final-lid-disam-match/mega-cliqa-0016.jsonl--Q271468--2005–2022, Feministiskt initiativ (Fi)-4--sv-0016-678

Gudrun Schyman

Vid en presskonferens den 4 april 2005 presenterades Schyman som en av styrelsemedlemmarna i det nybildade partiet Feministiskt initiativ, med sikte på riksdagsvalet 2006. Partiet erhöll ingen plats i riksdagen, men Schyman fortsatte som talesperson för Feministiskt initiativ och arbetade vidare med feministisk opinionsbildning.

Gudrun Schyman kandiderade i Europaparlamentsvalet 2009, Feministiskt initiativ fick 2,22 procent av rösterna och klarade därmed inte 4 procentspärren och därför blev inte hon eller någon annan från partiet invald i Europaparlamentet.http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/val2014/sa-vaxte-feministiskt-initiativ-over-4-procent/ läst 2015-01-01

Under Almedalsveckan juli 2010 eldade Schyman upp 100 000 kronor i hundrakronorssedlar för att uppmärksamma de ojusterade löneskillnaderna mellan män och kvinnor.

Gudrun Schyman toppade Feministiskt initiativs valsedel i riksdagsvalet 2010. Partiet fick 0,40 procent av rösterna och klarade därmed inte 4 procentspärren och därför blev inte hon eller någon annan från partiet invald i riksdagen.
Schyman ställde även upp i valet till kommunfullmäktige i Simrishamn. Feministiskt initiativ fick 8,9 procent av rösterna och blev 3:e största parti. Hon blev därmed kommunpolitiker igen i Simrishamn, som hon också var mellan åren 1980 och 1987, men då för Vänsterpartiet.http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article12261970.ab läst 2013-11-29http://www.expressen.se/kvp/hemmasegern-ger-gudrun-trost/ läst 2013-11-29

I januari 2011 tillkännagav Schyman sin avgång som talesperson för Feministiskt initiativ, men fortsatte i partiledningen och som politiker i Simrishamns kommun.Schyman avgår: "Men jag trappar inte ner", Svenska Dagbladet, 14 januari 2011. I april 2013 blev Schyman återvald som talesperson tillsammans med Stina Svensson och Sissela Nordling Blanco.http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artikel=5496878 2014 ställde partiet upp för val till Europaparlamentet, riksdagen, flera landsting och ett antal kommuner och partiet gjorde sina bästa val någonsin. Partiet fick ett mandat i EU-parlamentet med 5,3% av rösterna, i riksdagsvalet 3,1% och 26 mandat i 13 kommuner.


Gudrun Schyman

Gerd Gudrun Maria Schyman, född 9 juni 1948 i Täby i Stockholms län, är en svensk politiker. Hon var riksdagsledamot 1988–2006 för Vänsterpartiet kommunisterna (1988–1990), Vänsterpartiet (1990–2004) och därefter som politisk vilde (2004–2006). Schyman var partiledare för Vänsterpartiet 1993–2003, och bildade sedan Feministiskt initiativ där hon var partiledare åren 2005–2011 och 2013–2019. Schyman är för närvarande kommunpolitiker och representerar partiet i kommunfullmäktige i Simrishamn. Hon lämnade Feministiskt initiativ i början av 2022 och medverkar därefter i Klimatalliansen. Hon är bosatt i Gladsax i Simrishamns kommun.

Under åren 1977–1987 var hon sambo med filmaren Lars Vestman. Hon medverkade i flera av hans filmproduktioner, bland annat TV-serien Jag kan, jag vill, jag törs från 1980. Året innan syntes hon i hans dokumentärfilm Födelsen, som handlar om hur ett barn föds. I den 55 minuter långa, för sin tid mycket realistiska beskrivningen av ett barns födelse, får man följa den blivande fadern (Westman), modern (Schyman) och barnmorskans arbete. Parets första barn, en son, föddes på Ystads lasarett 1978."Födelsen (1979)". Filmarkivet.se. Läst 7 juli 2014.

Hon deltog i Let's Dance år  2010 i TV4 där hon kom på sjätte plats av totalt 12 deltagare.http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/tv/letsdance/article12222661.ab läst 2015-01-01Gudrun Schyman var själv "väldigt imponerad" över att ha varit med så länge. Schyman var den första deltagaren i programmet som kritiserade de heteronormativa könsrollerna i dansen. Redan i säsongens första avsnitt protesterade hon mot att kvinnorna skulle stå på knä vid sina manliga danspartner under inledningsnumret. Upplägget ändrades så att de tävlande stod upp, oavsett kön, medan deras professionella dansparter gick ner på knä. I säsongens andra avsnitt turades sedan Schyman och hennes danspartner Björn Törnblom på Schymans initiativ om att ha förarrollen i det tangonummer som paret framförde.

2014–2015 var hon en av de tävlande i På spåret i lag med K.G. Hammar.https://www.svtplay.se/video/17338974/politisk-tillbakablick/valet-sasong-1-nyhetskollage-gudrun-schyman-1988-200

Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 9 min
Arkivinslag med Isabella Lövin (MP) 2008 - 2016. Ur ”Mittnytt” 2008-01-23: Fisken i Bottenhavet blir allt magrare, nu krävs snabba insatser, anser författaren Isabella Lövin. Reporter: Elin Roumeliotou. Ur ”Rapport” 2008-06-11: Isabella Lövin är en av årets Sommarpratere. Reporter: Anna Olsdotter Arnmar.Mer om programmet
Arkivinslag med Isabella Lövin (MP) 2008 - 2016. Ur ”Mittnytt” 2008-01-23: Fisken i Bottenhavet blir allt magrare, nu krävs snabba insatser, anser författaren Isabella Lövin. Reporter: Elin Roumeliotou. Ur ”Rapport” 2008-06-11: Isabella Lövin är en av årets Sommarpratere. Reporter: Anna Olsdotter Arnmar.Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 2 min 15 sek
Ur "Rapport" 2017-10-01. Ulf Kristersson väljs till ny partiledare för Moderaterna. Intervjuer med Ulf Kristersson, Ulf Adelsohn (M), fd partiledare, Fredrik Reinfeldt (M), fd partiledare, Mikael Odenberg (M), fd försvarsminister, Kent Persson (M), fd partisekreterare.Mer om programmet
Ur "Rapport" 2017-10-01. Ulf Kristersson väljs till ny partiledare för Moderaterna. Intervjuer med Ulf Kristersson, Ulf Adelsohn (M), fd partiledare, Fredrik Reinfeldt (M), fd partiledare, Mikael Odenberg (M), fd försvarsminister, Kent Persson (M), fd partisekreterare.Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 10 min
Invandrarminister Birgit Friggebo (fp) och statsminister Carl Bildt (m) besöker invandrare i Rinkeby, och försöker bl a få igång en allsång. Medverkande även: Hamza Erdal, turkisk invandrare, Juan Fonseca (s), ordf Rinkeby kommundelsnämnd, och Filis Kipipidis. Reportrar: Ingeleif Öhman, Cecilia Wanger och Peter Ekstrand.Mer om programmet
Invandrarminister Birgit Friggebo (fp) och statsminister Carl Bildt (m) besöker invandrare i Rinkeby, och försöker bl a få igång en allsång. Medverkande även: Hamza Erdal, turkisk invandrare, Juan Fonseca (s), ordf Rinkeby kommundelsnämnd, och Filis Kipipidis. Reportrar: Ingeleif Öhman, Cecilia Wanger och Peter Ekstrand.Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 3 min 14 sek
Valvakor 2014. Medverkande: Fredrik Reinfeldt (M), partiledare och statsminister, Beatrice Ask (M), justitieminister, Björn Söder (SD), partisekreterare, Alma Hägglund, Carin Jämtin (S), partisekreterare, Dror Feiler (V), Hanna Wagenius (C), ordf Centerns Ungdomsförbund, och Acko Anckarberg Johansson (KD), partisekreterare. Reporter: Andreas Öbrink.Mer om programmet
Valvakor 2014. Medverkande: Fredrik Reinfeldt (M), partiledare och statsminister, Beatrice Ask (M), justitieminister, Björn Söder (SD), partisekreterare, Alma Hägglund, Carin Jämtin (S), partisekreterare, Dror Feiler (V), Hanna Wagenius (C), ordf Centerns Ungdomsförbund, och Acko Anckarberg Johansson (KD), partisekreterare. Reporter: Andreas Öbrink.Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 9 min
Feministiskt initiativ (fi) bildas 2005. Medverkande: Tiina Rosenberg, Gudrun Schyman, Susanne Linde, Mårten Dahlrot, Sofia Karlsson, Ebba Witt-Brattström, Staffan Bengtsson, Katarina Skönblad, Sören Holmberg och Lotten Sunna. Reportrar: Kiki Bek och Lena Scherman.Mer om programmet
Feministiskt initiativ (fi) bildas 2005. Medverkande: Tiina Rosenberg, Gudrun Schyman, Susanne Linde, Mårten Dahlrot, Sofia Karlsson, Ebba Witt-Brattström, Staffan Bengtsson, Katarina Skönblad, Sören Holmberg och Lotten Sunna. Reportrar: Kiki Bek och Lena Scherman.Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 2 min 34 sek
Om internets betydelse i valet 1998. Medverkande: Andreas Bjerner, Åke Gustavsson (c), ombudsman, Tommy Hamberg (v), oppositionsråd och Roger Carlsson (c), riksdagskandidat. Reporter: Rolf Hammarlund.Mer om programmet
Om internets betydelse i valet 1998. Medverkande: Andreas Bjerner, Åke Gustavsson (c), ombudsman, Tommy Hamberg (v), oppositionsråd och Roger Carlsson (c), riksdagskandidat. Reporter: Rolf Hammarlund.Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 8 min
Karin Söder väljs till partiledare för Centerpartiet 1986, och blir därmed Sveriges första kvinnliga partiledare. Övriga medverkande: Gunnar Hedlund (c), fd partiledare, och Margaretha Andersson, Halmstad. Reportrar: Fabian af Petersens, Pia Brandelius och Karin Andersson..Mer om programmet
Karin Söder väljs till partiledare för Centerpartiet 1986, och blir därmed Sveriges första kvinnliga partiledare. Övriga medverkande: Gunnar Hedlund (c), fd partiledare, och Margaretha Andersson, Halmstad. Reportrar: Fabian af Petersens, Pia Brandelius och Karin Andersson..Mer om programmet
Publicerades: Tor 20 maj 2021 06:0020 maj 2021 • 2 tim 45 min
Slutdebatten inför valet 1985. Medverkande partiledare: Olof Palme (s), Ulf Adelsohn (m), Bengt Westerberg (fp), Thorbjörn Fälldin (c) och Lars Werner (vpk), samt finansminister Kjell-Olof Feldt (s). Programledare: Ingemar Odlander.Mer om programmet
Slutdebatten inför valet 1985. Medverkande partiledare: Olof Palme (s), Ulf Adelsohn (m), Bengt Westerberg (fp), Thorbjörn Fälldin (c) och Lars Werner (vpk), samt finansminister Kjell-Olof Feldt (s). Programledare: Ingemar Odlander.Mer om programmet


