Swedish East India Company

The Swedish East India Company was founded in 1731 in Gothenburg, chartered to trade between Sweden and East Asia, particularly China, at a time when Sweden held no colonial territory in Asia of its own. Operating under a series of renewed charters through the eighteenth century, the company sent ships directly to the Chinese port of Canton, returning with cargoes of tea, porcelain, silk and spices that were sold on to buyers across Europe, making it for a time one of the largest such trading enterprises outside the Dutch and English companies. One of its ships, the Gotheborg, wrecked just outside Gothenburg harbour in 1745 while returning from China, a wreck later excavated and commemorated with a full-scale replica ship built in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The company's trading privileges lapsed and it was formally dissolved in 1813 amid changing European trade patterns and growing competition from other nations' merchants operating directly in Asian ports.