The Crown of the Baltic - A Map of the Month TL

Sorry for my infrequent posts in this thread (I'm pretty much driving Ares96 crazy :p:eek:), I've been sort of busy. I'll try to get another chapter up within twelve hours! :)

Not crazy, just surprised and a little impatient. Would be a lot better if you announced these little down periods beforehand though.
 
At the end of the Second Protectorate War in 1812, Karlskrona was a city of forty thousand, the largest in Sweden by a narrow margin [1], but as ever, it was suffering from overcrowding, and it was felt that rather than the piecemeal expansion that had marked the 18th century, a comprehensive plan should be drawn up for the creation of new housing. The only major unexploited area within the city limits that wasn't too hilly to build on was Yttre Wämö (Outer Wämö), the mainland area to the north of Malmen. This area contains two large hills and a string of smaller ones lining the coast. In between these is a small plain, which at the time was home to two steadings (Mariedal and Gullberna) and a number of smaller farms and cottages, all of which have now been demolished [2]. This area, it was decided, would be perfect for a new suburb [3], with room for enough housing to accommodate a city half again as large as Karlskrona was at the time. The southern hill was to be built on (with a church at the summit), but the northern one was deemed too tall to be comfortably exploited, and was set aside for eventual use as a park.

The roads leading to Nättraby and Rödeby (the modern-day Sjövägen and Kungsvägen) were straightened, paved and trees planted in them, forming a V shape resembling the one in Malmen, but it was decided that the streets should follow a straight grid pattern in between the two. On the 14th of July, 1815, the new neighbourhood of Nordstaden ("North Town" as it might be rendered in English) was opened for settlement, and many citizens of the overcrowded city quickly seized the chance to spread out. The speed of settlement was impeded, however, by the considerable distance (some three and a half statute miles) between the central city and the new neighbourhood. In 1825, in an attempt to partially alleviate this problem, N.P. Nordström and associates opened the first ever public transportation system in Sweden, a horse-drawn omnibus [4] line running from Sunnaplan in Nordstaden to Narvatorget [5] on Trossö. The line quickly grew popular, in spite of the fact that most inhabitants who needed to commute to Trossö could and would do so in private carriages.

At this time King Charles XV [6] was growing increasingly unstable, and his dismissal of Realm Secretary [7] Erik Wilhelm Staël von Holstein [8] in 1829 marked the beginning of a period of royal tyranny of a kind unseen since the days of Baron Görtz. According to mainstream historiography the King took control of the press and the courts of law and used them to persecute his political enemies, among them liberals, Finnish nationalists and members of the free churches, and steadfastly refused to grant permission to any kind of industrial venture for fear of upsetting the balance of society [9]. It's worth remembering that the universities were dominated for decades by the same liberals who had been the victims of royal oppression, so the historical account of events during this period is more than a little biased, but whether balanced or not the sources do agree that the King's behaviour was authoritarian and reactionary, even for the Autocracy, and this is in any case shown by the events which proceeded next.

The Great Revolution (Stora revolutionen), as it has become known, was actually more of a coup d'état, and took place entirely in Karlskrona. At midnight on November 29th, 1837, a cadre of liberal officers at the naval base in Karlskrona swore an oath not to surrender until a new Instrument of Government had been promised. The plan was for them to simultaneously march marines into the royal apartments, the admiralty building, the courthouse and the meeting room of the Procurement Committee [10], removing the chance of any organised resistance, and then to present their demands to the King, who would in theory be unable to mount any kind of opposition.

In practice, events unfolded quite differently. The stormings of the courthouse and the admiralty worked flawlessly, although two men were shot dead in the latter case, but when the palace was to be stormed, the Life Guards, whose officers had been bribed to stay out of any conflagration, nevertheless put up a passive resistance by blocking the entrances, and a stalemate dragged on for almost two hours, with the rebels and the guards across the courtyard from one another, until the guards finally retreated across Prinsgatan to their barracks. The rebelling troops proceeded to storm the palace, but by the time they arrived in the royal apartments, the King was gone. It later turned out that he had fled the city, headed for Denmark, and by the time he was captured he'd already reached Karlshamn.