Gudrun Schyman

Under åren 1977–1987 var hon sambo med filmaren Lars Vestman. Hon medverkade i flera av hans filmproduktioner, bland annat TV-serien Jag kan, jag vill, jag törs från 1980.


Gudrun Schyman

Under åren 1977–1987 var hon sambo med filmaren Lars Vestman. Hon medverkade i flera av hans filmproduktioner, bland annat TV-serien Jag kan, jag vill, jag törs från 1980. Året innan syntes hon i hans dokumentärfilm Födelsen, som handlar om hur ett barn föds.


Gudrun Schyman

Under åren 1977–1987 var hon sambo med filmaren Lars Vestman. Hon medverkade i flera av hans filmproduktioner, bland annat TV-serien Jag kan, jag vill, jag törs från 1980. Året innan syntes hon i hans dokumentärfilm Födelsen, som handlar om hur ett barn föds. I den 55 minuter långa, för sin tid mycket realistiska beskrivningen av ett barns födelse, får man följa den blivande fadern (Westman), modern (Schyman) och barnmorskans arbete. Parets första barn, en son, föddes på Ystads lasarett 1978."Födelsen (1979)". Filmarkivet.se. Läst 7 juli 2014.

Hon deltog i Let's Dance år  2010 i TV4 där hon kom på sjätte plats av totalt 12 deltagare.http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/tv/letsdance/article12222661.ab läst 2015-01-01Gudrun Schyman var själv "väldigt imponerad" över att ha varit med så länge.


Gudrun Schyman

Under åren 1977–1987 var hon sambo med filmaren Lars Vestman. Hon medverkade i flera av hans filmproduktioner, bland annat TV-serien Jag kan, jag vill, jag törs från 1980. Året innan syntes hon i hans dokumentärfilm Födelsen, som handlar om hur ett barn föds. I den 55 minuter långa, för sin tid mycket realistiska beskrivningen av ett barns födelse, får man följa den blivande fadern (Westman), modern (Schyman) och barnmorskans arbete. Parets första barn, en son, föddes på Ystads lasarett 1978."Födelsen (1979)". Filmarkivet.se. Läst 7 juli 2014.

Hon deltog i Let's Dance år  2010 i TV4 där hon kom på sjätte plats av totalt 12 deltagare.http://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/tv/letsdance/article12222661.ab läst 2015-01-01Gudrun Schyman var själv "väldigt imponerad" över att ha varit med så länge. Schyman var den första deltagaren i programmet som kritiserade de heteronormativa könsrollerna i dansen. Redan i säsongens första avsnitt protesterade hon mot att kvinnorna skulle stå på knä vid sina manliga danspartner under inledningsnumret. Upplägget ändrades så att de tävlande stod upp, oavsett kön, medan deras professionella dansparter gick ner på knä. I säsongens andra avsnitt turades sedan Schyman och hennes danspartner Björn Törnblom på Schymans initiativ om att ha förarrollen i det tangonummer som paret framförde.


Drakborgen

Drakborgen är ett brädspel i fantasymiljö, som gavs ut på svenska av Alga och Brio hösten 1985. Spelet skapades av Jakob Bonds och Dan Glimne och den första idén till Drakborgen föddes under Bonds gymnasietid. Bonds presenterade Drakborgen för Alga under sommaren 1980 och Glimne, som på Alga hade börjat arbeta på ett eget liknande projekt med namnet Trollkarlens borg, såg potentialen i spelet. Med inspiration från bland annat bokserien Sagan om ringen och brädspelet Dungeon! slog de ihop sina projekt och skapade ett spel inom genren "familjefantasy", och tillsammans med illustratören Anders Jeppsson utvecklade de Drakborgen under tiden fram till lanseringen.

Drakborgen spelas med upp till fyra hjältar och spelarna ska ta sig in i Drakborgen med sina hjältar och samla på sig skatter och den spelare som får ut sin hjälte ur borgen med högsta sammanlagda värde på sina skatter vid spelets slut vinner. Om ingen hjälte överlever eller hinner ta sig ut ur borgen vid spelet slut förlorar samtliga spelare. Brädet utgörs av en slumpmässig labyrint som spelarna själva skapar och inuti Drakborgen kan spelarens hjälte stöta på hinder såsom fällor och monster. I mitten av brädet finns en skattkammare som vaktas av en sovande drake som, om den vaknar, attackerar hjältarna som befinner sig i skattkammaren.

Drakborgen marknadsfördes som ett krävande spel med mycket regler och "hög dödlighetsgrad". Spelet fick främst positiva reaktioner när det lanserades, vilket till viss del överraskade Bonds och Glimne då de inte var beredda på den succé som Drakborgen blev. Spelet lanserades på flera andra språk under sent 1980-tal och tidigt 1990-tal och fick i Sverige ett expansionspaket under titeln Drakborgen II 1987. 2015 hade Drakborgen sålts i uppskattningsvis 250 000 exemplar världen över och gett upphov till uppföljaren Drakborgen Legenden från 2002 samt åtminstone tre nyutgåvor.

1988 såldes Drakborgen i drygt 8 000 exemplar medan Drakborgen II under samma period såldes i knappt 6 500 exemplar. 2015 hade Drakborgen sålts i uppskattningsvis 250 000 exemplar världen över. Bonds och Glimne kallade spelets försäljningssiffror för "smått fantastiska". Drakborgen och Drakborgen II var 2008 Glimnes mest spridda spel i världen och det förra var ett av hans bäst säljande spel någonsin.

Både Drakborgen och Drakborgen II har blivit samlarobjekt sedan lanseringen. Tradera har rapporterat att en auktion med båda dessa spel slutade på över 3 000 kronor i mars 2017 medan Drakborgen II i augusti 2016 såldes för 3 550 kronor på deras hemsida. Aftonbladet rapporterade den 25 december 2019 om en Tradera-auktion gällande Drakborgen II som vid tillfället var uppe i 2 688 kronor

Tradera har rapporterat att en auktion med båda dessa spel slutade på över 3 000 kronor i mars 2017 medan Drakborgen II i augusti 2016 såldes för 3 550 kronor på deras hemsida. Aftonbladet rapporterade den 25 december 2019 om en Tradera-auktion gällande Drakborgen II som vid tillfället var uppe i 2 688 kronor.

