entangled in insolvency – jussi sallila 295 In this chapter, it has been argued that the emergence of Swedish bankruptcy legislation in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries was not such an obvious example of the reception of foreign law as Stig Jägerskiöld asserted in his studies. In fact, many important features of the Swedish bankruptcy law were quite exceptional in the contemporary European context. The difference between Jägerskiöld’s account and the reassessment reflects developments in research since the 1960s. In the introduction to the chapter it was noted that Jägerskiöld’s willingness to stress common features of European legal history was linked to general criticism of nationalist interpretations of legal history. However, while Jägerskiöld exaggerated the extent to which Sweden followed the general European trends, the exceptional features of Swedish bankruptcy should not be investigated as the result of purely national developments. On the contrary, they provide an example of the interplay between foreign influence and domestic legal tradition in seventeenth-century Sweden that produced differing results in various areas of the law. Domestic law had a very prominent place in the legal argumentation of the testamentary cases studied by Trolle Önnerfors. This can be explained by the fact that universal problems related to inheritance are a matter most legal traditions necessarily have to deal with. On the other hand, the development of commerce and credit invoked many new legal questions for which there were no domestic rules. Therefore, it is understandable that there were more foreign influences law in bankruptcy law even if Jägerskiöld may have been willing to overemphasize the significance of the reception of foreign law in the Svea Court of Appeal practice. Jägerskiöld’s studies and analyses of the role of the Svea Court of Appeal as a conduit for the reception of the learned law reflect their times at a more practical level as well. Post-war scholarship on Roman law and European legal history was usually focused on great questions of legal thought in a manner characteristic of the traditional scholarship of the history of ideas. There was not much emphasis on detailed questions of private law doctrine or law in action. Due to the lack of modern research, Jägerskiöld’s account of the history of bankruptcy law in early modern Europe was based on nineteenth-century German scholarship.859 As Forster has noted, 859 See the references in Jägerskiöld, Stig 1967b p. 308. Conclusion
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