The history of Sweden

Sweden was settled by hunters as the Ice Age glaciers melted, and for thousands of years its people lived from forest, lake and sea. In the Viking Age Swedes sailed east across the Baltic and down the rivers of Russia, and around the year 1000 a single Christian kingdom began to take shape. After more than a century inside the Kalmar Union with Denmark and Norway, Sweden broke away under Gustav Vasa in 1523 and in the seventeenth century built an empire around the Baltic. Defeat by Russia in 1721 ended that era, and after losing Finland in 1809 the country turned inward, avoided war after 1814, and became in the twentieth century one of the world's most prosperous welfare states. In 2024 it gave up two centuries of military non-alignment and joined NATO.

The first people reached what is now southern Sweden around 12,000 BCE, following reindeer herds onto the tundra left behind by the retreating ice. Their camps in Scania belong to the Bromme culture. As the climate warmed, forests spread northwards and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers fished the coasts and lakes and hunted elk and seal. Farming arrived in the south around 4000 BCE, with the Funnel Beaker culture, which built the stone passage graves still found in western and southern Sweden.

The Nordic Bronze Age, from about 1700 to 500 BCE, has left Sweden some of the richest rock carvings in Europe. At Tanum in Bohuslän thousands of images show ships, warriors, ploughing and ritual scenes; carvings further north, in Jämtland, are older still, some dating to around 5000 BCE. Bronze itself had to be imported, so the elites who controlled trade grew rich, and they were buried under great cairns and mounds. In the Iron Age that followed, contacts with the Roman Empire brought glass, coins and weapons north, and the Roman historian Tacitus wrote around 98 CE of the Suiones, a people strong in ships, which is the first written mention of the Swedes.

The far north of Sweden belongs to Sápmi, the homeland of the Sámi, who are recognised today as an Indigenous people in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. Their languages and culture had developed by the Bronze Age or early Iron Age, and Tacitus's "Fenni" are often taken to be the first reference to them. For centuries the Sámi lived by hunting, fishing and trapping, and later by herding reindeer, trading furs with Norse and Finnish neighbours while keeping their own religion, with its drums, sacred sites and noaidi, or shamans.

From the sixteenth century the Swedish crown taxed Sápmi more heavily and encouraged settlers to move north with land rights and tax breaks. In the 1630s and 1640s Sámi men were forced to haul ore from the silver mine at Nasafjäll, and many fled. Missionaries destroyed drums and holy places, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state pursued a policy of assimilation, restricting the Sámi language in schools and regulating reindeer grazing in ways that pushed families from their lands. The State Institute for Racial Biology, founded in Uppsala in 1922, measured and photographed Sámi people as part of its pseudoscientific research. Sweden set up the Sámi Parliament in 1993, apologised for past wrongs in 1998, and in 2020 established a truth commission; the Church of Sweden issued its own apology in 2021.

In the centuries after Rome fell, rich chieftains in the Mälaren valley were buried with helmets, swords and whole ships at Vendel and Valsgärde, and the great royal mounds at Old Uppsala date from the sixth century. Around 750 the island town of Birka was founded on Lake Mälaren and became the main market of the region until it was abandoned around 975.

During the Viking Age, from about 800 to 1050, Swedes looked mainly east. They crossed the Baltic, settled along its eastern shore and travelled up the rivers of Russia, trading furs and slaves for silver. Arabic coins found in huge numbers in Swedish hoards show how far their trade reached. These eastern Norsemen, called Rus and Varangians, are believed to have played a central part in founding the state of Kievan Rus', and some served as guards of the emperors of the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. Runestones raised across central Sweden remember men who died in "Serkland", the Muslim lands, or in Greece.

Christian missionaries reached Birka as early as the 830s, when the Frankish monk Ansgar preached there, but conversion was slow and sometimes violent. Olof Skötkonung, who was baptised around 1008, is the first king known to have ruled both the Svear around Lake Mälaren and the Götar further south. Paganism held on at Uppsala until the late eleventh century, and in 1164 Uppsala became the seat of an archbishop.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were dominated by rivalry between the houses of Sverker and Erik, until the jarl Birger of the Folkung family took control. Birger is traditionally credited with founding Stockholm around 1250, and his son Magnus Ladulås strengthened the crown and created a privileged nobility in return for mounted military service. Swedish crusades and settlement extended rule over Finland, which remained part of the kingdom for more than five hundred years and brought Sweden into conflict with Novgorod. German merchants of the Hanseatic League dominated trade, and the town of Visby on Gotland was one of its great ports. In 1319 Magnus Eriksson inherited the crowns of both Sweden and Norway, and in 1350 the Black Death killed a large share of the population.