Speljätten Alga fick oss att kasta tärningen
Sällskapsspelen gör oss till rövare och giriga lånehajar
Långa slöa mellandagar och ingenting på tv. Kanske dags att blåsa dammet av kartongen och öppna ett sällskapsspel? Övertala några gäspande familjemedlemmar som hellre hade hukat över varsin mobiltelefon, fördela pjäserna, sortera sedlar och chanskort och vika upp pappbrädet – bara för att upptäcka att tärningen är försvunnen sedan en regnig eftermiddag
i somras.
Har du ett sällskapsspel på översta garderobshyllan är det mycket möjligt att det står Alga på kartongen. Nu har det kommit ut en stor tjock volym om detta drygt hundraåriga spelföretag. Det rör sig inte om någon kritisk studie – snarare en blandning av försenad jubileumsskrift och bilderbok för vuxna. Kanske någonting för farfar att försjunka i när barnbarnen lättade återgått till att pilla på sina telefoner?
Spelat har människan gjort sedan urminnes tider. Kortleken uppfanns i Kina under Tangdynastin (618–907). Schack började utvecklas i Indien och Iran för tvåtusen år sedan och Fia med knuff – också från Indien – har 1 500 år på nacken. Sumerer och egyptier tog tärningar med sig i graven redan på bronsåldern.
De moderna sällskapsspelen – som oftast bygger på ett annat gammalt indiskt spel som kallas Ormar och stegar – spreds i Europa på 1800-talet när tryckerierna hade kapacitet över och ville lansera nya produkter. Då som nu hängde man upp kartongdesignen på spektakulära händelser och kända personer: Konung Oscar II lär ha fått inte mindre än tjugo spel uppkallade efter sig.
Alga importerade spelen, Åhlén & Åkerlunds veckotidningar utnämnde dem till den nya flugan och Bonniers tog hem pengarna
Alga, grundat 1917, hade ursprungligen till uppgift att sälja tobak, pappersvaror och godis via Pressbyråkioskerna. När Bonniers sålt Pressbyrån 1940 fick Alga från Åhlén & Åkerlund ta över koncernens tillverkning och försäljning av sällskapsspel. Arrangemanget var praktiskt: Alga importerade spelen, Åhlén & Åkerlunds veckotidningar utnämnde dem till den nya flugan och Bonniers tog hem pengarna.
Storsäljaren då som nu hette Monopol, lanserat i Sverige 1936, bara ett par år efter premiären i USA. Enligt en populär legend som spreds av tillverkarna var det konstruerat av en arbetslös försäljare i Philadelphia: Charles Darrow skulle ha fått en snilleblixt hemma vid köksbordet, tänkt ut och ritat spelet, sålt det till Parker Brothers och blivit mångmiljonär.
Den sanna historien är, som vanligt, en smula mer komplicerad. När Parker Brothers började processa om rättigheterna visade det sig att det ursprungliga Monopolspelet hade lånat idé, spelplan, markörer och många andra detaljer från The Landlord’s game som mångsysslaren Elizabeth Magie tagit patent på redan 1903. The Landlord’s game var ett radikalt pedagogiskt spel som varnade för monopolism och förespråkade höjda skatter på egendom.
Monopolspelet bekräftar Marx tes att det är människans samhälleliga vara som bestämmer hennes medvetande – eller i det här fallet att spelreglerna har makt att, åtminstone tillfälligt, förändra individens personlighet. Efter några varv har en varmhjärtad och solidarisk medmänniska förvandlats till girig entreprenör och samvetslös hyreshaj. Vad Elizabeth Magie tyckte om saken förmäler inte historien.
Även om många av Algas spelidéer importerades, som till exempel Risk, Den försvunna diamanten, Alfa-Pet och Yatzy (en variant på 1950-talets populära pokertärningar) så var andra spel svenska original: Sjöfartsspelet, Tjuv och polis, Bondespelet och legendariska Sjörövarön som utvecklats av tre konstnärer i Stockholm på 1940-talet. Sjörövarön inspirerade också till Bengt Linders klassiska tv-sketch från 1967 där Margaretha Krook, Lars Ekborg, Gunwer Bergkvist och Åke Grönberg flyger varandra i strupen över spelbrädet.
Alga höll hårt på sin kommersiella profil och överlät det pedagogiska till konkurrenten Brio i Osby. För det mesta försökte man hänga upp en rätt konventionell spelidé på en framgångsrik idrottsman, ett tv-program eller på julens årligen återkommande långfilm från Walt Disney. En kändis på kartongen fick gå i god för spelets kvaliteter.
Många har också varit inblandade i att formulera reglerna – från Lennart Hellsing (Krakel Spektakel), Tove Jansson (Muminspelet) och Bertil Almqvist (Barna Hedenhös) till Lena Philipson (Flip eller flop) och Leif GW Persson. Anders Bagge har konstruerat ett lovande spel vid namn Vilket hundkaos som handlar om att fånga in förrymda fyrbenta vänner.
Mera originella spel är Byråkrat som handlar om att undvika att ta beslut och få så lite gjort som möjligt och Crazy som gav uttråkade äkta par möjlighet att kladda på varandras respektive.
Bonniers sålde Alga till Brio 1982. Proventus köpte Brio 2004 och numera ägs hela klabbet av tyska Regensburger. Elektroniken har inte lyckats ta död på de gamla pappspelen, som dessutom har blivit samlarobjekt: Ett begagnat Drakborgen II från 1985 är uppe i 2 688 kronor på Tradera och ett Sjörövarön från 50-talet ser ut att bli betydligt dyrare.


Drakborgen


Drakborgen

miniatyr|Fandrake AB lanserade en nyutgåva av Drakborgen den 11 februari 2022.
En nyutgåva av Drakborgen finansierades via ett Kickstarter-projekt, skapat av Fandrake AB, som varade mellan 6 och 27 maj 2020.

I Drakborgen förekommer ett antal regeltillägg som Bonds och Glimne tog fram och som inofficiellt benämns som ett expansionspaket med titeln Drakborgen III. Det är upp till spelarna själva att bestämma om de vill utnyttja de nya reglerna eller inte, då de inte är tvingande för nyutgåvan.


Drakborgen

miniatyr|Fandrake AB lanserade en nyutgåva av Drakborgen den 11 februari 2022.
En nyutgåva av Drakborgen finansierades via ett Kickstarter-projekt, skapat av Fandrake AB, som varade mellan 6 och 27 maj 2020. Projektet nådde sitt mål på 200 000 kronor inom sju minuter och blev vid tillfället den mest framgångsrika svenska gräsrotsfinansieringskampanjen någonsinDet tidigare svenska rekordet från november 2018 innehades av Apart Förlag AB gällande lanseringen av en jubileumsbox av Valhall. Rekordet låg då på 2 474 670 kronor.


Drakborgen

miniatyr|Fandrake AB lanserade en nyutgåva av Drakborgen den 11 februari 2022.
En nyutgåva av Drakborgen finansierades via ett Kickstarter-projekt, skapat av Fandrake AB, som varade mellan 6 och 27 maj 2020. Projektet nådde sitt mål på 200 000 kronor inom sju minuter och blev vid tillfället den mest framgångsrika svenska gräsrotsfinansieringskampanjen någonsinDet tidigare svenska rekordet från november 2018 innehades av Apart Förlag AB gällande lanseringen av en jubileumsbox av Valhall. Rekordet låg då på 2 474 670 kronor. I oktober 2020 slogs Drakborgens rekord, denna gång av en kampanj för en ny säsong av Varan-TV, vilken samlade in 4 313 059 kronor. med en insamlad totalsumma på 3 653 108 kronor.


Drakborgen

Drakborgen förekommer som en av titlarna i Boken om ALGA, som skrevs av Orvar Säfström, Ika Johannesson samt Jimmy Wilhelmsson och publicerades av Fandrake AB den 6 december 2019. I boken intervjuas bland annat Glimne och Jeppsson. Utöver denna lanserade Fandrake AB Boken om Drakborgen, skriven av Säfström och Wilhelmsson, den 7 december 2020. Boken innehåller spelets tillkomsthistoria, intervjuer med bland annat spelkonstruktörerna och originalillustrationer av Jeppsson

Utöver denna lanserade Fandrake AB Boken om Drakborgen, skriven av Säfström och Wilhelmsson, den 7 december 2020. Boken innehåller spelets tillkomsthistoria, intervjuer med bland annat spelkonstruktörerna och originalillustrationer av Jeppsson.

Beskrivning
Drakborgen är en av Sveriges första spelklassiker som även fick framgångar internationellt. I spelet iklär du dig rollen av en ärrad hjälte som dristar sig in i den legendomsusade borgen i jakt på rikedomar. Men varje hjälte måste hinna ut innan solen går ner, för ingen människa överlever natten innanför borgens murar. Många känner sig manade, men få tar sig ut och kan berätta om det.
Drakborgen släpptes första gången 1985 och blev snabbt känt för sin mördande svårighetsgrad: du har cirka 12-15 procents chans att ta dig in till skattkammaren (utan att väcka draken) och hitta ut igen. Om inte solnedgången tar kål på dig, så är det stor risk att borgens fällor eller fientliga invånare gör det.
I BOKEN OM DRAKBORGEN presenterar nördförfattarna Orvar Säfström och Jimmy Wilhelmsson hela berättelsen bakom spelet, baserad på intervjuer med konstruktörerna och andra nyckelpersoner. Egentligen startade Jakob Bonds och Dan Glimne var och en på sitt håll: det var först när de sammanstrålade på den senares kontor hos speltillverkaren ALGA i början av 1980-talet som tanken på ett gemensamt spel föddes.
Dan Glimnes prototyp av Trollkarlens Borg och Jakob Bonds prototyp av Drakborgen fördes samman, och resten är historia. En historia som återberättas i BOKEN OM DRAKBORGEN tillsammans med rikliga mängder originalartwork, skisser och aldrig tidigare visade produktionsdokument.
Uppslag från boken
Alla uppslag ovan är preliminära (work in progress).
Våren 1980 fanns det få fantasyspel på svenska att tillgå i leksaksaffärerna. Produktionen av Drakborgen drog dock ut på tiden: först fem år senare var spelet klart att släppas inför julhandeln 1985 – och då hade marknaden förändrats.
År 1985 hade förlagskonkurrenten Äventyrsspel hunnit släppa fantasyrollspelet Drakar och Demoner på svenska – och både leksaksbutiker och boklådor började fyllas med soloäventyr och fantasyromaner. På bio hade storfilmer som Conan (1982), Dark Crystal (1982), Never Ending Story (1984), Ladyhawke (1985 och Legend (1985) satt scenen för tusentals svenska ungdomar som satt försjunkna i fantasydrömmar.
Mitt i allt detta släpptes Drakborgen på Sveriges största spelförlag ALGA. Och succén var ett omedelbart faktum. Drakborgen var inte bara ett av ALGA:s mest långdragna utvecklingsprojekt, utan även ett av de dyraste. Illustratören Anders Jeppsson arbetade i över ett år på sina skisser och målningar för att få spelet precis så visuellt som konstruktörerna Jakob Bonds och Dan Glimne ville.
BOKEN OM DRAKBORGEN släpps i samband med nyutgåvan av spelet Drakborgen och bokens omfång bestäms av den Kickstarter-kampanj som öppnar den 6 maj 2020. Exakt hur många sidor eller vilket band boken kommer att få är därför inte klart förrän efter det att Kickstarter-kampanjen stänger den 27 maj 2020.
UPDATE: Det är nu klart att boken blir 1) hårdinbunden och 2) 196 sidor tjock!
Exempel på originalartwork
Exempel på produktionsdokument
Exempel på Anders Jeppssons skisser


Drakborgen

Drakborgen förekommer som en av titlarna i Boken om ALGA, som skrevs av Orvar Säfström, Ika Johannesson samt Jimmy Wilhelmsson och publicerades av Fandrake AB den 6 december 2019. I boken intervjuas bland annat Glimne och Jeppsson.


