On Saturday, England will play Sweden in the quarter-final of the 2018 soccer World Cup. Hopefully it will be a contest of good sportsmanship. But 208 years ago England (more specifically the United Kingdom) and Sweden engaged in a sportsmanlike war.
I say sportsmanlike, because the conduct of the Anglo-Swedish War of 1810-1812 reflected the better balancing of mutual British-Swedish interests against external entangling alliances. In 1810, Sweden had been defeated by the forces of France’s erstwhile ally, Alexander I of Russia. Under Napoleon’s terms of peace, Sweden was forced to sever its deep trade ties with the French emperor’s great adversary, Britain.
Sweden attempted to ignore Napoleon’s demands and continue trading with Britain. But when Frenchmen threatened war, Sweden was finally forced to cut off its British trade.
Yet there was to be no bloodshed between the two nations.
With the Swedish king ailing, the more-informed Swedish bureaucrats focused on retaining trade with Britain as far as was possible without sparking Napoleon’s rage. Smuggling continued apace as both governments recognized that war was a function of Sweden’s vulnerability to France but not one of true enmity with Britain.
But in June 1812, exactly one month after the commencement of Britain’s War of 1812 with the United States, Sweden and Britain agreed to peace. It was a fortuitous decision for the British and a negative one for Napoleon. On the same day that British-Swedish fraternity was re-established, the British signed a peace with Napoleon’s former ally, the Russian empire.
That alliance would eventually break the back of Napoleon’s army when he made the rather silly decision to march an ill-equipped army into the Russian winter.
Anyway, I predict England will beat Sweden 3-1.
