years’ War left such a scar on Europe that even at the end of the bloody, industrialized atrocities of the twentieth century it was regarded, along with the two world wars, as the most grievous military calamity to befall the Continent in its history. (It says something about the nature of Europe and its circular history that the first of those two world wars began with the shooting of a Habsburg.) But from our perspective it also marks a turning point, the beginning of the resolution of the church-state struggle and the emergence of the successor rivalry between public and private power. What is more, as we shall shortly see, it is a turning point that would not have unfolded as it did without the output of a mine that was now entering its ninth century of operation and its fourth century as an organized corporation. The Sweden of Gustavus Adolphus and Stora Kopparberg would be the decisive factor in determining the outcome of this war, the ultimate triumph of the idea of the supremacy of the nation-state and the move toward the social, political, and economic revolutions that would follow. In fact, it’s not entirely an accident that the man who could be said to have started the Thirty Years’ War, Count Thurn, after several initial battlefield setbacks leading Protestant troops, ultimately found himself on the winning side as a lieutenant general in the service of King Gustavus Adolphus.

A War Won by a Company?

In reality, the Thirty Years’ War was neither a single war, nor did it actually last for thirty years. It represented the culmination of hundreds of years of conflicts and their intersection on a patchwork battleground in which old and new rivalries and campaigns intersected like crowds in a city square, often becoming unintelligibly tangled and blended. It was also not entirely a war between states or even between church and state. In fact, among its key combatants and supporters were found an emerging class of global actors: corporations.

While we know that companies and even legally constituted corporations existed for centuries before the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was not until the first few years of that century that a movement began that would see a blossoming and transformation of the role companies could play. An important driver of this phenomenon had to do with one of those major periodic technological transformations that produced far-reaching social, political, and economic consequences. In this case the transformation had to do with the success that European navigators had achieved during the Age of Exploration. Advances in the design of seagoing vessels, constant improvements in navigational tools, and systematic mapping of the world made it possible to travel great distances and thus to embark on new frontiers both in terms of trade and conquest.

The problem was that expeditions overseas were expensive, risky, and slow. Significant capital had to be raised to finance missions, and while big profits were often possible, so too were great losses. What’s more, it would often be several years after an investment was made before it was known which outcome fate had offered up. To offset these risks, it made sense for investors to come together, as had the master miners of Falun, to form corporations whose shareholders could collectively insulate each other from the downside and share the upside of their endeavors. Better still, risk could be offset in yet another way if such ventures could exist over an extended period and thus cover more than one expedition.

Given the nature of the times, such ventures required, as did Stora, the official sanction of ruling authorities. The authorities in turn saw these enterprises not only as a source of revenue but as a mechanism to finance their international ambitions, extending their reach in a new form of public-private partnership. As a consequence, some of the earliest companies were endowed with very nationlike powers, including the ability to raise armies, wage war, seize territory, and even govern. In fact, it has often been observed that these early companies—in their global scope and unique hybrid powers—bear a striking resemblance to many of their multinational successors of today.

Among the first of these ventures was the British East India Company, chartered on December 31, 1600, to the Earl of Cumberland and more than two hundred “Knights, Aldermen and Burgesses.” The anticipated duration of the company’s existence was fifteen years; it would exist for 274 years, during which time it would field one of the world’s largest militaries and rule the Indian subcontinent. (The company was actually modeled in part on an earlier venture called the Muscovy Company, which was founded in 1555 and continued operating until the later years of the First World War).

Soon after, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was created to enable the Dutch to compete more effectively with their English rivals for domination of the spice trade. It too was envisioned as lasting just twenty-one years, and yet it was a major force on the world stage for almost two centuries. It too ultimately gained the power to mint its own coins, rule colonies, and battle rivals with brute force. For a time, it was even more dominant than the British East India Company in economic terms, in the size of its fleets, in the volume of its trade, and in the reach of its trading activities. And just as the overseas holdings of the British East India Company became what is modern-day India, so too did the spice island holdings of the Dutch company become what we now know as the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia. Other such companies soon followed, including the London Virginia Company in 1606, the Danish East India Company in 1616, the Portuguese East India Company in 1628, and the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, which is still operating today as a Canadian corporation. All played a significant role in the geopolitical remapping that followed the Thirty Years’ War.