Svenska Ostindiska Companiet

miniatyr|300px|Ostindiska huset i Göteborg. På frisen under taket står: "Byggnaden restes år 1750 af Ostindiska Kompt. Göteborgs museum omdanade densamma år 1895 för sina samlingar." Huset uppfördes 1762 av Det svenske Ostindiska kompaniet och ligger på Norra Hamngatan.
miniatyr|Delägarbrev för SOIC av 2 maj 1782

Svenska Ostindiska Companiet (SOIC) var ett svenskt handelskompani bildat 1731 som från Göteborg handlade med Östasien, framför allt med Kina. Under de första åren var resorna mycket lönsamma, för att under slutet av 1700-talet nästan alltid gå med förlust. Totalt genomfördes 132 expeditioner med 37 olika skepp. Kompaniet upplöstes 29 maj 1813 efter en bolagsstämma.

De båda följande oktrojerna, verksamma under 1786–1806 och 1806–1821, var inte lika framgångsrika.

De spreds sedan nära nog över hela Europa och utgjorde en betydande del av Sveriges export. Det har uppskattats att kompaniets handel stod för 2–5 % av Sveriges bruttonationalprodukt under perioden 1730–1800.

ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT
The narrative of the Swedish East India Company (SEIC) is a well-known part of Sweden’s eighteenth century history. The company is known as a profitable venture, the only successful chartered company in Sweden, but with a limited impact upon the country’s economic development. In this paper, we employ a value-chain analysis to estimate the Swedish East India trade’s magnitude in terms of value-added. The results show that the success of the company was not based on monopolised domestic market in Sweden, a typical strategy of big chartered companies. The most valuable line of SEIC’s business (Chinese teas) was rather based on re-exports to other countries in Europe. Our quantitative estimates also show that the Swedish East India trade eventually made up a non-negligible share, and in particular a major share of the transport and trade sectors, of the Swedish economy during a long part of the eighteenth century.
1. Introduction
1.1. Outline of the article
Between 1731 and 1813, the Swedish East India Company (SEIC) carried on trade between Asia and Europe. For several decades, it was one of the big chartered companies trading in Canton – the only Chinese port opened to Western countries. The company traded mainly in tea, but also in porcelain, silks, nankeens (Chinese cotton textiles), spices and many other goods. During the most extensive period of the Company’s operations, the company carried annually between 600 and 1200 tons of tea from Asia to Europe, accounting for about 15% the European tea imports from China. This was less than the English East India Company imported but about the same magnitude as the Dutch, Danish, and French annual tea imports. Considering the fact that Chinese tea, just behind Indian cotton, was the most important commodity in Euro-Asian trade, the Swedish Company was a major transnational trader. Yet the vast literature on the eighteenth-century chartered companies seldom pays attention to the Swedish venture. The literature on Swedish economic history furthermore often attributes little importance to the SEIC, as the company’s business strategy is believed to have had little impact upon the Swedish economy.
This paper aims to assess the role of SEIC from a new point of view. We will assess the role of the SEIC from the perspective of a value-added analysis of the trade flows between Canton, Sweden and the end-markets of the goods carried by SEIC. Such an analysis makes it possible to unveil the magnitude of the values generated in the value-chains of the Asian goods traded by the Company from Asia to Europe. This new perspective will also help us to assess the SEIC’s importance for the Swedish economy.
1.2. Previous research
The literature on Asian-European trade is to a large extent dominated by studies focusing upon the big English, Dutch and French companies (key works on the English East India Company include Bowen, 2006; Bowen, Lincoln, & Rigby, 2002; Chaudhuri, 1978; Erikson, 2014; Furber, 1948; Stern, 2009, 2011; for the Dutch East India Company see Clulow, 2014; Gaastra, 2003; Nierstrasz, 2015; Prakash, 1985; Steensgaard, 1973; Yong, 2007; for the French company see Haudrère, 1989; Le Bouëdec & Nicolas, 2008; for a comparative analysis, see Bruijn & Gaastra, 1993). Companies that were smaller, such as Danish, Swedish, Prussian or Ostend Companies, have received considerably less attention (standard works include Feldbæk, 1969; Koninckx, 1980; Parmentier, 1993; for more recent research see for example Asmussen, 2018; Dreijer, 2019; Hellman, 2019; Hodacs, 2016). Much of the standard literature on European chartered companies in Asia has focused upon the trade on India in particular, and especially on the competition between European companies in India (see for example Bowen, 1991; Bowen, 2006; Dalrymple, 2019; Stern, 2011). The research focus on India does not mean that the historians of Euro-Asian trade would underestimate the role of trade with China. In fact, the significance of the EIC’s trade with China has been acknowledged in the literature (see for example Berg et al., 2015; especially Hanser, 2019). The growth of the Canton trade had a transformative impact globally. First, there was the eighteenth-century transformation of consumption in Europe, not the least the transformation of Britain into a tea-drinking nation. Canton came to acquire a monopoly position in the Euro-Asian tea trade. All tea drunk in Western Europe in the eighteenth century originated in China. By the 1770s, the value of Britain’s imports of Chinese tea exceeded that of Indian cotton textiles (Price, 1998, p. 100). Second, there was the well-known role of Canton as a vehicle for India’s transformation after the British conquest of the sub-continent. After the conquest, Canton turned into the great destination of Indian goods – first cotton, then opium – as well as the destination of private Anglo-Indian remittances (Cuenca-Esteban, 2007; Hanser, 2019). As the trade in tea, silks, porcelain and cotton (nankeens) became the most dynamic part of Euro-Asian trade, Canton turned into a global trading hub (Van Dyke, 2005 and 2011).
Several European chartered companies took part in this transformation of the East Asian trade. The Danish Asiatic Company, reorganised in 1732, a year after the SEIC, is an illuminating point of comparison. Its role in Asia is well known and well understood (Asmussen, 2018; Feldbæk, 1969, 1991, 1997; Rasch & Sveistrup, 1948). The Danish trade with Asia had two legs, the Danish trading stations Tranquebar and Serampore (Frederiksnagore) in India, and Canton in China. Unsurprisingly, Danish-Indian trade was focused mainly on cotton textiles, while the Danes imported tea, porcelain, and silks from Canton. The total values of the Danish China trade by far exceeded the Danish India trade. In the four decades between 1732 and 1771, the Danish imports from China were three times bigger than the Danish trade with India. The difference diminished in the 1770s to 1790s due to the decline of China trade (Feldbæk, 1991, pp. 11–14). The Danish imports from China consisted mainly of tea, and much of it was re-exported from Copenhagen to the Netherlands, France, and Britain.
The history of the Swedish East India Company has received much attention in Swedish historiography, both in popular history literature and among professional historians. The popular history has often depicted the SEIC as the Swedish ‘adventure’ at sea (see for example Ahlander & Langert, 2009; Holmström, 2007; Lindqvist, 2002). The focus has been on the adventurous voyages, vessels, shipbuilding, dangers of life at sea, and meetings with exotic destinations and peoples in Africa and Asia. In this popular literature the business logic of the company, its extraordinary profitability, and its actual role in global trade is seldom discussed and often misunderstood.
There is also much scholarly research into the history of the Swedish East India Company. The general outlines of the company’s history are well-known from this research (Frängsmyr, 1990; Kjellberg, 1974; Koninckx, 1980; Söderpalm, 2003). The company was founded in Gothenburg in 1731 as a typical chartered company. The first charter stretched for fifteen years, from 1731 to 1746, and it provided the venture with monopoly rights on Swedish trade in Asia. The know-how and capital came to a great extent from the prohibited Ostend Company in the Austrian Netherlands. Many employees of the Swedish company were of Scottish and Flemish origin and made their early careers in the Ostend Asia trade. They therefore had know-how of the trade as well as useful contacts and networks in Asia and in Europe already at the time when they were recruited to work for the Swedish company. The British and Dutch perceived the Ostend Company as a dangerous competitor in Asia and the transfer of the Ostend venture to Sweden was seen as a hostile act in Amsterdam and London. This makes it understandable why, at its beginning, the SEIC’s venture was covered by much secrecy. After a conflict with the English East India Company in southern India, the so-called Porto Novo Affair of 1733 (Gill, 1958), the Swedish company focused almost exclusively on the trade in Canton. In Canton, the Chinese authorities treated all Europeans formally as equals and so the Swedes were treated in the same way as the Dutch and English East India companies.
The standard work on the history of the SEIC in the international scholarly literature is still Koninckx (1980), an excellent work yet covering only the first two charters of the SEIC’s history (1732–1766). Several foreign accounts of the company’s business have relied upon Koninckx’s work without acknowledging this limitation in time, hence describing the SEIC as if these two charters make up the entirety of the company’s operations. This has in effect meant that only half of all SEIC voyages are included in these accounts (see for example Bruijn & Gaastra, 1993; de Vries, 2003, pp. 40–41). There were, in reality, 132 SEIC voyages, and the company continued to operate for several decades following the end of the second charter in 1766.
Most recent research into the history of the SEIC has provided an increasingly complex picture of the company’s business and its role in the Euro-Asian trade (Hodacs, 2016; Hodacs & Müller, 2015; Müller, 2003, 2011, 2016, 2018). It has stressed the role of illegal tea market in Great Britain as the main destination of the SEIC’s cargoes of tea. As the re-exports to Britain were smuggled there are no official data on the commodity flows, yet we have enough indirect evidence in correspondence (Müller, 2003), and even in newspapers, parliamentary papers and other records (Cole, 1958; Janes, 2016, 2020). Hanna Hodacs’ research (2016), also pointed out the character of the SEIC as an important enterprise, and in many ways equal to other chartered companies, in organising trade between Europe and Asia, in silks and tea. Hodacs maintains the similarities, as well as differences, in strategies employed by the Danish and Swedish companies in Canton. Lisa Hellman in her research (Hellman, 2019) stressed how the Swedish company employees were well integrated in the European merchants’ society – the ‘foreign quarters’ – in Canton. Müller (2011, 2016, and 2018) paid attention to the role the SEIC’s purchases in Canton in the 1760s and 1770s did play for flows of remittances between India, Canton and London. So-called ‘Indian remittances’, in form of credit money available in Canton, were used to purchase Swedish return cargoes. In such a way the Swedish company, together with other chartered companies, contributed to British exploitation of India after the Seven Years War (Cuenca-Esteban, 2007; Hanser, 2019). The Swedish company also used neutrality for commercial purposes. Until the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden did not participate in the Anglo-French wars, and in Canton, a neutral flag was a business advantage during such wars (e.g. in 1756–1763, 1776–1783, and in 1793–1800) (Müller, 2016, p. 243).
While the recent research on the SEIC placed the venture in the context of eighteenth-century globalisation, it has not specifically studied the company’s contribution to the Swedish economy. The standard literature in economic history certainly mentions the company, but provides no impression that it had any significant impact upon the Swedish economy, but at most some impact locally for the city of Gothenburg (see for example Lagerqvist, 2013, p. 56; Magnusson, 2016, pp. 254–256). There has, however, been no systematic study of the SEIC’s trade flows to and from Sweden in relation to economic historical data on GDP and trade flows. In their article on Sweden’s foreign trade in the eighteenth century Rodney Edvinsson and Christoffer Tarek Gad (2018, p. 7) considered the SEIC’s trade but they only included imports for domestic consumption – which, as will be shown in the present article, only made up a minor part of SEIC’s total trade.
