State Building and Capitalism: The Rise of the Swedish Bureaucracy

The purpose of this article is to answer the following question: When did Swedish bureaucracy arise? That is, to determine a point in time when the organizational technology that Weber called bureaucracy became dominant in the process of Swedish state formation, as well as when bureaucracy finally replaced the feudal form of government based on the authority of nobility and the hierarchical ties of individual loyalties. The importance of this question relates to the debate on the sequential logic of economic and political development. The change from an aristocratic/particularistic to a bureaucratic/universal state apparatus can be understood as a change from despotic to infrastructural state power. Most empirical material indicates that, in terms of institutional structure, the transition to a bureaucratic administration started in the 1850s. Contrary to what most Swedish historians have argued, the Swedish state remained feudal and particularistic all they way up to the mid‐19th century. If any particular decade is key to this transformation, it would be the 1870s. By then the last of the noble privileges had disappeared, a uniform salary system had been introduced, and the various state apparatuses had begun reorganizing toward a higher level of efficiency and rationality.