The Agrarian History of Sweden Read online

  The publication of this work has been realized with the generous support of Stiftelsen Lagersberg, Eskilstuna, Sweden.

  Nordic Academic Press

  P.O. Box 1206

  SE-221 05 Lund

  www.nordicacademicpress.com

  © Nordic Academic Press and the Authors 2011

  Translations: Charlotte Merton

  Typesetting: Stilbildarna i Mölle, Frederic Täckström, www.sbmolle.com

  Maps and figures: Stig Söderlind

  Cover: Anette Rasmusson

  Cover image: ‘The harvest’, a painted tapestry by Johannes Nilsson

  (1757–1827), from Breared in southern Sweden.

  Photo: Halland’s Regional Museum, Halmstad.

  ISBN: 978-91-85509-76-8

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 - Early farming households

  CHAPTER 2 - Agriculture in Sweden

  CHAPTER 3 - Farming and feudalism

  CHAPTER 4 - The agricultural revolution in Sweden

  CHAPTER 5 - Agriculture in industrial society

  CHAPTER 6 - The tension between modernity and reality

  CHAPTER 7 - Swedish agrarian history –the wider view

  Notes

  Statistical appendix

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  Janken Myrdal & Mats Morell

  Interest in agrarian history–part of the broader history of social evolution and people’s living conditions–is growing internationally. The agrarian history of Sweden, which is presented here for an international readership, is important to this international dialogue, not least because there is an extensive research base in the country and a recent, comprehensive work on the subject, which is presented in this book in abridged form. Nordic Academic Press, in willingly shouldering the publication of this book, has made an important contribution by making Swedish history, and Swedish research, available to a wider academic audience.

  This book is a compressed version of a five-volume work, Det svenska jordbrukets historia, published between 1998 and 2003. The project was prepared under the aegis of Nordiska museet, with Janken Myrdal serving as the principal editor and with seven contributing authors. Stiftelsen Lagersberg (the Lagersberg Foundation) funded the entire project, and has continued to fund the preparation of this international edition and its translation into English.

  The background to the five-volume work was the growing interest in agrarian history in Sweden in the early 1990s, not least thanks to Kungliga Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, or KSLA), which in 1989 instituted a seminar on agrarian and forest history. After a couple of years, the idea of writing a standard work on Sweden’s agrarian history began to take form. The resultant project would run for over ten years, during which time the seminar acted as a vital sounding-board for the research required to complete the volumes. A variety of subjects that needed closer study were treated at the seminar, and the interchange between scholars from a wide range of disciplines spawned several new books along the way, with the history of cattle-farming, child labour in agriculture, and swidden cultivation (slash-and-burn agriculture) amongst the important but hitherto neglected subjects.

  The five-volume work was partly inspired by the four-volume study of Danish agrarian history published in 1988 as Det danske landbrugs historie. Soon after the Swedish project began, the Norwegians were moved to write their agrarian history in a major, four-volume work, and the Finns their own in three volumes, while at the time of writing an Icelandic agrarian history is in preparation. Thus only a few years later, and after much mutual inspiration, the Nordic region now boasts no less than seventeen volumes of native agrarian history.

  Initially the authors concentrated on research to fill the gaps that had already been identified, after which writing and then publication followed at a steady rate. Throughout the process there was intensive discussion on terminology and thematic treatments, and the entire work took shape in a dialogue between all the authors, yet it was never a matter of writing by committee: with at most a couple of authors per volume, each could leave their mark on the actual content. In the full-scale Swedish version, the illustrations are crucial, and the authors themselves selected and interpreted them under the guidance of an art editor. For reasons of space, most of the illustrations have had to be omitted from the English version.

  For this abridged edition the authors have not merely compressed their earlier work and updated it with recent Swedish and European findings; they have in many instances shifted focus, and, more so than in the original volumes, the chapters are now closely related to developments in international agrarian research. The chapters are ordered chronologically, and each is complemented with a short overview of a more specialized theme. The ambition throughout has been to offer the broad outlines of Swedish agrarian history in a single volume. The book concludes with a synthesis of the entire work and reflections on the course of Swedish agrarian development and historical research against an international background. There is also an appendix with statistical data concerning primarily the early modern period onwards, and a bibliography of the most important works in the field, with particular focus on research published in the last decade. The aim of this book is to offer readers–be they students, general readers, those of Swedish descent, or professional agrarian historians–a comprehensive, logically arranged, and lucid introduction to Sweden’s oldest industry. Readers who wish to pursue any particular issue will find plenty of suggestions for further reading in the notes and bibliography.