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We will look in a little more depth at two companies that revealed the emerging centrality of private power through their roles during the conflict that remade Europe. One, to which we will come back shortly, is Stora Kopparberg. The second is the Dutch West India Company. It was not the biggest or the longest surviving of these joint-stock companies, existing from 1621 to 1791, but its role in the Thirty Years’ War is such that it exemplifies how such ventures were used and why they were soon favored by so many would-be global powers.

By the time Thurn was introducing Martinitz to the miracle of flight, the Habsburgs for whom Martinitz worked were fighting a two-front war against Protestantism. Part of this was due to the extent of the Reformation, and part of it was due to the extent and subdivision of Habsburg holdings. Those holdings had reached their zenith during the reign of Charles V, who, by virtue of extremely good genetic fortune, inherited all the lands of his four grandparents: Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon (collectively, the crown of Spain), Mary of Burgundy (incorporating the Netherlands), and Maximilian of Habsburg (Austria and the Holy Roman Empire).

During his lifetime, Charles conducted wars against the Ottoman Turks (who were allied with his enemies in France), maintained the Inquisition, led the push for the Council of Trent (which launched the Counter-Reformation), and took both military and other measures to fight the spread of Protestantism. He also oversaw the crushing of the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. That said, he was also reportedly uncomfortable with excessive violence (at least by the standards of contemporary kings), and he sought counsel to reconsider the moral issues associated with the conquest of the Americas. He sponsored Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world, and ultimately, troubled by gout, he retired to a monastery during the last two years of his life.

When he stepped down, his brother Ferdinand succeeded him as Holy Roman Emperor, and his son, Philip II, received Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, and the Indies. This split the Habsburg dynasty into Madrid and Vienna branches. It also suggested a weakening that was bound to be tested, given the tensions associated with the Reformation. Not long into Philip II’s reign, just such a test came in the Low Countries. The result was one of those conflicts that ultimately overlapped and intersected with the Thirty Years’ War, this one known as the Eighty Years’ War.

Protestant nobles in the northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands began to rebel in the late 1560s, and by 1579, the seven northern provinces had formed the Union of Utrecht, which rejected Philip’s authority. Less than a decade later they shifted political power to an assembly called a States General, which granted each province a vote, and this entity in turn became the United Provinces of the Netherlands, known familiarly as the Dutch Republic. Philip responded by sending troops, but at the time, Spain was engaged in wars with the English, the French, the Turks, and the Portuguese as well as its overseas military enterprises in the Americas and Asia. This overreach led Philip’s treasury to declare bankruptcy three times during his reign despite the huge flows of resources that were pouring in from the New World. No money in the treasury meant no money for troops, and in 1596, unpaid Spanish troops mutinied and the rebels gained the upper hand. Philip died two years later, and while his son, Philip III, was unwilling to concede defeat, he was also unable to mount a counteroffensive. By 1609 the two sides agreed to a twelve-year truce. It wasn’t exactly an acknowledgment of independence, but it amounted to much the same thing, with only a handful of the southern provinces of the Netherlands remaining in Spanish hands (these would later become Belgium).

This breather in the contest gave the Dutch a chance to consolidate their victory. They cultivated industries new and old including publishing, textiles, and arms; reclaimed land; and promoted active global trade. They initially did this under the flag of the Dutch East India Company. Of the Dutch Republic’s gross national product, 5 percent came from the arms trade and the same amount came from the trading ventures of the East India Company, which soon became the first joint-stock company to have its shares traded on the open market. An exchange bank was founded in Amsterdam in 1609 that soon made that city Europe’s leading financial center—which in turn enabled the Dutch to gain access to capital on much better terms than could their chronically financially strapped adversaries.

Because much of the power in Holland was held by the militant Calvinist house of Orange-Nassau, which harbored ambitions to reunify all the lowlands by taking the Spanish Netherlands as well as a commitment to spreading Protestantism, the truce was sure to unravel in the wake of the events in Prague. The Dutch, under Maurice of Nassau, architect of much of their conflict with the Spanish, quickly came to the support of the Protestant cause, which was symbolized by the election of Maurice’s nephew Frederick V to assume the crown of Bohemia. Maurice’s support involved arms, cash, and a careful calculation that by supporting the new conflict he would position the Dutch for success should the truce with the Spanish fail to be renewed in 1621.

