Sweden

• 1. Introduction

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  Sweden stretches from the 55th parallel to the 69th, a country so long that its southern tip sits closer to Rome than to its own Arctic north. At 450,295 square kilometres, it is the largest country in Northern Europe and the fifth-largest in all of Europe, yet only 10.6 million people live there. Most of them, 88%, cluster in cities, especially in the south and centre, leaving the vast northern region of Norrland, which accounts for nearly 60% of the country's land, extraordinarily sparse.

  The story reaches back to around 12,000 BC, when the ice retreated during a warm period called the Allerød oscillation and the first reindeer hunters camped in what is now Scania, Sweden's southernmost province. From those early clans, two peoples eventually took shape: the Geats, known in Swedish as the Götar, and the Swedes, the Svear. Their descendants would go on to build a unified kingdom, sail to Baghdad, and hold the Baltic Sea in an iron grip for the better part of a century.

  What made Sweden a great European power? How did it then lose almost everything? And how did a country that was fighting wars in 1814 become, two centuries later, one of the most prosperous and equitable societies on earth? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Fire and Ice: Early Sweden

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  Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the Roman historian, was the first writer to describe Sweden and its people, doing so in his work Germania in 98 AD. He called them the Suiones and noted their distinctive longships, which carried a prow at each end. By the sixth century, the Byzantine historian Jordanes was also writing about the people of Scandza, naming two tribes he considered identical to the Swedes: the Suetidi and the Suehans. The Suehans had a particular reputation in the Roman world as suppliers of black fox skins and were said to keep exceptionally fine horses.

  Runic script appeared among the south Scandinavian elite by at least the second century AD, though what has survived from that Roman period is limited to short inscriptions showing that Proto-Norse, a forerunner of Swedish and other North Germanic languages, was spoken across the region.

  The exact moment Sweden became a unified kingdom is genuinely contested. Historians generally mark it from the tenth century, when Erik the Victorious and his son Olof Skötkonung ruled both Svealand and Götaland under a single crown. The epic poem Beowulf, however, refers to wars between Swedes and Geats in the sixth century, suggesting a much older rivalry between those two groups.

  Christianity arrived in 829 when Saint Ansgar is credited with bringing it to Sweden, though the new faith did not fully displace paganism until the twelfth century. For much of that century, the country was torn apart by dynastic struggles between the Erik and Sverker clans. The conflict ended only when a third clan married into the Erik line and founded the Bjälbo dynasty, which began consolidating a more durable state.

• 3. The Viking Reach

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  Swedish Vikings of the eighth through eleventh centuries went east, not west. While their Norwegian and Danish counterparts raided Britain and Normandy, Swedish Vikings and the Gutar sailed to Finland, Estonia, the Baltic states, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Black Sea, and, according to the sources, as far as Baghdad. Their routes ran south along the Dnieper toward Constantinople, and the Byzantine emperor Theophilos was so impressed by their fighting ability that he recruited them as his personal bodyguard, a unit known as the Varangian Guard.

  At the mouth of those trade routes, on the island of Björkö not far from where Stockholm would later be built, a trading port called Birka was founded around 750 AD. It served as the Baltic link in a chain of commerce that ran through Novgorod and Ladoga all the way to the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate. Archaeologists have recovered thousands of graves, coins, jewellery, and luxury goods from the site. Its population is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000 people at its peak. Birka was abandoned around 975, roughly when Sigtuna was established some 35 kilometres to the northeast.

  The Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan was among the outside observers who described these Swedish Vikings, whom he called the Rus. That name, the sources suggest, likely passed into the language of the region and eventually gave Russia its name. The same Finnic-language connection survives today in the Finnish word for Sweden, Ruotsi, and the Estonian Rootsi, both of which trace back to the Rus people who inhabited the coastal areas of Roslagen in Uppland.

  The last major Viking expedition from Sweden was the ill-fated journey of Ingvar the Far-Travelled to Serkland, the region southeast of the Caspian Sea. The Ingvar runestones, raised to commemorate the expedition's members, mention no survivors.

• 4. Empire and Collapse

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  Sweden's rise to continental power accelerated under King Gustavus Adolphus, who reigned from 1611 to 1632. During the Thirty Years' War he led Swedish forces to conquer roughly half of the Holy Roman states and defeated the Imperial army at the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. He was planning to become the new Holy Roman Emperor when he was killed at the Battle of Lützen in 1632. After Sweden's only significant military defeat of the war at Nördlingen in 1634, the German states began breaking away one by one, leaving Sweden with Swedish Pomerania, Bremen-Verden, and Wismar. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 nonetheless confirmed Sweden's standing as a major European force.

  By the middle of the seventeenth century, Sweden was the third-largest country in Europe by land area. It reached its greatest territorial extent after Charles X crossed the Danish Belts and extracted the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658. During this entire era, Sweden controlled much of the Baltic Sea.

  The seeds of collapse were already planted. One third of the Finnish population died in the Great Famine of 1695-1697. Famine also struck Sweden itself, killing roughly 10% of the Swedish population. Then came the Great Northern War. After the Battle of Narva in 1700, Charles XII had an open path into Russia but turned instead against Poland, defeating Augustus II the Strong at the Battle of Kliszów in 1702. That decision gave Russia time to modernise its army. When Charles XII finally marched into Russia, his forces were exhausted by Cossack raids, Peter the Great's scorched-earth tactics, and the brutal winter of 1709. At Poltava, they were overwhelmed.

