With the end of the Great Northern War the Scandinavian countries entered upon a period of much-needed peace after more than a century and a half of bitter though spasmodic inter-Scandinavian warfare. This struggle had fundamentally been one between the two more powerful nations, Denmark and Sweden, for political and economic control of the Sound and the Baltic, but the other Scandinavian countries had also been vitally affected by it: Norway because of its dynastic union with Denmark, Finland because that duchy formed part of the kingdom of Sweden. In its last phase, during the Great Northern War (1700–21), this inter-Scandinavian rivalry had become inextricably intermingled with the wider struggle of many Powers against the Baltic empire conquered by Sweden; Denmark-Norway's allies in the war had at one time or other included Saxony, Russia, Poland, Prussia and Hanover.

As far as the long inter-Scandinavian conflict was concerned, the Great Northern War imposed a settlement which lasted in its entirety for nearly a century, while the specific Dano-Swedish-Norwegian borders established have survived to the present day. Denmark gave up all hopes of reconquering the provinces Scania, Halland and Blekinge, lost to Sweden in the seventeenth century, while Norway similarly reconciled herself to the loss of Härjedalen, Jämtland and Bohuslän. The Swedish attempt to conquer Norway was abandoned immediately after the death of Charles XII in 1718, and the project of a Swedish acquisition of Norway was not revived till the very end of the century (and then along lines which excluded plans for direct conquest).