A thousand years ago, the Vikings defied the high seas and rivers to sail to far away lands; they were the first to reach the North American coast. Six hundred years later, Sweden was a European superpower and the Baltic was a Swedish inland sea. Ships crossed the Atlantic to the New Sweden colony (modern Delaware). In the 1700s, our famous botanist Carl von Linné sent his pupils out and around the world to document plant and animal life.
During the 1800s and in the beginning of the 1900s, over a million Swedes emigrated to the USA. At the turn of the last century one fifth of Swedes lives in America and there were more Swedes in Chicago than in any other city, with the exception of Stockholm. During the 1900s, Swedish industry’s exports were hugely successful and ‘Made in Sweden’ became a tag that changed the image of Sweden abroad and at home.
As a developed democracy with two hundred years of uninterrupted peace, the Sweden of today is a country with significantly more immigrants than emigrants. But our curiosity about the world around us is the same now as it was before. In relation to our population, there are disproportionately a lot of Swedes traveling for business or pleasure worldwide.