The negotiations to renew the truce ultimately broke down when the Spanish made demands that the Dutch cease their trade in the West Indies and tolerate Catholicism at home. While the Spanish had little appetite for war, due to their financial challenges, the death of Philip III, and the fact that his son was only sixteen at the time of succession, tensions grew and battles erupted. Advisers to the young king argued that the cost of maintaining the Spanish army of Flanders was almost as high in peace as it was in war and that a war might reverse Dutch gains overseas that had begun to take a toll on Spanish shipping. Seeking to pin down the Dutch as they defended their homeland, Spain’s general, the Italian-born Ambrosio Spinola, led the army of Flanders to what became the celebrated siege of Breda in 1624. The Dutch surrendered a year later after a loss of thirteen thousand troops.

At the same time, the Spanish changed tactics and started to squeeze the Dutch on the high seas. Close to home, they employed fleets of commercial raiding ships out of Dunkirk to attack Dutch shipping in the English Channel. In addition, they began intercepting and harassing Dutch ships from the New World. This hurt in many ways—for example, by interrupting the supply of salt that was vitally important to curing the herring on which the Dutch diet depended. (When you look at the importance of salt and trade routes to the wars of this period and the importance of spices to preserving fragile food supplies in rapidly expanding European societies, it is clear that much of the conflict of the day had less to do with spiritual conflict over religion or the hearts-and-minds battles for national identity than with keeping stomachs filled.) The Spanish finally imposed an embargo. The English and the northern German Hanseatic traders complied, and the latest phase of the Dutch-Spanish conflict truly became a trade war, with Spain able to use its fleet and its globally dispersed and hardened strategic network of fortresses to tighten the economic noose around the Dutch. Part of the response to this in the Netherlands was the formation of the Dutch West India Company.

This enterprise, modeled on the early success of its Asian-oriented cousin, within a couple of years of its founding in 1621 had made significant inroads into the Iberian-dominated sugar and slave trades and staked important new footholds in Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. (Brazil, the property of Portugal, had come into play for the Dutch with the Spanish annexation of Portugal more than three decades before.) The formation of the company was clearly as much a matter of national strategy as it was of economic initiative. Although sugar, slaves, and spices were vitally important elements of Iberian-American trade, the most valuable individual ships on the Atlantic to the Spanish monarchs were undoubtedly the galleons of Spain’s annual treasure fleet. For over a century, since the very first journeys of Columbus and those who followed in his wake, Spanish ships had been bringing gold and silver from mines in New Spain and Potosí to the port of Seville. The value of this treasure rose from over a million ducats a year between 1516 and 1520 to over thirty-six million a year a century later. The crown was entitled to its “royal fifth,” but given the additional taxes that were imposed, the Madrid Habsburgs ended up with as much 40 percent of these seaborne revenues.

As the size of the treasure grew in value and as Spain’s financial health faltered, the kingdom developed a very elaborate system of security measures to protect its vital lifeline. Spanish ships leaving Mexico and Panama would meet in Havana each March to return to Europe in a convoy escorted by a squadron of heavily armed warships. Initiated in the 1560s, the system worked well for almost a century, but in 1628, at a crucial moment in the Thirty Years’ War, it failed. In the late summer of that year, the Spanish Council of Finance reported that the treasury was once again strapped, two million ducats short of its needs for the year. This was due again to the expense of distant military operations, in this case an intervention in Mantua, Italy, and the support for the emperor’s wars in Germany. The delicate financial balance demanded a successful delivery by that year’s treasure fleet.

The Dutch understood this, since they had been the victims of Spain’s wreaking havoc with their trade routes for several years. Early that year, the Dutch West India Company financed a mission by Admiral Piet Hein to do what had never been done before: intercept and sack the Spanish treasure fleet. The Dutch had tried before, but between the challenges of locating a fleet on the high seas of the Atlantic and defeating the Spanish defenses, they had never been successful. But this time, Hein’s patient four-month search yielded different results. His fleet of thirty-one ships found the fifteen-vessel Spanish flotilla off Cuba. The Dutch took nine Spanish ships in the first attack. Hein then pursued the half-dozen remaining ships to Matanzas Bay, near Havana, and opened fire to prevent the Spanish from offloading their cargo. The Spanish had met their match. They were vastly outgunned, and they abandoned their ships.

Hein returned to the Netherlands with almost two hundred thousand pounds of gold. The shareholders of the Dutch West India Company got a 75 percent dividend, but the people of the Netherlands got a historically even more significant return. Spain was forced to choose between paying for its Italian campaign and continuing to wage war with the Dutch. The king sent his emissaries to offer to negotiate a settlement with the United Provinces. The Dutch, emboldened, did not accept the offer, instead seeking to make advances in the southern provinces.