In 1397 Queen Margaret I, already ruling Denmark and Norway, had her great-nephew Erik of Pomerania crowned king of all three realms at Kalmar. The Kalmar Union was meant to unite Scandinavia against German power, but Swedish nobles and peasants resented Danish rule and the taxes that paid for Danish wars. In 1434 the mine owner Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson led a rising, and the following year a meeting at Arboga is often seen as the first Riksdag, the parliament of the four estates of nobles, clergy, burghers and peasants. For much of the fifteenth century Sweden was in practice governed by regents of the Sture family.

In November 1520 Christian II of Denmark, having conquered Sweden, invited its leaders to Stockholm for his coronation and then had more than eighty of them executed in the Stockholm Bloodbath. The massacre provoked a rebellion led by a young nobleman, Gustav Eriksson Vasa, and on 6 June 1523 he was elected king, which ended Sweden's part in the union.

Gustav Vasa built a strong, centralised kingdom. To pay his debts he turned on the Catholic Church: the Riksdag of Västerås in 1527 transferred church lands to the crown, and over the following decades Sweden became Lutheran, following the teachings of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. He broke the trading monopoly of Lübeck, put down several peasant revolts, and in 1544 made the crown hereditary in his family.

His sons fought over the throne. Sigismund, who was also king of Poland, was a Catholic, and the Swedish estates deposed him in 1599 in favour of his uncle, Charles IX. The dynastic quarrel with Poland lasted for decades. Meanwhile Sweden pushed east: in 1561 Reval, today Tallinn, placed itself under Swedish protection, beginning Swedish rule in Estonia.

Sweden's age as a great power began under Gustavus Adolphus, king from 1611 to 1632. With his chancellor Axel Oxenstierna he reformed the army, the administration and the universities. The Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617 cut Russia off from the Baltic, and in 1621 he took Riga from Poland. In 1630 he landed in Pomerania to join the Thirty Years' War on the Protestant side, won a great victory at Breitenfeld in 1631, and was killed at Lützen in 1632. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 gave Sweden western Pomerania, Wismar and Bremen-Verden, making its monarch a prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

His daughter Christina, who abdicated in 1654 and converted to Catholicism, was followed by Charles X Gustav, who invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1655 and then marched his army across the frozen Danish straits. The Treaty of Roskilde in 1658 forced Denmark–Norway to give up Scania, Halland, Blekinge and Bohuslän, which gave Sweden roughly its modern southern borders. The empire was at its largest, ringing the Baltic from Finland to northern Germany. A small colony, New Sweden, was also founded on the Delaware River in North America in 1638, but it was lost to the Dutch in 1655. Charles XI took back crown lands from the nobility in the "Great Reduction" of 1680 and ruled as an absolute monarch.

The empire rested on a small population and constant war. In 1700 Russia, Denmark–Norway and Saxony-Poland attacked together, starting the Great Northern War. The young Charles XII won brilliantly at Narva in 1700, but his invasion of Russia ended in disaster at Poltava in 1709, where Peter the Great destroyed his army. Charles fled to the Ottoman Empire and was killed in Norway in 1718. Under the Treaty of Nystad in 1721 Sweden ceded Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and part of Karelia to Russia, whose new capital, Saint Petersburg, stood on former Swedish land.

After Charles XII's death the estates curbed royal power, and the years from 1719 to 1772 are known as the Age of Liberty. Two parliamentary parties, the Hats and the Caps, competed for power, and in 1766 Sweden passed one of the world's first laws on freedom of the press. It was also a scientific age, part of the Enlightenment: Carl Linnaeus devised his system for naming plants and animals, Anders Celsius his temperature scale, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was founded in 1739.

