Crowdfunding the realm - fundraising, state building and community formation in Sweden, ca 1650-1860

The purpose of this project is to study church fundraising in early modern Sweden and how this institution expressed changing ideas about who was responsibility for the welfare and survival of individuals.

In the later half of the 17th century, the Swedish state expanded a practice of localized fundraising into a national organization for providing humanitarian aid, well predating the rise of bourgeois humanitarian philanthropy in the 19th century.

Using a diverse range of sources, including royal circular letters, petitions, cathedral chapter minutes and financial records, the project will analyze how the state organizers justified which faraway strangers merited parishioners’ charity and why, as well as how local actors actively shaped the scope and purpose of fundraising campaigns.The project confronts the timeless questions of what bonds of responsibility binds society together.

It offers a historical perspective on the humanitarian debate of our own time, by examining how efforts to support the lives of vulnerable people have shaped ideas about communities of belonging and solidarity. Furthermore, the project presents an innovative approach for studying the process of state building from below.

Ultimately dependent on voluntary donations, the fundraising institution created an arena where local actors – aid applicants, doners, parish pastors – negotiated with the state about ideas of piety, responsibilities and the boundaries of solidarity.