Introduction

This book, based on the extensive Swedish sport history research carried out over the last 50 years, aims to present to an international audience a coherent history of Swedish sport. In particular, it highlights the relationship between sport politics and people’s changing attitudes towards sport from the eighteenth century until today. When one considers the development of Swedish sport and sport politics over a longer period of time, a number of distinctive features emerge. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sport in Sweden was largely a political top-down project driven by public institutions. During the first third of the twentieth century sport in civil society also became the object of political intervention, and since the 1930s the level of political and organisational stability in sport has been remarkable. In this book, we will look into how and why this development has come about. Although the book does not offer a comprehensive comparative analysis, it outlines the characteristics of Swedish sport politics by contrasting it with circumstances in other countries, above all Denmark and Norway.