In 1772 Gustav III restored strong royal rule in a bloodless coup. A patron of the arts, he founded the Swedish Academy and the Royal Opera, but he was shot at a masked ball in 1792 and died soon after. His son Gustav IV Adolf joined the wars against Napoleon, and in 1808 and 1809 Russia conquered Finland, which became a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. The loss of a third of the kingdom led to the king's overthrow and a new constitution in 1809 that divided power between the crown and the Riksdag.

Looking for an heir, the Riksdag chose a French marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, in 1810. As crown prince he took Sweden into the coalition against Napoleon in the Napoleonic Wars, and by the Treaty of Kiel in 1814 Denmark surrendered Norway to the Swedish king. The Norwegians declared independence and adopted their own constitution, and after a short war that summer they accepted a personal union in which they kept their own parliament. It was the last war Sweden has fought. Bernadotte reigned as Charles XIV John from 1818, and his descendants still occupy the throne.

The union between Sweden and Norway grew strained as Norwegian nationalism rose, and in 1905 the Norwegian parliament declared it dissolved. Sweden accepted the separation peacefully.

Nineteenth-century Sweden was a poor, rural country with a fast-growing population. Crop failures in the late 1860s set off mass emigration, and between 1850 and 1910 more than a million Swedes left for the United States, many settling in Minnesota and the Midwest. At home, railways, sawmills, iron ore and engineering began a late but rapid Industrial Revolution. Swedish inventors and firms became known worldwide, among them Alfred Nobel, whose fortune from dynamite funded the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.

The four-estate Riksdag was replaced in 1866 by a two-chamber parliament, but voting rights were tied to income. Popular movements for temperance, free churches and labour grew strong, and the Social Democratic Party was founded in 1889. Universal male suffrage was introduced in 1909, and after unrest at the end of World War I, in which Sweden was neutral, women won the vote; the first election under full equal suffrage was held in 1921. Parliamentary government was firmly established from 1917.

In 1931 soldiers fired on striking workers at Ådalen, killing five people, an event that shocked the country. The following year the Social Democrats under Per Albin Hansson came to power, and they would govern almost without interruption until 1976. They promised a folkhem, a "people's home", and the Saltsjöbaden Agreement of 1938 between employers and unions set the pattern of negotiated labour relations.

Sweden stayed neutral in World War II, but its neutrality involved hard compromises. It sold iron ore and ball bearings to Nazi Germany and allowed German troops to cross its territory to and from occupied Norway, while sending volunteers and aid to Finland in its wars against the Soviet Union. As the war turned, Sweden took in refugees: almost all of Denmark's Jews escaped across the Sound in October 1943, and the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Budapest in 1944 before disappearing into Soviet custody. In the last weeks of the war the "White Buses" brought concentration camp prisoners, many of them Scandinavians, to Sweden.

During the Cold War Sweden remained officially non-aligned, though it cooperated quietly with the West. Spared the destruction of the war, its industry boomed, and governments under Tage Erlander and then Olof Palme expanded pensions, health care, housing and education into one of the world's most comprehensive welfare states, funded by high taxes. The Riksdag became a single chamber in 1971, and the 1974 Instrument of Government left the monarch a purely ceremonial role. Palme, an outspoken voice on world affairs, was shot dead in a Stockholm street in 1986; the murder was never solved in court.

A banking crisis and deep recession in the early 1990s led to spending cuts and economic reforms. After a referendum, Sweden joined the European Union in 1995, but in 2003 voters rejected the euro, days after the foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death. In 1994 the ferry Estonia sank in the Baltic with the loss of 852 lives, most of them Swedish, the country's worst peacetime disaster.

Sweden received large numbers of refugees from the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, and immigration and integration became central political issues; the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats grew from a fringe party into one of the largest in parliament. After the 2022 election, the Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson formed a centre-right government that relied on Sweden Democrat support in parliament.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 transformed Swedish security policy. Sweden applied to join NATO together with Finland that May, and after delays caused by objections from Turkey and Hungary it became the alliance's 32nd member on 7 March 2024. In the general election of 13 September 2026 the four centre-left opposition parties won 176 of the Riksdag's 349 seats against 173 for the governing side. Kristersson resigned, but the Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson was unable to agree a coalition, and on 15 October 2026 the Riksdag voted down her candidacy for prime minister, leaving government formation unresolved.