  Even if the agrarian population and the circumstances of agricultural production are the heart of the book, it is inevitable that, faced with six thousand years of history, the importance of the various themes will vary considerably according to the period under discussion, and that there will be some overlap between periods. Choosing a terminology that holds good for all ages–and chapters–is a delicate matter, and was the source of lively debate between the authors in the preparation of the Swedish version. With translation came new excitement, for the agrarian history of each country has produced a series of specific terms, often legally or socially defined, on which developments in historiography largely depend. Many are resistant to translation. We have Britain’s customary tenant and Sweden’s skattebonde; Norway’s odelsrett and Denmark’s gårdmand. These problems are rarely insurmountable, given that the similarities are often greater than the individual terms might lead us to think, but in some instances the terminological variations reflect very real differences in meaning: translating the Swedish bonde into English is always a challenge, for it does not always equate with peasant. We have used English terminology as far as possible, but have elaborated on the original Swedish terms wherever their precise meaning is important to our argument.

  Both the five-volume edition and the condensed, updated version presented here are part of a wider trend that in recent years has seen agrarian and rural history become lively fields of European research. It is part and parcel of this that their historiography has become a subject in its own right. Indeed, two important works have recently been published that together treat agrarian historiography for much of Europe: The Rural History of Medieval European Societies and Rural History in the North Sea Area.1 Neither book mentions Swedish research of any date, and for this reason we felt it appropriate to open the book with a brief account of the Swedish literature.2

  The beginnings of agrarian history in Sweden

  The publication of books and pamphlets in Sweden accelerated from the 1730s onwards, and among the major beneficiaries of this explosio
n were agricultural texts. The 1770s saw a further increase, when the first large works on Swedish agrarian history were also published. Shorter references to the history of agriculture were made in several books published in the late eighteenth century, its inclusion primarily justified on the grounds of political and economic utility. A utilitarian focus, and above all the rancorous debate on contemporary agrarian policy, was central to the hundred-page epic, Landtbrukets öden i Sverige (‘The fate of farming in Sweden’), published in 1776 by the lawyer and librarian Fredrik Mozelius in the proceedings of the Royal Patriotic Society. As he wrote in his introduction, ‘In the present century, philosophical as it is rightly called, the history of its industries has, as it were, been instilled with life since the founding of scientific and agricultural societies in the majority of European countries.’ Engelbert Jörlin, a farmer’s son, who in 1777 published an even longer text in the same series, departed from the narrow utilitarian trend. A disciple of Linnaeus, he had a predilection for scientific systematization, and attempted to compile evidence of the types of animals and cereals that had been farmed since the Middle Ages. At the end of the eighteenth century, Magnus Blix, judge and controversialist, published his polemic Swenska jordbrukets historia i kortaste sammandrag (‘Swedish agricultural history in briefest outline’). Blix argued that Swedish agriculture was in decline, and drew a number of salutary lessons from France, where in his view the Revolution had been made possible by a similar degeneration. Some years later he was countered by Pehr Nylandh, a land-surveyor, who defended the recent large-scale redistribution of land and other measures taken by the Swedish state to improve agriculture.

  There was then a pause of almost a hundred years before the next general summary of Swedish agrarian history saw the light of day: Peter von Möller’s Strödda utkast rörande svenska jordbrukets historia (‘Miscellaneous writings on Swedish agrarian history’), published in 1881. Despite being written by an amateur, a country gentleman from Halland, this work had modern scholarly ambitions. An ambitious and systematic survey of Swedish agriculture, it is if truth be told the first Swedish work of agrarian history that is worth reading for more than its historiographical value. At the time Möller was writing, cultural history had become firmly established. In 1881–2, August Strindberg, who had already made a name for himself as a novelist, published Svenska folket i helg och söcken (‘The Swedish people at work and play’), in which he dismissed Sweden’s kings-and-battles history. The book met with considerable resistance from established historians, and the ensuing debate mirrored the dispute over cultural history then raging in Germany. Strindberg, however, was far more radical in his emphasis on the common people than Karl Lamprecht in Germany, who only wanted to reduce the dominance of political history.

  Soon a number of currents in cultural history became apparent. One example was Hans Hildebrand’s project on medieval cultural history, which saw the publication of volume after volume over many years–a level of productivity that matched Troels Lund’s in Denmark. Ethnology also became immensely popular, as is borne out by the existence of such Swedish institutions as Nordiska museet and the open-air museum Skansen, located in the middle of Stockholm’s main park.

  Swedish agrarian history in the early twentieth century

  It would be some time before the study of everyday life–of which agrarian history is just one branch–found acceptance as an academic subject. It was only at the start of the twentieth century that academics began to turn their attention to agricultural history, and even then such research was considered a form of folklivsforskning, later better known as ethnology. Ethnology was to be of great importance in Sweden, as it was in several Germanic countries and Hungary, and played a crucial role in shaping national identity. In Sweden, its leading figure was Sigurd Erixon. His favoured approach, adopted by his disciples, was to chart the regional differences across Sweden, although it should be noted that he also emphasized cultural flow across national borders, and thus was not interested in bald attempts to identify ‘Swedishness’. Classic ethnology had its heyday between the 1930s and the 1950s.

