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.