Meanwhile, the Spanish, chastened and eager to avoid a replay of the debacle, decided to vary the schedule of their treasure fleet shipments. While this initially worked, the 1631 fleet left so much later in the year that it found itself in the mid-Atlantic during hurricane season and was destroyed in high seas and winds off the Yucatán peninsula. Spain was squeezed even harder. The crown was forced to confiscate private silver from the fleets, alienating the private investors and seamen on whom it depended. It also set aside the religious principles that had allegedly gotten it into so many of the wars it was fighting at the moment and began to borrow money from Portuguese Jews and conversos. But Spain could not keep up. Financial pressures coupled with battlefield setbacks produced a vicious cycle that forced Spain to the peace tables and ultimately coerced it to rein in its imperial ambitions. The losses of Europe’s greatest crown to a fledgling Dutch corporation was an important precipitating event that led to the undoing of the Spanish empire and also to the loss by Catholic forces in the Thirty Years’ War. Conversely, the successes of that corporation and the others of that era—born of necessity and opportunity—helped fuel the growth of empires that would succeed the Habsburgs and lead to the birth of the private empires that would enjoy their own victories to come.

The Lion of the North Roars

From the western reaches of the Atlantic, Europe got gold, silver, salt, spices, and other essentials. But the waters of the seas to its north were also plied with ships carrying vital cargo: timber, textiles, porcelain, and—essential to war and building alike—copper. And just as the Dutch, Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese made the Atlantic trade a vital front in the Thirty Years’ War, so too was trade on the Baltic vital.

In the early years of the conflict, Denmark’s king Christian made a move into Northern Europe, allegedly in support of the Protestant cause. In 1624, with British and Dutch support, Danish armies made a play for enhanced power in Germany—taking momentary advantage of the fact that the Swedes were embroiled in a Vasa family spat pitting them against the Poles. While the motive for taking up arms against imperial and Catholic League armies led by Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Count of Tilly was allegedly associated with the Reformation-born rift, in reality King Christian was seeking to strengthen Danish access to northern Germany’s ports and gain a trading advantage.

The initiative was short-lived and unsuccessful. The Danes were soundly defeated by Wallenstein, the empire’s leading general, and Tilly, who had famously won a victory at the Thirty Years’ War’s first major battle at White Mountain, effectively using his better-trained troops to crush the Protestant opposition in two hours. By 1629, the Danes sued for peace with the emperor and withdrew, having made minimal gains. Their defeat in turn emboldened the emperor Ferdinand to proclaim the Edict of Restitution, demanding the return to Catholics of all church lands taken since 1552. The edict also denied Calvinism any official recognition at all. Even on the emperor’s side, leaders from Philip II to Wallenstein winced, worried that the edict was overreaching. Their concerns were borne out. German Protestants feared that this was only a first step and that the emperor might go much further in his efforts at retribution.

They sought a champion and got one in the person of Gustav Vasa’s grandson, Gustavus Adolphus. When asked why he intervened, Gustavus Adolphus would later minimize his religious motivation, commenting that if religion was his motive, he would have gone to war against the pope. Instead, he implied, his goal was to strengthen Sweden’s hand in northern Germany, to protect the trade on which his rapidly growing kingdom was increasingly dependent. But Gustavus was more than a mere opportunist. He was a student of the Dutch leader Maurice of Nassau’s innovative military techniques. Like Maurice, he recognized a need to counter the Spanish tercio system, which had successfully capitalized on formations involving columns of men fifty across and thirty deep. He sought a more flexible, versatile approach, and he embraced lines that were only six deep and that employed soldiers equipped with muskets and copper-sheathed pikes as well as cavalry. He also made great strides in the use of field artillery, developing a copper regiment piece that could be pulled by a single horse.

Sweden’s advantage therefore lay not only in the innovations of its king but also in the resources found within the Great Copper Mountain. As king, Gustavus owned many of the mining huts of Falun and was acutely aware how valuable this precious resource was. With the Continent continuously shrouded in the smoke of cannon fire, the demand for copper was at unprecedented highs. From the time shortly after Gustavus entered the fray in 1630 until 1635, Swedish copper exports grew more than fivefold from what they had been in the same amount of time a decade earlier.