1.3. Aim of the current article
In this paper we argue that the SEIC’s trade was an important part of Sweden’s foreign trade if we not only focus on its imports, but also take into account the company’s main activity: the re-exportation of Asian goods to foreign markets in Europe. A combination of exports and re-exports in foreign trade was a quite typical feature of eighteenth-century mercantilist trade. The role of re-exports in Britain’s foreign trade, for example, is well known and considered as an important factor regarding trade flows, state revenues, access to credit, and Britain’s economic development in general (see especially Ormrod, 2003; O’Brien, 2005; Price, 1998). Adding re-exports to exports improved the balance of trade from a mercantilist point of view. The British re-exports consisted mainly of tobacco, sugar, cotton textiles, and coffee, and much of the goods – but far from all – were produced in British colonies. The direct production of such goods was thus potentially beneficial for the British Empire, as well as several British subjects benefiting from this trade, even though it took place outside of the United Kingdom, and hence outside the scope of British national accounts.
This is, indeed, different in comparison with the SEIC’s purchases in Canton, where the production of tea and silks clearly took place completely outside European sphere of influence. The value-added created in the trade of the Asian goods, however, was an activity that should be included in national accounting of the European nations, to the extent that European agents were the ones involved in the trade. Activities related to such trade created trade and credit networks, provided jobs in trade, shipping, shipbuilding and other industries, and created great profits that could be invested in the domestic economies.
To summarise, in spite of the vast international literature on the role of big chartered companies and eighteenth-century globalisation we lack an assessment of the economic role of the Swedish East India Company. Internationally, its role still is often misunderstood and diminished. In Sweden, the most recent research on the company has reevaluated its global role and placed it in the context European trade and consumption revolution, but the reappraisal has primarily been based on qualitative or limited quantitative evidence. The literature in the field of economic history has yet to reevaluate the importance of the company’s activities, in no small part perhaps because many scholars in the field still hold the (incorrect) belief that all primary sources relating to the company’s economic activities have been destroyed. In this article, we add a new dimension to the reappraisal, by employing a value-chain analysis on Sweden’s East India trade in order to assess the magnitude of this global trade flow in economic terms.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Value-chain analysis
In recent years, there have been various attempts at studying the creation of value-added in historical transnational value-chains, for example in the transatlantic slave- and colonial goods trades (Combrink, 2017; Eltis & Engerman, 2000; Fatah-Black & Van Rossum, 2015; Rönnbäck 2014, 2018). A value chain, according to the leading theorists Raphael Kaplinsky and Mike Morris ‘describes the full range of activities which are required to bring a product or service from conception, through the different phases of production […] to final consumers’ (Kaplinsky & Morris, 2001, p. 4).
A key point of a value-chain analysis is that it enables studying in what links of this chain value is created, contributing to understanding how the value derived in the creation of a final product is distributed between different agents in the value-chain. This can be done by estimating the value-added at different stages of the value-chain. A value-chain analysis can be of different levels of detail, depending on how rich the available primary data is. In historical studies, a value-chain analysis is often forced to rely upon various proxies in combination with empirical data, as there might be variables for which information simply is lacking. A value-chain analysis can also be used to estimate the magnitude of economic activities in a comparative perspective. Estimating the amount of value-added throughout an economy is one way of measuring the historical Gross Domestic Product of the country (Broadberry, Campbell, Klein, Overton, & van Leeuwen, 2015, xxxiii). By estimating the value-added throughout a particular value-chain, we can thereby provide a quantitative estimate of how important that value-chain is compared to the total output of the whole country.
A simple method to do this is to calculate the value of the output at a link a the value-chain as the product of volume of goods handled and the price of the product at that link of the chain. The value-added is then calculated as the value of the output, minus the value of input of intermediate goods (from previous stages in the value-chain). When analysing transnational value-chains, we naturally have to take this transnational character into account, as the value-added of the whole value-chain might exceed the value-added of a single nation’s economy. In order to make a meaningful comparison, one would therefore need to compare only those links of a value-chain taking place ‘within’ a national economy, in abstract terms, to the GDP of that economy. Drawing such border between national and non-national economy in the eighteenth century is sometimes very difficult. This is the issue we have to consider, no matter if the analysis to British re-exports of the West Indian commodities, or the Swedish re-exports of Chinese tea. During the eighteenth century, trade was regulated in agreement with mercantilist thought of foreign trade, but at the same time – and because the early modern states lacked ability to implement their mercantilist policies – much trade was carried on in the grey zones between national, colonial and other borders (Müller, 2018, pp. 85–89; Shammas, 2000).
Our aim is thus to estimate the value-added involved in the Swedish participation in the value-chains of the Swedish East India trade during the eighteenth century. The value-chains for the commodities traded did, of course, not begin at the point when the Swedish company purchased the goods. The first legs of the value-chains would instead have been between production areas in China, for example Fujian tea-growing areas, or China’s inland porcelain capital Jingdezhen, and the point of sale to the European companies in Canton (Gerritsen & Riello, 2016; Yong, 2007). As our aim is to estimate the magnitude of the Swedish involvement in these value-chains, we take the point of purchase in Canton as our starting point (and hence first input of ‘intermediate goods’ in the value-chain), in order to analyse the value-added created at later links in the chain.
It is important to note from the outset that the study is not limited to studying the value-added of the Swedish East India Company alone, but of the value-added throughout the value-chain initiated by the SEIC, as long as Swedish agents were involved. We do thus try to estimate the value-added of Asian goods imported into Sweden, including the value-added that the Company directly was responsible for from purchase of goods in Asia to their sales in Sweden, but also the value-added at later links in the value-chain until the products reached the final consumers in Sweden or abroad. We furthermore try to estimate the value-added of re-exported Asian goods: both the links in the value-chain from purchase in Asia until the sale at auctions in Sweden, and the value-added in later stages of the value-chain for the share of the goods re-exported by Swedish agents. The SEIC was certainly directly responsible for a large part of the estimated value-added but, as we will show in this article, the Company’s trade also enabled a very substantial re-export trade conducted by other agents – most often agents in one or another way related to the company (Askenfelt, 2017; Hodacs & Müller, 2015; Janes, 2020; Söderpalm, 2003, pp. 88–105).1
2.2. Quantities and value of goods purchased by SEIC in Asia
There is no single data-source that would allow us to easily estimate the magnitude of the Swedish East India trade, as the account books of the SEIC largely were destroyed. Ever since Eli Heckscher’s days, economic historians have therefore despaired at the prospects of arriving at any estimates as to the company’s trade (Lagerqvist, 2013, p. 56). Such a conclusion is, however, premature. Primary sources are certainly often lacking, or – when they exist – are rather fragmentary. But several scholars have over the years come to realize that a number of primary sources related to the company actually have survived in various archives. By triangulating data between these different sources, it becomes possible to provide a quantitative estimate of the magnitude of the company’s activities. In order to estimate the volume and value of goods traded by the SEIC, we start by using data from primary and secondary sources on the goods purchased in Asia. Data has been gathered from different sources for different parts of the period under study.
For the period from 1733 to 1761, data has been gathered from previous research. Christian Koninckx (1980, pp. 451–452) has assembled data on the amounts of tea purchased in Asia by the SEIC during the period 1739–1767. Data is missing for a few ships known to have gone to Asia on SEIC’s account. We have here assumed that the ships for which data is missing carried as much tea as the average carried on other ships the same year. One type of tea, Bohea, completely dominates the purchases, accounting for 84% of all known tea purchases by the Company during this period (see also Hodacs, 2016, p. 55, fig. 2.1). After tea, the silk textiles were the most valuable commodity and especially during the first two charters silks played an important role for SEIC’s trade. Silks were imported by the piece, a piece being between 14 and 15 m long and about 70 cm wide depending on the textile quality. Koninckx has assembled data for silk textiles traded by the SEIC (Koninckx, 1980, pp. 456–457). Hodacs has independently also created a dataset of SEIC’s silk trade, based on printed sale catalogues for the period 1733–1759 (Hodacs, 2016, pp. 193–194). Hodacs and Konincks provide very similar figures for the majority of available years.
For the period 1762–1786 the authors of this article have collected data on all company purchases in Asia from the primary sources on the Company balance accounts and purchase invoices stored at the Gothenburg University Library2 and Jean Abraham Grill’s collection (Godegårdsarkivet, Nordiska museet).3 The data for 1762–1786 complement Hodacs and Koninckx series, based on different sources, but as the data for the periods 1733–1761 and 1762–1786 differ in the ways they have been collected we have to be careful when comparing them. The purchase invoices report data on both the quantities and the values (accounted for in Chinese taels) of the purchases. They are dated either at the end, or at the beginning, of the year when the purchases of cargoes were completed and the vessels prepared to leave Canton for voyage home. Homebound voyage took on average about a half year. As the dating of the Company invoices is somewhat inconsistent (sometimes December, sometimes January), the Canton purchase data occasionally does not match auction data in Sweden from the corresponding year of sale. As we miss information for a few ships, we have in this article made a crude assumption that the ships for which data is missing carried as much goods as the average carried on other ships the same year. Some of the invoices for tea contain no data on the quantities purchased, but only information on the amounts of money spent for the purchase. We have then estimated a proxy for the quantities traded by using the price of tea in Canton, based on the research by Pim de Zwart (de Zwart, 2016). The resulting estimates are shown in Figure 1.
The data enable us to estimate quantitatively the relative importance of the goods purchased by the SEIC in terms of their monetary value. As was noted above, the price of tea in Asia has been assembled by Pim de Zwart, and therefore enable us to calculate the value of the volumes of tea reported in previous research as purchased by the SEIC. We have then assumed that the SEIC purchase price of silk was roughly the same as that of the Danish East India Company, about 10 tael per piece.4 The price is consistent with the average prices in the purchase invoices and balance accounts of the period after 1762.5 There is no similar data on the purchase of other goods than tea or silk (e.g. porcelain, spices) prior to the data we have collected for the period 1762–1786, but from previous research it seems as if they were of quite marginal importance. We have here assumed that these goods in total amounted to ten per cent of the total purchase value in Asia (which also is roughly in line with the relative importance of these goods during the following period). The resulting estimates are shown in Figure 2.