  Charles XII returned to Sweden in 1715 and launched two campaigns against Norway, in 1716 and 1718. During the second, he was shot dead at the siege of Fredriksten fortress. Sweden was forced to cede vast territories in the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, losing an estimated 200,000 men over the course of the war, 150,000 of them from the Swedish mainland. With that, the empire was finished and Russia emerged to fill the vacuum.

• 5. Poverty, Emigration, and Industrialisation

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  For much of the nineteenth century, Sweden remained economically poor, dependent on agriculture and barter long after Western European neighbours had begun to industrialise. Between 1750 and 1850, the population doubled, and the land could not support everyone. Over 1% of the population emigrated annually during the 1880s. Between 1850 and 1910, it is estimated that more than one million Swedes moved to the United States.

  Yet change was accumulating in the countryside before the factories arrived. Government-sponsored enclosure programmes, more aggressive use of agricultural land, and the introduction of new crops, including the potato, began reshaping the Swedish farming economy. The farming culture took on an enduring political role, visible today in the party once called the Agrarian Party and now called the Centre Party.

  Between 1870 and 1914, Sweden began building the industrialised economy it now has. Grassroots movements spread through the second half of the nineteenth century: trade unions, temperance groups, and independent religious congregations. These movements built the democratic foundations that would carry Sweden into full parliamentary democracy by the time of World War I.

  The Swedish East India Company had already offered a glimpse of commercial ambition when it began operations in 1731, choosing Gothenburg as its home port because the mouth of the Göta älv river offered the country's best harbour for long-distance voyages. That trade helped turn a small town into Sweden's second city. By the twentieth century, companies such as Volvo, Ericsson, Electrolux, IKEA, and Sandvik would place Sweden among the world's major exporters, with the engineering sector alone accounting for 50% of output and exports.

• 6. Neutrality and Its Limits

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  Sweden declared neutrality in both World Wars, but neutrality was never simple. During World War I, under pressure from the German Empire, Sweden mined the Öresund channel and closed it to Allied shipping, and allowed Germany to use the Swedish cipher to transmit encrypted messages to its overseas embassies. Swedish volunteers were permitted to fight alongside the Germans for the White Guards in the Finnish Civil War.

  In World War II the Swedish government informally supported Finland during the Winter War and the Continuation War, allowing volunteers and materiel to cross the border. Sweden also supported Norwegian resistance against Germany. In 1943, Sweden helped rescue Danish Jews from deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his colleagues protected tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. But the country also allowed German troops to transit Swedish railways, and both Swedes and outside observers have noted that Sweden could have done more to oppose the Nazi war effort.

  After the war, Sweden stayed out of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but its leadership maintained close private ties with the United States. The country took advantage of an undamaged industrial base to help supply the rebuilding of Europe, receiving aid under the Marshall Plan. For most of the postwar decades, the Swedish Social Democratic Party governed largely in cooperation with trade unions and industry.

  The early 1990s brought a severe test. A real estate bubble burst, the GDP fell by around 5%, and in 1992 a run on the Swedish krona forced the central bank to raise interest rates briefly to 500%. The government responded by cutting spending, reducing parts of the welfare state, and privatising public services. A referendum in November 1994 passed with 52.3% in favour of joining the European Union, and Sweden became a member on the 1st of January 1995.

  On the 28th of September 1994, just weeks before that referendum, the passenger ferry MS Estonia sank while crossing the Baltic Sea en route from Tallinn to Stockholm. The disaster killed 852 people, 501 of them Swedes, making it one of the worst maritime disasters of the twentieth century.

• 7. Sweden Today

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  Sweden's 349-member Riksdag traces its origins to an assembly held in 1435 in the town of Arboga, the first meeting where representatives from different social groups gathered to decide national affairs. The word riksdag itself entered use in the 1540s under King Gustav Vasa, who also broke the monopoly of the Hanseatic League and led Sweden into the Protestant Reformation. The institution that emerged from those sixteenth-century struggles became a functioning parliamentary democracy by the early twentieth century and today operates under a constitution built from four fundamental laws.

  On the 30th of November 2021, Magdalena Andersson became Sweden's first female prime minister. The following September, a narrow victory by a bloc of right-wing parties brought Ulf Kristersson of the Moderate Party to power on the 18th of October 2022.

  In 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine ended a long era of Swedish military non-alignment. Sweden formally joined NATO on the 7th of March 2024, after months of delays caused by objections from Turkey and Hungary. Finland joined alongside Sweden, together closing the last major gap in the alliance's northern flank.

  Sweden's income Gini coefficient in 2010 stood at 0.25, among the lowest of any developed country. The Riksbank, founded in 1668 and the oldest central bank in the world, has kept average inflation among the lowest in Europe since the mid-1990s. Sweden was the first nation to implement carbon pricing, and its carbon prices remain the highest in the world as of 2020. The country ranked sixth in the Environmental Performance Index in 2024. In 2013 an estimated 15% of the population was foreign-born, and an additional 5% were born to two immigrant parents, a demographic shift that has brought new political tensions alongside genuine cultural diversification.