The King was subsequently taken back to the city, where he abdicated after renouncing the succession rights of his underage children, leaving the crown to his second cousin, Alexander Romanov [11]. Though the people and the clergy resisted the accession of a Russian king, Alexander dispelled the worst fears by converting to Lutheranism and immediately seizing upon the need for reform, calling an extraordinary meeting of the realm to establish a new constitution, and proved a far more capable, though hands-off, ruler than his predecessor.

The only real import these events had on Karlskrona, aside from the upheaval caused by the revolution, was the construction of a large number of new government buildings on Trossö, which resulted from the decision to reform the state administration into a series of departments, each led by a member of the Council of State (statsrådet) and headquartered in its own building outside the palace. Most of these sprung up around the Grand Square, including the Chancery Building, but the largest building by quite far was the new Parliament House, which was built at Karl Fredriks Torg [12] on the west side of Trossö. This placed Västerudd, formerly a housing area for shipyard workers and one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the city, right between the government quarter and the legislature, and as a consequence of this, the area was gradually gentrified, pushing the working classes off Trossö almost entirely and leading to an expansion of housing on Saltö to house the workers thus displaced.

However, by the time the new parliament building was completed, and the events mentioned set in motion, it was 1874, and a new technological development had reached the city. It would never be the same again…

[1] At the same time IOTL, Stockholm had almost 75,000 inhabitants, but Karlskrona's growth is relatively stunted in comparison, owing partly to the lesser prominence of trade and manufacturing in the city and partly to the lack of space into which the city could comfortably expand.
[2] This is the case IOTL as well, and the area is home to several residential areas along with Dynapac, one of Europe's largest makers of steamrollers (no, really).
[3] That is, in the sense of a faubourg-type development. Obviously, actual suburbs are still in the TL's future.
[4] The term "omnibus" is a bit convergent with a PoD in 1696, but I'm using it for convenience. To wit, it refers to a large horse carriage run as a public transportation service.
[5] Formerly Neptuni Torg ("Neptune Square"), this square (located at what is IOTL the northern half of Hoglands Park) was renamed in 1802 due to a drive to remove "pagan superstition" from the names of the city's public places.
[6] An entirely fictional character (more specifically, the grandson of Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, Charles XII's designated heir ITTL), Charles XV bears no intentional resemblance to the OTL king of that name.
[7] Essentially a sort of prime minister (although more like the Hand of the King from ASOIAF than anything we've seen IOTL), the office of Realm Secretary (rikssekreterare) is described in more detail in Makemakean's part of the TL.
[8] An alternate, considerably younger version of Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, the Swedish ambassador to Paris whose wife ran the foremost political salon in the city during the revolution.
[9] To be fair, he did kind of have a point about that.
[10] The Procurement Committee (Upphandlingsutskottet) is a quasi-parliamentary body appointed by the King, whose approval is needed for any kind of tax to be levied. Something like Barebone's Parliament, to use the closest English equivalent. Again, Makemakean explains this in more detail.
[11] Charles XIV Peter, the king after Charles Frederick, has the same parents as OTL's Peter III of Russia, and as such the Holstein-Gottorp line is related to the Romanovs.
[12] OTL's Chapmansplan - the Riksdag is housed roughly at the location of the old city gasworks, which is long since demolished and today houses a hotel, but whose location is still known as "the gasworks".
 
From Bookkeeper of the Nation: An Anthology of the Carolinian Realm Secretaries, 1972, Åbo Academy Press:

The retirement of Georg Heinrich von Görtz from the Realm Secretariat in 1735 came as a surprise to the whole nation, including most members of the Procurement Committee. Although already a man of sixty-seven years, with the scars of aging making him appear ten years older than that as well, Görtz' intellectual and organizational output had remained virtually constant since his appointment twenty years earlier. Though he had allocated most of the responsibilities associated with foreign affairs to his confidant Gyllenborg as early as the ascension to the throne by Charles XII in 1730, he had continued to draw up plans and device innovations to spur Sweden's economic growth, being the de facto dictator of the Swedish financial machine at this point.

