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Th is paper examines the reception of Dutch commercial ideas and institutions in continental Europe during the fi rst half of the seventeenth century. Using printed and archival sources from France, Sweden and Denmark, it argues that it is more useful to examine how statesmen and thinkers adapted Dutch material to diff erent local circumstances and changing political conditions than to search for a mercantilist approach to political economy. Dutch arguments were particularly important, because they focused attentions upon the just and expedient relations between sovereignty and commerce. Replacing Hugo Grotius's Mare liberum in the contexts of the broader debate about the governance of commerce and of the politics of the Th irty Years War allows us to recover part of its further signifi cance, for its polemical clarity allowed statesmen and scholars to refi ne more sharply their notion of commerce's relation to the state.

Sweden’s victories in the Thirty Years War, and the kingdom’s subsequent half‐century as a great power, continue to intrigue historians. Historians have argued that Sweden’s success resulted from its rapid construction of a military state, with institutions which efficiently directed a large percentage of its available resources to war. Recent work on the military state has confirmed some of this theory, showing that the kingdom was able to shape institutions, but that this development depended upon bargaining and took a long time. Many strains of recent research, however, suggests that the model of the military state might be reaching the end of its useful life, as it attributes too much agency to Swedish statecraft, and too little to regional influences, internal dissent, cultural forces, and religion.