To seize the moment required not only clever battlefield tactics but smart management skills. And just as Gustavus borrowed from the techniques of Maurice of Nassau in his campaigns, he imported a Dutch manager named Louis de Geer to become his head of royal munitions. Initially just an investor at Falun, De Geer introduced methods that enabled Gustavus to produce 20,000 muskets, 13,670 pikes, and 4,700 suits of cavalry armor from 1629 to 1630 alone. Later, De Geer went into business for himself and built a major operation that was, in revenue terms, about one-third the size of the Dutch East India Company. It is easy to see how such production could be a potentially decisive factor in the Thirty Years’ War. As a result, interest in the mines grew and visitors from the Continent became more frequent. Foreign governments wanted to better understand what kind of economic engine Gustavus had at his disposal.

One such reconnaissance was conducted by a French diplomat named Charles Ogier. Visiting the mines just a few years after Gustav and his armies made their 1630 entry onto the Continent, Ogier wrote of the scope of the enterprise and the price it demanded of those who worked there:

For those of you who wish to create a picture of the Mine in its entirety, imagine a dark hole, terrible and deep, down to 60 or 70 fathoms (a little over 110 meters), dug out and arched artificially and in different directions, held up by nothing other than itself, filled with fires in different places, filled with smoke and sulfur and the smell of metal, filled with dripping water. And then, in the depths of the earth, black people, like small devils, echoes from hammers and crowbars with which the stone is broken. The cries from the mine workers, those transporting the ore to the baskets and finally the desolation and the thunderous roar which could result, should such a terrible and weighty construction collapse. For you who think you can see this in your mind’s eye you will get, if not a complete picture, at least an impression of this highly strange and remarkable phenomenon.

With the great dark pit as the origin of his army’s strength in terms of copper, weapons, and hard currency, Gustavus entered the European war with special advantages his adversaries lacked, well served by his creative military mind. He landed in Germany in July 1630. Initial progress was slow. But approximately a year later, Gustavus’s army of sixteen thousand was approached by a Catholic force of thirty-five thousand led by Tilly. Technically, Gustavus was constrained by a treaty with Catholic France, which had supported the Dutch and Swedes in a bid to offset the efforts at hegemony of their coreligionist rivals from Madrid and Vienna. Gustavus was allowed to engage Catholic League troops only if he was first attacked, and that is just what happened. In these initial skirmishes, the Swedes won modest victory after modest victory, chipping away at Tilly’s superior force. Gradually the bulk of the two armies began to converge on Saxony, which was ruled by the Protestant elector, Johann Georg. Johann had tried to remain neutral but could do so no longer and threw in with Gustavus; significantly, that put sixteen thousand Saxon troops at Gustavus’s disposal. With the sides more evenly matched and with the Swedes boasting almost twice the artillery of their opponents, Gustavus engaged Tilly in the fields outside Breitenfeld on September 17, 1631.

The Protestant army included not just troops from Sweden and Saxony but also volunteers and mercenaries from Finland, Germany, Scotland, and elsewhere in Europe (mercenaries representing an early and enduring manifestation of private power and applying the spirit of entrepreneurship to meet the demands of the times). Gustavus kept the inexperienced Saxon troops cordoned off from his well-schooled Swedish army. Close to noon, the imperial artillery began to barrage Gustavus’s army, only to be met by the more numerous, more maneuverable Swedish guns. Charge after charge from Tilly’s troops was turned away as the afternoon wore on. Ultimately it was the Saxon troops that tipped the balance, though not at all in the way Gustavus might initially have hoped. Rattled by the conflict, many of them followed their leader, the elector, in retreat. Sensing victory, a major contingent of the imperial army followed in pursuit. Tilly moved to reinforce the gap left by these troops, and in so doing he spread his army too thin. Gustavus charged the weakened center of the imperial lines. He moved his lighter guns into position and blasted away at the heart of Tilly’s defenses. The imperial armies began to break and retreat. Two-thirds of Tilly’s hitherto undefeated army was gone—dead, deserted, or, like the count himself, wounded.

Gustavus was hailed across Europe. After thirteen years, the tide of the war had taken a turn that would prove vitally important to the Protestant cause and the ultimate outcome. He marched on, taking additional territories and weakening the empire, which he likely sought to partition. Although he would fall in the Battle of Lutzen a year later, his right-hand man, the powerful chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, kept up the Swedish initiative with such skill that by the time the time peace talks began in 1643, the balance of Europe had been shifted, and there was no doubt that the previously underrated power from the north had played a central role. Gustavus Adolphus was hailed as the Lion of the North. Sweden, in no small part due to the ancient enterprise in Falun, had won control of the trade routes it sought and of lands around the entire perimeter of the Baltic. In fact, thanks to Gustavus, the country was reaching a zenith of international influence it would never again achieve, and it had, in so doing, changed the shape of global history.