We have then made use of official Swedish trade statistics concerning the East India trade, assembled by Joh. Fr. Nyström (Nyström, 1883, tables 1 & 4), for an estimate of how much of the Asian goods carried by the SEIC to Europe actually were imported and consumed in Sweden, and how much was re-exported to other markets in Europe. Nyström’s volume summarises known official and private data on the trade of the Swedish East India Company. Nyström’s data are most useful as regarding the values of Asian goods re-exported from Sweden, including data on an aggregate level (as well as disaggregated geographically by market for the re-exports). Nyström also included data on the value of Asian commodities officially imported into Sweden, by type of commodity. His data, however, has to be employed with caution and might sometimes require correction.
SEIC’s cargoes were normally sold on auctions in Gothenburg between July and October. Re-exports were loaded on smaller vessels and left Gothenburg, while goods for domestic consumption could be stored or transported by land to other parts of Sweden. It is difficult to evaluate the reliability of the official re-export data reported by Nyström. As the chartered English East India Company had a legal monopoly on the sale of Asian goods in Britain, re-exports to Britain were essentially illegal. That smuggling to Britain was a common practice is, however, well-known (Cole, 1958; Kent, 1973, pp. 112–129; Müller, 2003, 2018, pp. 133–153; Mackillop, 2015; Janes, 2016, 2020). We would therefore not necessarily trust the geographical disaggregation of the Swedish official statistics regarding re-exported Asian goods (Nyström, 1883), as re-exports that officially were reported to be destined for one market – say the Netherlands – very well might have been smuggled to the British market. As there were no regulations prohibiting re-exports from Sweden, and there were many legal markets for Swedish re-exports (Netherlands, France, Portugal, Hamburg, etc.), we on the other hand see little reason to believe that the total quantities reported to have been re-exported would suffer from any systematic bias. This data therefore allow us to calculate the share of Asian goods carried by the SEIC that was re-exported, for the period from 1756 until the early nineteenth century (with some gaps in the data-series). This is shown in Figure 3.
From the late 1750s until the 1780s, around 95% of all goods carried by the SEIC to Europe were re-exported to Europe. The situation changed in the mid-1780s. In 1784, the British government enacted the so-called Commutation Act, which reduced the duties on tea from 119% to 12.5%, which in practice reduced the price of tea by half. The target of the Act was tea smuggling. The decline in Swedish re-exports in the 1780s and even more so in the 1790s indicates that much of the SEIC re-exports indeed had ended up as smuggled goods in Britain. During the last years of the SEIC’s existence the share of goods re-exported fluctuate substantially; by then, however, the values of the cargoes also declined rapidly.
As Nyström’s data in the main only is reported as aggregate value of the trade, we do unfortunately not know exactly how much of the individual commodities traded from China was consumed in Sweden, as the data for domestic consumption of the goods starts only in 1769 (Nyström, 1883, table 1). Previous research has established that the vast majority of the tea was re-exported. We have here assumed that, for the period from 1756 onwards, the share of tea re-exported is equivalent to the share re-exported of all Asian goods reported in Figure 3. For the period prior to 1756, we have assumed that 95 per cent of the tea carried to Europe by the SEIC was re-exported. This might be a slight overestimate, but will bias our value-added calculations downwards to err on the safe side (since the value-added will be lower for re-exported tea than for the imported, as will be discussed below). It is from qualitative sources on the other hand obvious that silks primarily were traded for domestic consumption in Sweden. In the private correspondence of the company’s directors (Hodacs, 2016, p. 116), there is evidence of a substantial domestic market for silks in Sweden and a lack of interest for silk abroad. The different markets for tea (re-exports) and silk textiles (domestic) seems to be confirmed by distinctions between bidders at Gothenburg auctions. There was thus a group of bidders who exclusively bought silk textiles, while others focused on trading in tea (Askenfelt, 2017, pp. 78–79). Fluctuations in silk imports depended partly on the market situation in Canton, partly on the state policy in Sweden. Some years there was a shortage of silk in Canton, and the Chinese authorities regulated sales to foreigners. There was also a close relationship between the SEIC silk imports and the regulations of the domestic market for silk in Sweden. For example, the decline in silks imports in 1746 and 1747 is undoubtedly related to the ban on sales of Chinese silks in 1745–1747. A total ban on domestic consumption of Chinese silks in Sweden was introduced in 1754 (Hodacs, 2016, p. 114). After that date, silk textiles ceased to be a major item in the SEIC trade.
2.3. Calculation of value-added
The quantities of goods traded, as estimated through the model presented above, and the value of these goods in Asia, are then used for a set of calculations of the value-added involved in the value chain, from the SEIC’s purchase in Asia to the final consumers in Sweden, or to the re-export end markets elsewhere in Europe. In order to calculate the value-added involved in the tea trade in particular, we have employed data from previous sources on the prices of the goods traded on various markets in Europe. Pim de Zwart has assembled data on the auction price of tea in the Netherlands (de Zwart, 2016). There are also auction prices of tea from Britain for sporadic years during the same period, assembled by Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna Mui (H.-C. Mui & Mui, 1984, appendix 2), and Swedish data for two years assembled by Linus Askenfelt (Askenfelt, 2017). There are furthermore consumer prices of tea from both Britain and the Netherlands: a long-term series of British data has been assembled by Gregory Clark (Clark, 2006), and a shorter series of data from the Netherlands has been assembled by Liu Yong (Yong, 2007, appendix 10). All prices have been converted into silver content-prices by the authors of this paper using the exchange ratios used by de Zwart and Clark, respectively, to enable comparison. The wholesale/auction prices are shown in Figure 4.
As can be seen in the figure, the auction prices for tea are quite similar on the two biggest European tea markets – England and the Netherlands – and on both markets the price seem to exhibit a declining trend over time. In contrast, the final consumer prices of tea were, quite surprisingly, seemingly two to three times as high on the Dutch market as the price on the British market. Whether this is due to problems with the data assembled by previous scholars or is a reflection of really different equilibria on the two markets is beyond the scope of the present article. Clark’s English data at least fit well with more anecdotal data on English retail prices for tea reported by Stephen Twining (Twining, 1956, p. 45). There is, unfortunately, no data on retail prices of tea in Sweden but there is information on sale duties and excise on tea consumption. Nevertheless, it is difficult to assess its impact on the end-market prices of tea.6 We know that consumption of tea in Sweden was regulated in a similar way as that of coffee and chocolate in 1747, and there was an excise on tea (Knutsson, 2019, p. 276). There were, on the other hand, no bans on tea drinking comparable with the multiple bans of coffee consumption. The state was simply much less interested in tea drinking than in coffee drinking because, at least from the mid-century, there was so much less tea consumed in comparison with coffee. We have here made the conservative estimate that the consumer price of tea imported to and sold on the Swedish markets was equivalent to the consumer price on the British market, so as to not inflate our estimates of value-added of the imports unduly. The total value-added of the goods actually imported into Sweden would thus be the difference between this final consumer price, and the purchasing price in Asia. If consumer prices for tea were higher on the Swedish than on the British market, for example closer to the consumer prices Yong has reported from the Netherlands, we would thus be underestimating the value-added involved in the value chain substantially.
With the exception of silk, imports into Sweden were only a minor share of the goods carried to Europe by the SEIC. The vast majority of all goods carried were instead re-exported elsewhere in Europe, as was shown in Figure 3. The value-added of these re-exports must be calculated in two steps. First, we calculate the value-added of the links in the value-chain from purchase in Asia to the auctions in Sweden. There is auction data on tea available in the primary sources on the SEIC on the for the period 1733–1759,7 but as the Company sold the tea by the chest, without necessarily specifying how much tea the chests contained, the data is very hard to use for our purposes. As is shown in Figure 4, the crude estimates made by Askenfelt for two auctions (1748 and 1758) nonetheless suggest that the average price received on the auction in 1748 was very similar to the prices on Amsterdam auctions in the same year, and the price received in 1758 was somewhat higher than the price on the Amsterdam market that year. We have again made a conservative assumption that the prices of tea received at SEIC’s auctions were on par with the auction prices in the Netherlands. If the auction prices in Sweden were higher than in the Netherlands, as Askenfelt’s second data-point would suggest, we would thus underestimate the value-added created in the Swedish East India trade. As these goods would make up intermediate goods for the next step in the value-chain, this would however have no impact upon our estimates for the share of goods re-exported by Swedish agents (as a down-ward biased estimates of the value-added in this link of the value-chain would be met by a corresponding up-ward bias of the intermediate good in the following link in the value-chain). The bias would thus only be problematic for the share of goods re-exported by non-Swedish merchants.
The second step is to estimate the value-added involved in the value-chain from the sale at the auction, to when the goods were sold on the re-export markets. As has been noted above, official statistics suggest that these re-exports were destined for several markets in Europe, primarily Britain, the Dutch Republic and France (Nyström, 1883, p. 86). There is, however, much indirect evidence from Britain suggesting that the British market was a major destination. All such re-exported tea would have had to be sold illegally, since the English East India Company had a legal monopoly on the sale of Asian goods in Britain (Cole, 1958; Janes, 2016; L. H. Mui, 1975; H.-C. Mui & Mui, 1968). What prices the merchants re-exporting the goods were able to catch when selling their goods on the end market is therefore hard to determine. Anecdotal evidence from the inventory of the wife tea merchant Thomas Irvine (who also had been SEIC’s supercargo) in 1766 suggests that value that he estimated his tea to be worth was very high, almost four times as high as the auction prices in the Netherlands and Britain – and approximately two-thirds of the consumer price of tea in Britain.8 This also fits quite well with anecdotal evidence presented in previous research, for example Cole’s finding that smuggled tea sold for between half and two-thirds of the price of legally imported tea in Britain (Cole, 1958, p. 405), or Mui and Mui’s evidence on Gothenburg tea sold in Scotland in 1785 (H.-C. Mui & Mui, 1968, p. 64). Markets in Britain handled tea of many different qualities, and the SEIC adjusted successfully to the market differentiation. Bohea, the cheapest and most voluminous quality of tea, completely dominated SEIC’s trade over the period of 1733–1767 (Hodacs, 2016, p. 55, 189–192, Appendix 1). But demand for tea changed and in the 1770s and 1780s the company traded increasing quantities of the black tea quality Congo, in demand in Scotland and northern England. Many authors have pointed out the differences between Scotland and London tea markets. Scots were known for their taste for the more expensive Congo, originating in Gothenburg (Janes, 2016, pp. 230–232, 2020, pp. 192–193; Mackillop, 2015). SEIC’s teas, including the popular Congo, were known as the ‘Gotteburgh Teas’, the brand name established already in the 1750s. It seems as if the SEIC was crucial for creating the distinct Scottish taste for the more pricy Congo. In our analysis of the value added from the SEIC’s Asia trade, we have used established English tea price series (Clark, 2006; de Zwart, 2016; Yong, 2007) that do not differentiate between tea qualities as a benchmark. If, as previous scholarship thus suggests, the tea traded by the SEIC on average was of a higher quality, we might therefore underestimate the value-added involved in the business of re-exporting the Asian teas. We have here assumed that the wholesale price of such re-exported (smuggled) tea that Swedish merchants could capture when selling the tea on the re-export markets was the average of the final consumer prices (in Britain) and the London/Amsterdam auction prices. The value-added of this link in the value-chain would thus be the difference between this selling-price and the auction price described above. As we would want to compare our estimates to Swedish GDP-figures, we only want to include activities undertaken by Sweden-based agents (including too foreign-born, but naturalised Swedish merchants). Previous research has shown that the majority of the goods sold at the SEIC auctions were purchased by Swedish (or naturalised Swedish) merchants, who later re-exported the goods (Askenfelt, 2017, pp. 68–71; Hodacs & Müller, 2015; Müller, 2003).
