Manufacturing Saltpetre in Finland in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries

This chapter analyses the manufacturing of potassium nitrate in late 16th- and early 17th-century Finland. In order to secure its self-sufficiency in gunpowder manufacturing at the eve of its Age of Greatness, the Swedish crown built a network of state-owned saltpetre works and obliged peasants to deliver the raw materials. The system did not function as hoped for several reasons, not least because of the burdensome ‘saltpetre tax’, which created conflicts between the local peasants and the crown’s men, and it was fairly quickly abandoned for other solutions.