Olof Blomqvist, I Want to Stay. Local Community and Prisoners of War at the Dawn of the Eighteenth Century (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2023). xx + 371 pp.

A Saxon sergeant held as a prisoner of war in Uppsala in 1707 was walking his dog one April evening when he met and started to quarrel with a local servant.Among the subsequent charges, the servant accused the sergeant of having insulted the Swedish king and the Swedish army.When asked by the local court how he knew that, given that the sergeant spoke German, the servant explained that a German was staying with his master and he had learned some words from him.The scene is one of many encounters between prisoners of war and the local community narrated in Olof Blomqvist's doctoral thesis, I Want to Stay, about prisoners of war during the Great Northern War.The dissertation studies three towns that had to deal with war captives: Torgau in Sachsen, Aarhus in Denmark, and Uppsala in Sweden.The 'had to'-part should be stressed: in all three cases, the central authorities delegated the responsibility and thus the greater part of the financial cost of war captivity to the local communities.Blomqvist's story of the prisoners of war is, therefore, a story about the dynamics between the state and the local community but also, and perhaps foremost, about the relationship between the local community and individual prisoners.Torgau stands out in the investigation in several respects.To begin with, the town council in Torgau openly opposed the demands of the Saxon states and refused to comply with certain instructions.By contrast, the Danish and Swedish states imposed the responsibility for the prisoner on the local level without much friction.Blomqvist explains the difference with the greater political independence enjoyed by the Saxon town.In this context, the matter of how to deal with the