45 ty for construction projects in keeping with their status. This reevaluation does not imply a restoration of the nobility. Rather, it was a matter of the emancipation of the peasantry made possible through the political weakness of the nobility and through the fact that the nobility seems to have been generally less rational — in the modern economic sense of the word — in the management of their estates than was earlier believed. From the 1650’s onward it became more difficult to get the yeomanry to accept newtaxes to the Crown. Instead the nobility was forced to accept highly sensitive personal contribution {kontributioner), which together with the cessation of donations and a partial Reduction, brought about the reversal of the earlier positive development of incomes. Parallel with that decreased income, the nobility suffered a veritable explosion of costs in their life style. The last section of the article was devoted to the nobility’s specific utilization of resources in the form of the nearly compulsory luxuryconsumption of an international standard, a consumption which started as a peaceful branch of Sweden’s great power politics. Because it was extraordinarily demanding of capital, credit, and cash and, furthermore, created employment and was labor-intensive, this conspicuos consumption contributed, when all is taken into consideration, to the opening up of seventeenth century society to a newperiod. It seems both to have promoted the integration of the peasants into the market and to have been of great significance for the rise of middle social strata and of subgroups with little or no connection to agriculture. The market must thus have been broadened and a money economy spread. Luxury consumption also certainly contributed to the fact that the traditional economic power positions were unstable long before the upheavals of the 1680’s. Through continued investigations on, among other things, that theme, it ought to be possible to further reduce the distance between the different levels of development touched upon in the introduction.
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