Heavily influenced by the mercantilist doctrines that were popular by the time, Görtz had as early as 1717 been starting to introduce heavy export tariffs on many raw materials, mainly iron and copper. The idea was that by disincentivizing producers from selling these goods to foreign manufacturers, he could assist the development of a domestic manufacturing industry by providing them with cheap source materials. [1] Though the policy had resonated with the lower levels of the Swedish nobility and wealthy burghers (those most likely to invest in such domestic industries), the policy had proven massively unpopular with the commoners in the Norrlandic provinces, and the king had in 1724 been forced to send in the army to put down an insurrection in the traditionally rebellious province of Dalecarlia [2].

By the mid-1730s, however, Sweden was beginning to see a growing industry in many areas from which goods traditionally had been imported from overseas (primarily Great Britain), and this success was attributed to the protectionist policies of Görtz. Albeit many of these factories were located on Swedish soil and employed Swedish labour, many of the entrepreneurs were in fact immigrants, mainly from Ulster in Ireland, who had brought with them ideas and technology from the British isles. In time, many of these immigrants would obtain letters of nobility and marry into the old Swedish noble families. [3]

Taking credit for this achievement, Görtz wrote a letter of resignation to the King in April, which Charles XII accepted accepted with some regret. On the 2nd of May 1735, Görtz stepped on-board the ship of the line Hedwigae Eleonorae which took him to Stralsund in Swedish Pomerania, from whence he travelled to his ancestral holding of the estate Schlitz by Fulda in Oberhessen, which had been in his family's possession since the 12th century. Though he would continue to live for another twelve years, he would elect never to return to Sweden, despite Charles XII:s repeated invitations.

His final political act is contained in his letter of resignation, in which he advised the King to appoint Carl Gyllenborg as his successor. Charles XII trusted in this advice, and on the 29th of April 1735, Gyllenborg was took the oath of office of Realm Secretary.

During the years of the Görtzian Premiership, many Germans had been appointed to senior positions in the prestigious financial institutions such as the Realm Bank and the College of Commerce, and Görtz had recruited many nobles from diverse northern German principalities to serve as ambassadors for Sweden abroad. German had become so entrenched as the lingua franca of the government that it was rumoured that not even half of the Committee of Procurement spoke Swedish. Those who had hoped to see a return of native Swedes to important positions in government upon the resignation of Görtz were to find themselves sorely mistaken...



[1] Görtz had these designs in OTL as well, but his untimely execution in 1719 kept them from ever being properly realized.
[2] I much prefer to use the (once conventional) Latinized English exonyms to using the Swedish names for the provinces when writing about them in English. It sounds cooler that way. The convention these days (in English literature) seems to be to call them by their Swedish names for all provinces except, oddly enough, my home province of Scania (Sw. Skåne). I have no idea why this is. It's like the inconsistency you find when people insist on calling the city Beijing rather than Peking, but are perfectly okay to call the European cities of Copenhagen, Venice, Vienna, Brussels, Munich, etc. But I'm digressing.
[3] Happened in OTL as well.
 
The steam railway had been introduced in Germany [1] as early as 1831, but it was only in the 1860s that the idea spread to Sweden. The benefits of rail transport as compared to animal power - higher speed, greater reliability, lesser risk of the driver getting kicked - were clear to everyone, and it was decided that a number of mainline railways should be built with Government money, in order to connect the various parts of the realm and promote growth in rural areas. The first line to be built was to run between Karlskrona and Stockholm, which was fitting not only because it would connect the old capital to the new, but also quite simply because those were, by quite far, the two largest cities in the realm.

