For three centuries, the people of the North were the primary security problem of Christian Europe. Today their descendants award the Peace Prize, mediate other nations’ wars, and appear at the top of every index of trust and decency anyone has thought to construct.

The usual bridge between these two facts is conversion. The Vikings became Christians, and Christianity civilized them. Peter Kriger proposes something less flattering and considerably more useful: nobody’s soul changed. The raid was a business, and the business went bankrupt.

A raid is a strategy for acquiring wealth, and it pays only under a specific set of conditions. Remove those conditions and the strategy vanishes without anyone having to repent. What makes the Norwegian case extraordinary is that the raiding removed them itself. The victims fortified. The chieftains who grew rich became kings, and kings suppress plunder for the same reason a landlord discourages arson.

What eventually grew in the same soil is the mirror image of the longship: a society organized around the elimination of risk, and a sovereign fund that distributes the national catch among generations who will never meet. The instrument is the same. Only the interval has been lengthened.

Norway carries the argument. Its neighbors test it. Denmark accepted a king and a church earlier and behaved no better, which disposes of the religious explanation. Sweden never spent a day under foreign rule and built the same institutions anyway, which disposes of the theory that humiliation taught the North humility. Iceland refused a king altogether and tore itself apart, which disposes of the idea that freedom alone produces peace.

From the tribute pennies of a defeated English king to a coastline that stopped being worth attacking, this is an account of how a people changed everything about their behavior while changing nothing about themselves—and of what that should make us suspect about our own virtues.

Morality rarely transforms a nation.