For goods other than tea, we have in the model assumed a mark-up ratio in the price between the Asian and European markets equivalent to those found for silk and porcelain in the Dutch case by Pim de Zwart, in order to arrive at a proxy for the sale value of these goods (de Zwart, 2016). De Zwart’s data seems to refer to raw silk, whereas our data refers to silk cloth. Anecdotal evidence on mark-up ratios for silk cloth traded by the SEIC reported by Hanna Hodacs (Hodacs, 2016, p. 109) suggest a somewhat lower mark-up ratio at the stage of auctions in Gothenburg, but this does on the other hand not include any mark-up between the auctions and the final retail prices. We have therefore opted for using the Dutch data as a proxy for the mark-up ratio. We have then calculated the value-added in the trade in these goods as the difference between the sale values and the purchase values of these goods. As these goods only made up a minor fraction of all the goods traded by the SEIC for most of the period under study, they have a quite marginal impact upon the aggregate estimates.
The data has finally been compared to Swedish GDP estimates by Rodney Edvinsson (Edvinsson, 2013, 2014), both total Swedish GDP and the share of GDP made up of the sectors of transport and trade in particular. Edvinsson’s data has then been converted into silver content-values using data on the silver content of Swedish currencies from Wallroth (1918). When comparing our data to these estimates, there is a risk that the transport sector’s share of Swedish GDP might be underestimated, as estimates of Swedish foreign trade often has focused on imports and exports (e.g. Edvinsson & Gad, 2018), excluding re-exports, but also as Swedish ships participated in international tramp shipping that do not show up in Swedish trade statistics (Müller, 2012, 2018, pp. 43–84).
3. Results
Figure 5 reports the resulting estimates of the value-added involved in the Swedish trade on East India for the period from 1739 to 1786. As described above, we have when necessary attempted to the best of our abilities to make conservative estimates, in order to not bias our estimates upwards. As can be seen in the figures, the total value-added involved in the trade was in the range of two to five per cent of total Swedish GDP during the period under study. The trade peaked during the 1740s, experienced a new temporary peak in the mid-1750s, as well as in the mid-1760s. All these peaks primarily seems attributable to particularly large amounts of goods purchased in Asia during these years, primarily of tea but during the first peak also of silk. Despite these peaks, the trade decreased in importance (relative to the Swedish economy) from the 1740s onwards. In the 1780s, the trade experienced a small, temporary increase again. This is largely attributable to rising prices of Asian goods in Europe (without any corresponding increase in Asia, as it seems), thus increasing the mark-up – and hence the value-added – between the Asian and European markets.
Much of the value-added created in this process is directly attributable directly to SEIC’s trade alone, i.e. between the stage of purchasing the goods in Asia, and selling them at auctions in Gothenburg. As only a minor share of all the tea carried to Europe was imported into Sweden, comparatively little value-added can on the other hand be attributed to the part of the value-chain from the auctions to final consumption in Sweden. The largest contribution to the value-added created did, however, come from the re-exports of the tea carried to Europe.
4. Discussion
Several historians have in recent years come to re-evaluate the role that the Swedish East India Company played for the process of early globalisation during the eighteenth century. Economic historians have, however, not yet come to re-evaluate what role the company’s trade played for the development of the Swedish economy. The idea that the issue is impossible to research, since the company’s accounts are missing, still seems prevalent among scholars in the field of economic history.
Several scholars have, however, over the years unearthed a number of different sources relating to the company’s activities. These enable us to make some crude estimates of the magnitude of the company’s activities quantitatively. In this article, we have attempted to do so, using a value-chain approach. The data available from the primary sources are certainly far from perfect. It has several times been necessary to make more or less crude assumptions as to some of the aspects of the trade. One example of this is what price Swedish merchants might have received for goods (primarily tea) re-exported elsewhere in Europe – most importantly for goods smuggled to the British market. We have to the best of our ability then tried to make conservative assumptions, so as to not inflate our estimated figures unduly.
The results we arrive at suggest that the company’s activities was of a magnitude equivalent to around two to five per cent of the Swedish economy at the time. In comparison to total Swedish GDP, the value-added created in the Swedish East India trade is perhaps not overwhelming. This is hardly surprising, as the Swedish economy to a very large extent still was dominated by the agricultural sector. Compared to the value-added created by non-agricultural activities – and in particular from the trade- and transport-sectors – in the Swedish economy, the value-added created by the SEIC was in contrast without a doubt of a considerable magnitude: during the peak years potentially in the range of 60%–80% of the value-added estimated for the trade- and transport-sectors of the Swedish economy. The results must certainly be interpreted with some caution mainly for two reasons. The first reason is that the data available on the magnitude and value-added of the SEIC’s trade, and the re-export trade in particular, is imperfect, as has been discussed at length in this article. The second reason is that Swedish GDP figures in the trade/transport-sectors might be too low, missing much of the value-added created by the SEIC for the simple reason that re-exports often have been ignored in previous research, as noted above. This latter reason would thus merit the question whether the Swedish transport sector’s historical GDP-figures might be in need of revision. It is, at the very least, high time that the company’s role not just for the economy locally in Gothenburg – but also on in terms of the value-added even on an aggregate level as well as for globalising the Swedish economy – is recognised more broadly in the field of economic history.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 A useful approach to analyse organization of re-exports from Sweden is to study the public sales catalogues of the SEIC’s cargoes in Gothenburg. There is a large number of preserved sale catalogues for 1733–1759 reporting the names of bidders. See collection digitized by the Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/eac/databases/ [accessed 2020 January 7].
2 Gothenburg University Library, Collection Ostindiska kompaniet: Fakturor på returladdningar från Kina med olika skepp, 1768–1786, http://www2.ub.gu.se/samlingar/handskrift/ostindie/dokument/document.xml?id=61 [accessed 2020 January 5].
3 1762–1766, Godegårsarkivet, Nordiska museet, Digitala arkivet: Expeditioner, A28, http://ostindiska.nordiskamuseet.se/ [accessed 2020 January 5].
4 For details of qualities and length of pieces see Hodacs (2016, p. 96). Dominant qualities being Poisee damask, taffeta, peeling, and Bed damask. We use here an average purchase prices of the Danish Asiatic Company assuming the Swedes bought their silk textiles at same price (Hodacs, 2016, p. 96).
5 Based on calculations from the SEIC purchase invoices for 1769–1774, the Canton price of silk was about 10–12 tael per piece.
6 The printed sale catalogues for 1733–1759, on the first page include information about different duties put on goods intended for domestic consumption. See for example sale catalogue of Götha Leyon of 1752 https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/swedish/id/2509.
7 The catalogues for 1733–1759, digitized in https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/eac/databases/ [accessed 2020 January 7].
8 Inventory of Margareta Irvine, 14 April, 1766, (widow of SEIC supercargo Thomas Irvine), Riksarkivet (Stockholm), Göta Hovrätt, Bouppteckningar, 1766, vol. 1. https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/C0105477_00157#?c=&m=&s=&cv=156&xywh=-1508%2C-2%2C9165%2C5383 [accessed 2020 January 7].
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In a robustness test of our estimates, we use the data discussed above on the official imports and re-exports of Asian goods assembled by Nyström (1883). Data on the value of goods imported into Sweden is available from 1756 to 1812, with gaps in the series. Except for the quantities of tea imported, these statistics only report the values of the goods imported and re-exported. It is unclear exactly how these values were calculated. As both quantities and official aggregate values of tea are reported in the source from the 1760s onwards, it is possible to estimate the official Swedish valuation per pound of tea. These values shift quite substantially over time – starting in the 1760s at an unrealistically low valuation (even lower than the contemporary purchasing price of tea in Canton), but then rising drastically in the 1770s, and increasing drastically yet again in the 1790s. The official valuation of these goods is thus of uncertain reliability, similar to what previous scholars have argued in the case of the valuation in other Swedish trade statistics from this time (Häggqvist, 2015; Vallerö, 1969).
As the data in the official re-export statistics do not allow us to disaggregate between different types of Asian goods, we have here ignored the possibility that the value-added might differ between different types of goods. As the vast share of the re-exported goods during this period was made up of tea alone, as noted above, this ought not to introduce any major biases in the estimates.
We use this data to calculate a crude proxy of the volumes of Asian goods carried to Sweden by the SEIC (i.e. the total of goods imported and goods later re-exported) by using the price of tea on auctions in Europe as a basis for our calculation (see Figure 4). We here assume an official valuation of the tea twice as high that of the auction price in Amsterdam. This yields a proxy estimate of the volumes carried to Sweden by the SEIC quite similar to those estimated using the primary sources above, as can be seen in Figure A1, except for some years of extremely high (known) purchases in Asia.
Using this data, we can then estimate the value-added of the East India trade in the same manner as described in the main text. The resulting estimates are reported in Figure A2. As can be seen, the robustness test shows a smoother development over time, to a large degree potentially as the particular peak purchases during the 1750s to 1770s shown in Figure A1 are not captured by the proxy series. The magnitudes of the estimates are, however, at least quite similar.


