The Swedish East India Company: Tea, Porcelain, and Smuggled Silver

Before Sweden had a colonial empire, it had a trading one. This episode of The History of Sweden dives into the Swedish East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Companiet), founded in 1731 in Gothenburg. We follow its ships around the Cape of Good Hope to Canton, where Swedish traders swapped Swedish iron and tar for Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk — often paid for with smuggled Spanish silver. It was a risky business, run by men like Colin Campbell and Henrik König, who navigated Dutch and British monopolies, monsoon winds, and the delicate politics of the Qing court. The company made fortunes, funded Sweden's first great scientific expeditions — including Carl Linnaeus's apostles who collected thousands of specimens — and left a lasting mark on Swedish material culture. But it also had a seamy side: secret cargoes, bribery, and the near-shipwreck of the Götheborg, whose story is still being told today. We'll look at the daily life of a supercargo, the economics of a trade that was technically illegal for Swedes to conduct, and how this commercial venture shaped Sweden's place in the world long before the modern era.

#SwedishEastIndiaCompany #Ostindiefarare #Gothenburg #Canton #ChinaTrade #TeaTrade #Porcelain #ColinCampbell #HenrikKönig #CarlLinnaeus #Götheborg #Monsoon #Supercargo #EighteenthCentury #TradeHistory #SwedishHistory #History #FexingoHistory

Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo