The dissertation examines how economic matters were depicted between 1770 and 1820 in two European kingdoms. Britain and Sweden are studied during this Age of Revolutions from the state’s perspective; state-managed newspapers are examined, one from Britain, the London Gazette, and two from Sweden, Stockholms Post-Tidningar and Inrikes Tidningar. These were stable types of media that transformed slowly alongside the changing popular press. State-managed newspapers were produced both to inform and manage the loyalty of populations. Aside from the continued development of the centralized state, this was also the time when Enlightenment ideals were spreading, the public sphere was transforming, notions of the nation and nationalism were developing, and communication strategies were changing; these concepts are the basis for the model of the development of modernity used in this study. Economic matters are seen as existing in a value-realm model that gradually disintegrated over time, expressing the birth of the modern world. This model included political, social-cultural, and technological values, in addition to economic matters. This disintegration involved a sense of uniformity. In both Britain and Sweden, economic objects, practices, ideas, and discourses received similar treatments over time. This process was, however, non-linear and not complete by the dawn of industrial transformation.   The first two chapters discuss the theory and methodological approaches. The form, order, and content of the newspapers are analyzed to show how economic matters became separate or unembedded to varying degrees over a fifty-year time span. British and Swedish descriptions are compared, as well as how the other state was portrayed in the opposing newspapers. These observations are described in three empirical chapters, relating events and analyses from 1770 to 1775, 1790 to 1795, and 1815 to 1820. The results of this dissertation show how early modern economic matters can be viewed beyond quantitative contents as an expression of becoming modern, offering complimentary context. Advances in thinking about data generated modern numerical indicators, also reflected by form and order qualities. The unembeddedness of economic matters was an ongoing and non-linear process that was expressed by increased abstractness, separation, and emphasis.

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This thesis addresses four years of the turbulent history regarding a small Italian Reformed group, better known as Waldensians, that lived in the duchy of Savoy (or Italian Piedmont). It will focus on how the Swedish press presented their issues to the Swedish readership in the years 1686-1690. The source is the Ordinarie Stockholmiske Posttijdender, a newspaper that started to be published during the final years of the Thirty Years’ War, and which is the only preserved Scandinavian and Lutheran newspaper survived (until these days). Within the newspaper there are few and short reports on the Reformed groups from the Piedmont area that sometimes are in disaccord. This paper aims to see how Swedes portrayed the Waldensians through media within the Swedish Lutheran State. One main argument is that the newspaper represents a slow process of knowledge of the Waldensians. Only during the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697), the newspaper started considering them as one of the many examples to discredit Sweden’s enemies. The Swedish newspaper is thus also understood as part of the wider European news network during the centuries of the absolutistic European States and as a tool propagating the State’s view on foreign events.

This study explores the Swedish portrayals of Russians as compared to Danes and Polesand how they changed over time during the Great Northern War and Russo-SwedishWar (1741–1743). Through the Swedish state-run Posttidningar, the information deliveredby the state indicates that the circumstances of war and the power of the enemy leaderswere more significant than specific attributes of the enemy other in forming collectiveSwedish identity. Creating these collective sentiments was an essential tool for the stateto affirm the cooperation of its population during times of war. The information aboutthe enemy affects the transformation of a semi-public sphere in Sweden by providing acommon knowledge base to discuss and understand a changing view of its place inEurope. By depicting the enemy in flexible terms, the Swedish state desires its populationto cooperate based on the threat of war, common knowledge, and Sweden’s place inEurope, rather than solidarity against a static religious or political other.