Acknowledgements

I owe the deepest gratitude to my patient editor, Andrew Pettegree, for his interest in my research and for making this book happen: a simple thank you is not enough! I also wish to thank Judith Rinker Öhman for her excellent work with the translation and copy editing of the manuscript. Many thanks to the Swedish foundations that financed Judith’s work: Anérstiftelsen, Delegationen för Militärhistorisk forskning, Åke Wibergs stiftelse and Stiftelsen Konung Gustaf VI Adolfs fond för svensk kultur. A special thank you goes to all the wonderful archivists, librarians and museum officials, both in Sweden and abroad, who have assisted my research for over ten years.

I am indebted to many colleagues and friends who have supported my scholarly development and the internationalisation of my research. First of all, I wish to thank Helen Smith, William H. Sherman, Mark Jennings and Simon Ditchfield, who all patiently listened to my broken English when I was a visiting PhD student at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. Brita Brenna, who reviewed my dissertation that I defended in June 2015, offered me valuable criticism that I have tried to consider when adapting the thesis to this book. I can only hope that I have succeeded to some extent, and I could not have wished for a better opponent. For this, I owe Brita many thanks. I also wish to thank the review committee for their important remarks: Mårten Snickare, Hjalmar Fors, Eva Nilsson Nylander and Leif Runefelt, thank you very much!

I had the great privilege to spend five months at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin as a visiting postdoc in 2016. My sincerest thanks to Lorraine Daston, who invited me, and to all the generous scholars at the MPI with whom I enjoyed many fruitful discussions. I especially want to thank Jaya Remond, Clare Griffin, Sebastian Felten, Katja Krause, Tamar Novick, Anja Sattelmacher, Minakshi Menon and Ryan Dahn for their friendship. In April 2016, I was invited to give two lectures in Warsaw, which was a highly rewarding experience. A special thanks to Katarzyna Wagner, who organised everything, and to Magdalena Wroblewska and all the wonderful scholars and museum officials who made my visit so memorable. I also want to thank Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, who invited me to join the workshop Skokloster as a Laboratory of Collection Studies in 2017, and to Gerhild Williams, who invited me to the Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär Conference in 2018, which was a truly inspiring meeting.

Thanks to the Swedish Research Council, which awarded me a postdoc that took me back to Berlin in 2017, and to Anke Te Heesen and the Lehrstuhl für Wissenschaftsgeschichte that housed me for two years. Anke is a benevolent mentor and I am obliged to her, not least when it comes to the making of this book. To the dear colleagues I met at the HU – Eric Engstrom, Lara Keuck, Mathias Grote, Susanne Saygin, Kerstin Pannhorst, Alrun Schmidtke, Allison Huetz, Anne Greenwood MacKinney, Alfred Cheesman, Laura Hassler, Carla Seeman and Seraphina Rekowski – thank you for making the Lehrstuhl such a terrific academic environment and workplace. I am also very grateful to have had the opportunity to talk at the Translocations conference in Berlin in December 2019, organised by Bénédicte Savoy’s research group at the Technische Universität. A special thanks to Robert Skwirblies, who invited me to write for the Translocations anthology, and to Isabelle Dolezalek, who invited me to Universität Greifswald to talk about spoils and object-biographical method in January 2020. In December 2020, I had the opportunity to present part of my introduction chapter and book proposal at the colloquium led by Daniela Hacke at the Freie Universität. My sincere gratitude to Daniela Hacke, Birgit Näther and the all the participants who had an interest in and took the time to review my work.

Since 2017 the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University is my academic home in Sweden, a big thank you to my lovely colleagues there, it is a great pleasure to work with you. Above all, I owe many thanks to my brilliant and generous colleague Hanna Hodacs, for reading the entire manuscript draft and supplying me with insightful suggestions for how to improve it. Thank you for pointing out its weaknesses, and for being such a great and fun discussion partner. Any errors that remain are of course my own. Lastly, a special thanks to my interdisciplinary mate Cecilia Rodhén for listening to my endless ranting about how to analyse plunder, and for bringing my attention back to the core of my thoughts: classification.

To my beloved family and friends who have supported me when I have needed it the most – Mum, Dad, Johanna and family, Erez, Helena, Lydia, Per, Daniel, Johan, Silke, Jaya, Annika, Lisa and Mari – thank you all for all the fun, and for your patience and faith in me. Now, let’s have some champagne.

Stockholm, April 2022