Organizing History: Studies in Honour of Jan Glete (review)

Organizing History: Studies in Honour of Jan Glete was intended to be a Festschrift marking the end of a productive scholarly career. Unfortunately, Glete’s death from cancer in 2009 meant that he never read the finished tribute. Although he was able to see the table of contents shortly before his death, the final publication itself had to be a posthumous recognition of his work.

The volume consists of sixteen essays written by Glete’s former students and colleagues. These include not only scholars from his native Sweden, but also historians from Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Spain. As with any publication of this type, it brings together disparate subjects that might not normally appear in the same volume. What ties these essays together is Glete’s general approach to historical scholarship and his efforts to create a theoretical approach to organizing historical study. These provided the editors with a logical framework with which to tie the essays together.

Glete’s early scholarship focused on economic and business history specifically related to industrial and financial organization. While he eventually redirected his focus from business to maritime history, he did not concentrate solely on naval history per se. Instead, he used his earlier approach of organizational theory to develop syntheses that would place naval scholarship in a broader historical perspective. This also fit within his broader theories regarding early modern state formation. While some questioned his application of market analogies to the study of state formation, they nonetheless acknowledged his contributions to broadening our understanding of that process.

Reflecting Glete’s general approach to historical study, the editors have organized the essays into three main categories: “Organizations,” “Norm Systems,” and “Institutional Change.” There is also a general overview of Glete’s career, which examines the different phases of his scholarship. The book concludes with a compilation listing Glete’s published and unpublished works.

The individual essays examine an extremely broad range of topics. In the section on “Organizations,” they include: a theoretical study of the application of industrial growth theories to the process of state formation; a study of commissary officials in the Danish-Norwegian army in the seventeenth century; a review of developments in the British Royal Navy between 1689 and 1815; the evaluation of an eighteenth-century Dutch naval incident in 1707; and an assessment of the value of a museum exhibit (the Vasa royal warship) for increasing public interest in maritime history. The section on “Norm Systems” includes: a comparison of French and Swedish justifications of their entry into the Thirty Years War; an examination of the role Castilian guards played in the military structure of the Hispanic monarchy; a theoretical discussion of the value of using cultural-historical methods to study law codes and other cultural institutions; and a study of the way corporations use sport to develop and improve productivity.

The final section, “Institutional Change,” has a similarly diverse collection of essays that focus primarily on economic and organizational matters. The topics include: productivity in Swedish merchant shipping from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century; the significance of the Swedish Convoy Office and its role in the development of the Swedish imperial economy; South America’s role in the new global food order; capital in the medieval iron trade; administrative changes in the Swedish army near the end of the Napoleonic wars; and finally an overview of the Swedish and Norwegian welfare states in the twentieth century.

Using Glete’s theoretical approach is a useful way to organize what might otherwise be a series of unrelated essays. With their narrow focus, some of them would not be valuable for readers who do not already have extensive knowledge of the subject matter. But the theoretical framework is a useful tool for understanding complex historical developments. It is clear that Glete was able to effectively influence his students to apply that in their own work. The volume is thus...