  A subject equally significant for agrarian history was human geography, inspired by an international, and more specifically French, research tradition in which geographers pieced together ambitious accounts of entire regions, including their history. Swedish human geographers had at their disposal a source material of unique quality: seventeenth-century high-resolution maps and tax registers of grain and livestock. The first boom in historical human geography coincided with that in ethnology. Scholars in both disciplines published a number of works, some addressing particular themes or implements, others specific regions, producing in the process the first wave of agrarian history, and ensuring the subject rested on broad, scientific foundations.

  In other branches of Swedish history–political history, economic history, and archaeology–agrarian history played a limited role in the inter-war period. There were a handful of exceptions. In 1923, for example, Carl-Gustaf Weibull published Skånska jordbrukets historia intill 1800-talets början (‘Skåne’s agrarian history until the early nineteenth century’). This work was published by the two local agricultural societies, and was just one of a considerable number of historical works produced under the auspices of Sweden’s agrarian organizations. Agrarian history also had a central place in Eli Heckscher’s monumental Sveriges ekonomiska historia från Gustav Vasa (‘Sweden’s economic history from Gustav Vasa’), the first two volumes of which, dealing with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were published in the mid 1930s, while the two on the eighteenth century followed in 1949. Heckscher, who also wrote a number of shorter works on the redemption of Crown land and on the enclosures, was very critical of peasant agriculture, and was convinced that the peasants’ relative independence delayed agrarian development in Sweden. In the argument he presented in his great monograph, he set out in particular to compute Sweden’s national agricultural production and place it in relation to demographic developments.

  In the late 1940s, at about the same time as agrarian history became a standard subject in Germany and the Netherlands, with special research institutes set up and journals founded, it seemed for a while as if Sweden would see a similar breakthrough. Enoch Ingers, principal of a folk high school, published the first two volumes of Bonden i svensk historia (‘The peasant in Swedish history’) in 1943 and 1947, with a third, posthumous volume published in 1956. In the mid 1940s there were also valiant attempts to appoint a professor of agrarian history at the College of Agriculture at Ultuna in Uppsala. This met with stiff resistance from younger economists, who argued that the chair might jeopardize the anticipated further expansion of agricultural economics at the college. It was only much later, in 1994, that the chair was established, and it is one of the peculiarities of this story that a number of the agricultural economists who in their youth had been amongst its fiercest opponents were now in their retirement amongst its loudest advocates.

  In preparing his work, Ingers, who was an amateur, employed a number of younger historians as research assistants, amongst them Valter Elgeskog and Folke Dovring, both postgraduate students at Lund University, and the first Swedish scholars to call themselves agrarian historians. Elgeskog defended his doctoral thesis on crofters in 1945, and gave it the subtitle En agrarhistorisk studie (‘A study in agrarian history’). Two years later Dovring presented his thesis on medieval units of land measurement, writing in his introduction, ‘What an agrarian historian seeks are not exceptional facts, but typical facts.’ He was inspired by the immensely influential French agrarian historian Marc Bloch, and even later would often refer to his work. Dovring published frequently, and unlike Elgeskog, who left academe, tried to make a career as an agrarian historian. However, a number of leading Swedish historians had other ideas, concerned by what they thought was Dovring’s tendency to write about agrarian issues without paying enough attention to the political and military factors involved, and the upshot was that he left
Sweden and went on to a successful career overseas. Amongst his many works were the chapter on twentieth-century agriculture in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, and the book Land and Labour in Europe in the Twentieth Century, which ran to three editions between 1956 and 1965.

  In 1953, before he left Sweden, Dovring had written Agrarhistorien (‘Agrarian history’), the book that can be seen as his scholarly legacy to Swedish history. In it he described in detail the direction he believed academic agrarian history ought to take. Now, half a century later, many of his suggestions are proving useful in research on demography, human geography, and settlement history.

  The second wave

  After the Second World War, decolonization brought home the fact that much of the world’s population were still peasants and that they played an active role in making history. One effect was an upsurge in agricultural and peasant history. Research departments and journals of agrarian history were established in several countries. In Germany and Britain, comprehensive multi-volume works on the history of agriculture were begun.

  In Sweden, however, there were no immediate parallels. Folke Dovring failed in his one-man attempt to establish agrarian history as an academic subject. True, the posthumous third volume of Ingers’ work was seen through the press by the historian Sten Carlsson; 1952 saw the publication of Börje Hanssen’s Österlen, a much-cited socio-anthropological study of south-east Skåne in the eighteenth century; and in 1957 Gustaf Utterström published a large, if somewhat unsystematic, work on the transformation of agriculture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet little happened in terms of history and economic history, while agrarian history almost vanished as a theme in ethnology and human geography.