Gustavus was succeeded by his extraordinary daughter, Queen Christina, who he had ordered should be raised as a prince—that is, with all the skills a young man would have been taught. She was trained in fencing and shooting; was tutored in religion, philosophy, Greek, Latin, and the great languages of modern Europe; and was exceptionally gifted on horseback. Oxenstierna wrote of her when she was fourteen that “she is not at all like a female” in that that she had “a bright intelligence.” In an effort to counteract the obviously sexist biases both of courtiers like Oxenstierna and of the era, she took the oath of office as a king rather than as a queen, thus resulting in her nickname “the Girl King.”

Part of her education was an introduction to the mine at the heart of the Swedish economy. When she was about twenty, the striking young monarch rode to Falun to urge the miners on. She and Oxenstierna, who through his long and distinguished service ultimately grew to be recognized as one of the leading figures in Swedish history, knew that Sweden’s gains during the war could not be maintained without ever-increasing output—a fact that led them ultimately to embrace unsustainable practices. Speaking to the gathered miners, she said, “Sweden stands or falls with the Copper Mountain.” Visiting yet again a few years later, she would say, displaying a view understandably rather different from that of Ogier, that she hoped the sulfurous smoke that emanated from the smelting houses in Falun would never disappear.

At the Tip of a Copper Pike: The Nation-State Takes Center Stage

In the wake of the Swedish victories, the course of the war took several more turns. First, the emperor and many of the Protestants within the empire agreed in 1635 to the Peace of Prague, which dissolved the Catholic League, granted amnesty to many former enemies of the emperor, recognized Calvinism, and suspended for forty years the implementation of the Edict of Restitution. The peace was signed, and the archduke Ferdinand, the emperor’s son, pressed for a general amnesty for anyone who agreed to the peace. Once again, the emperor miscalculated, denying amnesty for several old enemies including the Elector Palatine (who had accepted the Bohemian throne in 1620) and the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. This was enough for the Swedes and their allies in France, who had only recently entered the war in order to assert that they were still ostensibly fighting on behalf of some of the Germans on whose land they were battling.

In 1636, Ferdinand II died, replaced by his more peace-minded son, Ferdinand III. Four years later Spain faced revolts in Catalonia and Portugal, and soon after, the citizens of Naples and Sicily were similarly inspired to challenge Madrid. Philip IV’s finances were now in such dire straits that he could barely manage a 60,000-florin loan to his Vienna cousins, one-seventh of what he had given outright just two years earlier. Then, in 1643, the French won a striking victory over the Army of Flanders at the town of Rocroi, thanks to a little bit of late-night daring, a 3:00 a.m. attack on sleeping Spanish troops led by the troops of the Duc d’Enghien. After a fierce day of battle the Spanish were down to five, then two, of their once-feared tercios. The Spanish surrendered and d’Enghien led his army to the gates of Vienna by 1645, thus sending the unmistakable message to both branches of the Habsburg clan that it was time to seriously negotiate the peace.

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Not surprisingly, the peace negotiations that led to the conclusion of the many conflicts that comprised what is today known as the Thirty Years’ War were as complex, fitful, protracted, and momentous as the conflicts themselves. Initial negotiations between France and the Habsburgs started in Cologne in 1636 but were quashed because France sought the inclusion of all its allies. The Swedes meanwhile had also engaged in preliminary negotiations in Hamburg. Ultimately, all parties acknowledged that these discussions were preparation for an overall peace agreement. This agreement would itself be negotiated in two cities in Westphalia, one Catholic—Munster—and one both Lutheran and Catholic—Osnabruck. The Lutheran Swedes took Osnabruck as the location for their negotiations with the empire, while the French did their primary diplomatic work in Munster.

The half-decade-long negotiations were extraordinary in many respects. In terms of the sheer number of participants, they were a mirror onto the Europe whose future they sought to resolve. A total of 194 European kingdoms, principalities, estates, electorates, republics, and free cities were represented by 235 official envoys. While these delegations never met in any single plenary session, the discussions were effectively managed serially over the course of the five years, with the greatest concentration of participants gathering during the year and a half following January 1646.

