these studies usually exaggerated the modernity of earlier forms of bankruptcy. When the emergence of modern bankruptcy law was dated to an earlier period, it was natural for a scholar of Swedish legal history to assume that seventeenth-century Swedish jurists could adopt a more or less complete system of bankruptcy from abroad. However, new international research has shown that the intellectual analysis of insolvency by legal scholars was to a large extent a product of the seventeenth century. Over the course of the century, insolvency ceased to be a matter of merchant communities and began to be more forcefully regulated by states. However, the regulatory and institutional solutions began to diverge as European states began to shape their bankruptcy law actively. The Swedish courts and legislators were shaping the foundations of their bankruptcy system at the same time as other countries. Because Jägerskiöld wanted to tell a story of the reception of foreign law and its European aspects, it is understandable that he did not focus on the uniformity of Swedish bankruptcy law, one of its most peculiar features. In this, the 1680s case law of the Svea Court of Appeal played a key role, serving the increasingly centralized governance of the Realm as a result. However, the uniform legislation applied by the ordinary courts in the whole of the realm in the eighteenth century was at times seen as a hindrance to the commercial and industrial development of the capital. More generally, this reassessment of the development of bankruptcy law underlines the importance of studying legal change in the political and economic context. The making of Swedish bankruptcy law in the late seventeenth century has characteristics that can with good reason be called “revolutionary.” However, it is not certain whether they are best understood as part of a general narrative of “judicial revolution” extending over a century. Rather, it may be that changes in other fields of the law in the practice of the Svea Court of Appeal were the result of other revolutions. This calls for more research in the future using the vast archives of the Svea court. the svea court of appeal in the early modern period 296
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