Svenska Ostindiska Companiet

De båda följande oktrojerna, verksamma under 1786–1806 och 1806–1821, var inte lika framgångsrika. När det nya ostindiska bolaget skulle bildas 1786 var folk så ivriga att få vara med vid aktieteckningen att dubbla den behövliga summan tecknades. Det nya bolaget gjorde dock från början en usel affär på fartygsköpen från det förra kompaniet, vilket berodde på att samma personer satt som direktörer i båda bolagen. Två av skeppen var så gamla och nedgångna att de aldrig kunde begagnas. Det ena av dem såldes för 1/9 av vad det kostat bolaget i inköp och reparation. Två andra fartyg måste slopas efter endast en resa. Ett femte blev efter tre resor degraderat till kölhalningspråm, och ett sjätte var odugligt efter fem resor. Det sjunde skeppet gick förlorad på sin tredje resa, och det åttonde och sista av de först inköpta såldes efter tre Kinafärder till Storbritannien.


Svenska Ostindiska Companiet

De båda följande oktrojerna, verksamma under 1786–1806 och 1806–1821, var inte lika framgångsrika. När det nya ostindiska bolaget skulle bildas 1786 var folk så ivriga att få vara med vid aktieteckningen att dubbla den behövliga summan tecknades. Det nya bolaget gjorde dock från början en usel affär på fartygsköpen från det förra kompaniet, vilket berodde på att samma personer satt som direktörer i båda bolagen. Två av skeppen var så gamla och nedgångna att de aldrig kunde begagnas. Det ena av dem såldes för 1/9 av vad det kostat bolaget i inköp och reparation. Två andra fartyg måste slopas efter endast en resa. Ett femte blev efter tre resor degraderat till kölhalningspråm, och ett sjätte var odugligt efter fem resor. Det sjunde skeppet gick förlorad på sin tredje resa, och det åttonde och sista av de först inköpta såldes efter tre Kinafärder till Storbritannien.

När de två första laddningarna kom hem, år 1788, var Sverige i krig med Ryssland och Danmark, och Göteborg hotades med belägring, så ingen försäljning av godset kunde äga rum på utlovad tid. Följden blev att de utländska köparna vände sig till Köpenhamn för att få sina behov fyllda, och när auktionen till slut gick av stapeln blev det stor förlust för kompaniet. Ännu ogynnsammare blev av samma anledning resultatet av den expedition som företogs med två fartyg som återvände 1789. Knappt var kriget slut förrän kompaniet drabbades av ett annat hårt slag. Dittills hade Storbritannien och Nederländerna varit de bästa avsättningsorterna för det kinesiska teet. Visserligen hade Storbritannien ett eget ostindiskt kompani, men dess teimport hade varit belagd med så höga tullar att britterna fann det förmånligare att smuggla in det svenska Ostindiska kompaniets varor än köpa av det brittiska kompaniet. Men 1790 nedsattes dessa tullar så mycket att risken med lurendrejerierna blev för stor i förhållande till den vinst de numera gav, och genast sjönk importen från Sverige betydligt. Ännu sämre gick det för kompaniet året därpå i Nederländerna, då detta lands regering förbjöd all annan teimport än genom nederländska Ostindiska kompaniet. Genom dessa båda förordningar berövades det svenska kompaniet omkring 5/6 av sin avsättning. De övriga avsättningsländerna för Ostindiska kompaniets varor, Tyskland och Belgien, var vid denna tid indragna i krig, vilket omöjliggjorde nästan all handel med dem.