The simple act of convening so many different actors in a secular conference, sponsored not by the church but by political actors treating one another as equals, was revolutionary, and it proved to be a model for virtually all European peace conferences that have taken place in the centuries that followed, from Utrecht in 1711 to Vienna in 1814 to Paris in 1919. For centuries, hierarchy had been a central organizing principle of European society, but at Westphalia, as a practical matter and as a step reflecting broader social and political changes that were taking place, all participants, regardless of the size of the entity they represented, were to be referred to as “Excellency,” all kings, regardless of the history of their thrones, were to be referred to as “Majesty,” and theoretically all official representatives were to arrive in the two cities on equal footing, limited to coaches pulled by no more than six horses.

These aspirations to create an equitable environment were not all honored to the letter—the Swedes arrived with a delegation of 165 including “medical personnel, cooks, a tailor and a personal shopper.” But status-based mechanisms and roles such as chairmen were done without, and much was achieved through the multiple, parallel negotiations. Leo Gross, the noted international legal scholar, has described the outcomes of Westphalia as follows:

[The treaties of Munster and Osnabruck] marked man’s abandonment of the idea of a hierarchical structure of society and his option for a new system characterized by the co-existence of a multiplicity of states, each sovereign within its territory, equal to one another, and free from any external earthly authority. The idea of authority or organization above the sovereign state is no longer. What takes its place is the notion that all states form a world-wide political system, or that, at any rate, the states of Western Europe form a single political system. This new system rests on international law and the balance of power, a law operating between rather than above states and a power operating between rather than above states.

Further, the agreements enshrined the idea that each individual state’s choice of religion was to be respected without foreign interference. While the only acknowledged choices were Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Calvinism, the principle that was established—making the leaders of each state sovereign in all political and theological matters—forms the basis for most modern theories of political science. From neorealism to neoliberalism, a central precept that has gone unchallenged to this day is that states are “autonomous, unified, rational actors” with total authority over a defined geographical area. Later in this book, we will consider whether this assumption needs to be revisited as a consequence of intervening events.

Specifically, the treaty recognized the advance of Protestantism deep into territories ruled for centuries by Catholic institutions. The Habsburgs would be able to suppress Protestantism only within very limited hereditary lands, the outlines of which would ultimately emerge as what was known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Further, Christians—living as religious minorities—would be permitted to practice their religion without interference. Spain acknowledged the full independence of the Dutch. The Dutch gave up their claims on the Spanish Netherlands and agreed to keep their trading ships away from Spain’s American colonies in exchange for Spanish recognition of Dutch rights to territories formally controlled by Portugal. The Swiss Confederation gained independence. Sweden received five million dalers with which to pay its armies and also gained Western Pomerania, Wismar, Bremen, and Verden.

Of all the participants in the conflict, the Swedes, the Dutch, and the French emerged particularly strengthened. But territorial gains and national fortunes would continue to ebb and flow over the decades and centuries to come. What made the Treaty of Westphalia (as the two treaties were collectively known) significant was the shift in collective attitudes that it enshrined, perhaps the most significant collective adjustment in political philosophy and structure that the West had seen since the fall of Rome. Notable in that context was the relatively minor role the pope himself and the Vatican played in the final outcome in Westphalia. Popes had for so long been pulled between the interests of Europe’s various leading Catholic actors—in Vienna, Madrid, Paris, or elsewhere—that it was hard for them to take sides in the war, and they spent most of its duration tending to the development of the Holy See.

The pope’s representative to Westphalia, the nuncio Fabio Chigi, was a proponent of parallel talks, which effectively eliminated the chance for the pope to play any leading role in the settlement. That point was essentially made moot by the fact that the official position of the Vatican throughout was to avoid any concessions to the Protestants. This was such a stunningly anachronistic view that it negated the influence of the pope more than any procedural, structural, or tactical undertaking could have. The official response of the Vatican to the treaty was a papal bull from Pope Innocent X that declared the agreement “null, void, invalid, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.” Psychologists have a term for such a statement. They call it projection, because in political terms it was the central role of the Catholic Church in European affairs that was being declared null, void, and increasingly empty of meaning and effect due to the church’s failure to adapt. After all, perhaps the most striking element of the Treaty of Westphalia was its provision that granted states “territorial superiority in all matters ecclesiastical as well as political.” The old battle lines were erased; the old was map remade. The hierarchies were undone. A coda was written to the epoch during which the struggle between church and state was central. The great leveling had begun—not just in the titles exchanged among diplomats, but also in the rising role of businesspeople and businesses in the affairs of the reordered sovereign states of Europe.