Yet again, however, Karlskrona's unusual location proved highly inconvenient, since the only way to build a railway anywhere near Trossö was to run it straight through Malmen. This, it was agreed, was unacceptable, and so when the Southern Mainline (Södra stambanan) opened in 1873, its southern terminus was located in Nordstaden, a good few miles outside Karlskrona's city centre. This was clearly an unsatisfactory arrangement, but there was no way to resolve it satisfactorily, and so the "temporary" station at the crossing of Västra Bangatan and Kungsmarksgatan remained the main Karlskrona terminus for twenty-three years.

Before then, however, means had been made to continue the growth of rail transport in the city. It was decided that a "tracked omnibus" (what we today would call a horse tramway) should be built to connect the train station with the central city, and to this end, Karlskrona Spårvägsaktiebolag (KSAB) was formed in 1876. When the line opened two years later, connecting the railway station to Narvatorget, it made Karlskrona the first city outside the Holy Roman Empire or North America to boast such a system. The line proved extremely popular, as not only did it connect the station to the city, it also took in the fledgling Caroline University and the heavily-populated quarters of Malmen and Nordstaden. Within a few years, branch lines were opened to Gräsviken, Sunnaplan and the Riksdag, the latter by way of the newly-built promenade along the western shore of Trossö, but any connection up the steep hills of Trossö itself would have to wait, as the horse-drawn tram cars couldn't manage the kind of inclines found there - they could hardly make it up and down Pantarholmen as it was.

No, it would be no sooner than 1896, at the same time as the new central station opened at Järnvägstorget [2], that a line could be built connecting the station to the Grand Square. The method chosen was the cable car, inspired by the growing system in Yerba Buena, and the line ran from the station, up Smedjegatan, to the Grand Square, then down Kyrkogatan to the palace. This line quickly became a financial success, and a branch was added going west along Hantverkargatan to the parliament building. Unlike most of the tram system, the cable cars have remained to the present day, having become an important landmark of the city as well as a good way to get around the historic centre.

However, the arrival of rail transport did much more for the city than simply facilitate transport between existing sites. With the arrival of a fast and cheap means of travel, the city could expand into areas that would have been impossible to reach with only animal transport. This was fully seized upon in 1884, when an entirely new town - Karlskrona's first suburb in the modern sense - was founded at Boråkra, on the grounds of a farmstead in the east of Nättraby parish [3] bought out by a private developer. It was spun off from the rural municipalities of Nättraby and Lösen, made an independent borough (köping) in 1890 and a city three years after, and grew into one of the most populous such settlements in the country by the turn of the century.

As a result of industrialisation, the city of Karlskrona saw explosive growth in the last third of the 19th century, chiefly centred on the mainland but also extending to the central city, where the bay between Trossö and Malmen [4] was almost completely reclaimed in order to house the new railway terminal and a housing area, leaving only a narrow strait separating the islands of Trossö and Wämö. As a result of this, the city's population skyrocketed, going from roughly 75,000 in 1860 to 213,440 in 1900 [5].

[1] With the much greater political upheaval in Britain, and the slightly lesser political upheaval in Germany, it is the latter that becomes the cradle of the Industrial Revolution ITTL.
[2] This is located on reclaimed land that doesn't exist IOTL, but the southern edge of it would straddle the OTL marina, and the western edge the access road. The location is reached by tunnelling under Malmen and then running on reclaimed land.
[3] This area is actually unsettled IOTL, and the farms there remain in healthy business. That's right - the city is now bigger in terms of area settled than its OTL counterpart.
[4] Parts of this strait has been reclaimed IOTL to serve as industrial land, but not nearly as much as ITTL.
[5] This is still less than two thirds of Stockholm's population in 1900, but it's worth remembering that due to Karlskrona's somewhat peripheral location, more people are going to move to regional centres (Stockholm, Gothenburg, Tammerfors, Reval/Tallinn) rather than the capital. Additionally, the rate of technological advancement ITTL, slowed down by Luddite agitation in Britain and political disunity in Germany, means that the explosive growth brought on by industrialisation hasn't been going on for as long.
 
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