People are sometimes surprised to learn that for much of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Sweden was one of Europe’s great powers. The revolution that transformed Swedish government following the death of Karl XII at the end of the Great Northern War is still less widely-known. But though largely carried through without bloodshed, this transformation was nonetheless significant. It was the first serious challenge to royal absolutism in the eighteenth century.

This article attempts to examine what happened in Sweden in the extraordinary years between 1718 and 1720, but also to explain why this revolution has largely been forgotten today...