Coronation and Abdication, Collapse and Reinvention

The coronation of Queen Christina in 1650 in Stockholm was a kind of exclamation point attached to the country’s hard-won victories in the Thirty Years’ War. It was a massive, gorgeous, unprecedented, excessive celebration “with a splendor previously unparalleled in the realm.” Featuring a massive parade of musicians and heralds, nobles in gilded carriages and officials of state in their best finery, and the queen herself riding in a carriage drawn by six white horses shod in silver, the procession at the center of the coronation was a far more civilized sort of political theater than her great-grandfather had used to knit the kingdom together. It was also considerably more than the recently triumphant kingdom could afford, even with the workers in the mines performing at levels never before equaled, which were ultimately unsustainable. Something would surely come crashing down.

The queen herself was a contradiction, one of the great victors in the Thirty Years’ War who would within a few years renounce her throne and her religion and run off to live for years in the Vatican under the protection of a series of popes and cardinals, a striking woman who won the hearts of many men and is reputed to have had at least one woman among her great loves, a patron of knowledge and of the arts who was deeply practical, and yet a ruler and later a self-exiled queen who spent money with abandon. Under her leadership Sweden completed the transition to being a modern European power, yet at her coronation there was doubt about whether the realm had the funds to cover the salaries of the bureaucrats who ran the government.

Similarly, Sweden’s golden age has other contradictory elements to it when we look at the world of the average citizen. Despite the country’s victories—or perhaps in part because of the expense associated with them—the standard of living for the average Swedish peasant during the era was actually lower than it had been in the century before. Hunger and poverty were so commonplace that bread made of tree bark actually became a staple in the peasant diet. With Swedish soldiers demanding their pay for the wars, even with the big settlement that followed Westphalia, the economic pressures on the country were enormous. This in turn led to a major push at the mines, which had already been operating during the war at a fever pitch. The years immediately after the war were the most successful ever in terms of the amount of copper produced. But the need for output was such that little attention was paid to longer-term considerations such as maintaining the mine pit infrastructure properly. Safe practices were ignored, and miners worked on because on average even the lowest among them was still doing somewhat better than the average struggling Swede.

At the end of the year of Christina’s grand coronation, driven as they had been to produce, forty miners at Falun stood together to evaluate the year’s output. Throughout the day, the last day of December in 1650, they weighed the copper. Though they were eager to celebrate the arrival of the New Year, that had to be postponed because there was still more ore to be weighed. In the end, the numbers represented a new record for the mine: three thousand tons of raw copper. The average yield in prior years had been less than one-sixth of that. The achievement of 1650 at the mines at the time of the glittering coronation was hard to equal.

In 1654, Christina abdicated. In part, this was due to a desire to practice in public what had been her secret Catholicism. In part, this was due to the fact that she had created so many new nobles—almost five hundred overall—that she had been forced to sell or mortgage crown property to the tune of 1.2 million riksdalers annually. In the months after that, the reckoning for the mine’s neglect finally came. The great pit collapsed on itself, dirt filling in the many chambers of the mine, bringing operations to a complete halt. It was the greatest catastrophe to that date in the mine’s history. But whereas with the departure of Queen Christina, or even that of her father, it might be said that Sweden had passed its zenith, and even though the mine would never again achieve the output it achieved in 1650, it cannot be said that the enterprise called Stora Kopparberg had begun its downturn. Because, as a company, Stora was built to adapt and reinvent itself, to change and adjust with a nimbleness that a country could hardly duplicate.

In fact, Stora had begun to shift its economic foundations even as the walls of the great pit started to groan with the stresses of overmining. As the Thirty Years’ War was coming to a close, a master miner from Germany named Hans Filip Lybecker recognized that a constant supply of lumber was essential to the mine. He therefore established in the late 1640s Stora Kopparberg’s Wood Company, a venture that gradually grew over time and, thanks to good management, would offer an alternative growth path for the concern when, in the late seventeenth century it became clear that the glory days of the mine were behind it. Furthermore, as the Swedish crown grew strained, the miners at Stora found ways to enhance their independence, building their business in ways that over the next century would greatly increase its autonomy and diversify its sources of revenue.

Stora had played a central role in Sweden’s rise, and Sweden in turn had played a central role in ending the dominance of the church and asserting the rights of the nation-state. But in the early years of the era of nation-states, Stora entered a new, increasingly independent chapter in the company’s history, one that would once again track with the evolution and rise of the other companies mentioned in this chapter and indeed with an entirely new global economic structure increasingly built around the accumulation of private rather than public power. The implications for the new nation-states were more complex, and in ways more ominous, than they might have imagined, or indeed than they might imagine even today.