The Agrarian History of Sweden Read online

  It was not to be until the 1970s that Swedish agrarian research picked up again. The way was led by economic historians, partly in reaction to the current focus in their field on trade, the iron-working industry, and the short-term causes of the Industrial Revolution. An entire generation of Swedish economic historians, with Lars Herlitz prominent amongst them, now turned to Eli Heckscher’s account of the dynamics of pre-industrial society. Several of them were influenced by Marxism, and, in seeking the roots of Sweden’s industrialization in the agricultural developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrated that peasant agriculture in many respects drove the expansion. While Herlitz studied taxation systems and landownership, most of his successors concentrated on production trends or on technology and its dissemination. While the ethnologists more or less abandoned research on agrarian history–not least on the dissemination of farming implements–it became increasingly important in other fields of history, in part because of the student revolts of 1968, when the history of everyday people and everyday life became a matter of public interest. Social history superseded political history; economic factors were seen to play an ever-greater role. The same was true of archaeology. In human geography, meanwhile, the historical focus had survived, but was given a new direction. Human geographers tackled the Iron Age with the help of field studies and archaeological excavations of surviving fields and settlement remains. They also succeeded in linking the field-study approach with the map-based tradition, with fruitful results.

  The third wave

  The first wave in Swedish agrarian history had come in the early twentieth century, with human geography and ethnology; the second in the 1970s, somewhat later than the rest of Europe, with economic history and history: now the 1990s saw something of a third wave, as the study of agrarian history in Sweden was put on an institutional footing. The chair at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences was instituted in 1994, and beginning in 1999 there has been a steady stream of doctoral theses on agrarian history–although the greater part of the research is done at other institutions around the country. The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry has run a programme of seminars and publications throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and has built up a library that is one of Europe’s finest in the field. At the end of the 1990s the parent volumes of this present book were published, and since then the field has taken on a more diverse character, in terms of both method and subject.

  In recent years, historically minded human geographers and archaeologists have conducted detailed studies of villages and arable fields dating from the Middle Ages and before. In archaeology, scientific methods play an ever-more prominent role. Archaeological research laboratories analyse food remains and materials such as iron. Palaeo-ecology, in particular pollen analysis, has been especially successful. Osteology is no longer only a matter of brief analysis reports, but now includes comprehensive studies of the metric data and nutritional status of livestock–and humans.

  For the medieval period, feuds and revolts are attracting particular attention amongst historians, while research on medieval economics is once again focused on prices, particularly land prices, and production trends. Research on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has receded somewhat from a high point in the 1980s and early 1990s: one strand has concentrated on the size and distribution of production, another on social conditions and landownership. The lively interest in court and parochial records has been fruitful in research on subjects such as local politics and gender relations. For the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, landownership and secondary production in peasant societies (skilled trades, flax processing, and the iron industry) have attracted attention, as in recent years have trends in agricultural production, with lively, often demography-based research on agrarian society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular focus on southern Sweden. Research on the period from 1850 to 1950 had long been relatively neglected, but that has now been redressed by several new works covering a broad spectrum of subjects from agricultural business structures, the dairy industry, agricultural policy, and agricultural organizations to farm-level studies of the gendered division of labour and children’s role in agriculture.

  The last decade has also seen what amounts to contemporary agrarian history. Agrarian sociology, which elsewhere came to importance in the wake of decolonization, never gained much ground in Sweden, while economists long dominated interpretations of post-war Swedish agriculture. Yet now there is promising research on Swedish rural development that in many respects echoes the tradition of European agrarian sociology that in Scandinavia has been strongly represented in Norway.

  The third wave of agrarian history has meant that a number of new issues have emerged, and many neglected areas– the use of woodlands, to name but one– have been revisited. Even the boundaries of what constitutes traditional agriculture are being pushed back. What else –other than the production of food, fibres, and now fuel–will the farmers of the future be expected to undertake, when an increasingly wealthy and environmentally aware population demands to experience nature and rural culture and to be entertained by the landscape?

  A tradition and a mission

  An important recent trend is that scientists are becoming more and more involved in agrarian history. Biologists have started to bring history to bear on their analyses. There is considerable interest in interpreting species evolution and biodiversity from an understanding of supply systems and land use–and vice versa. As historians, and above all archaeologists, increasingly apply scientific methods in their work, agrarian history holds the promise of a closer connection between the natural sciences and the human sciences that gives reason to hope, despite the immense challenges we face not only in the distant future, but today.

  There is a clear connection between the renewed interest in agrarian history, the new directions taken in agrarian history, and concern over pressing environmental issues. This is perhaps only to be expected. Agrarian history is about how we mobilize and cultivate nature in order to live, and about the social organizations and structures we have created in order to do so. There is a huge interest in examining the extent to which land-use systems have been environmentally sustainable, or how ecological limitations on production development have been circumvented by the adoption of new techniques or cultivation systems. Such research has a clear relevance for the problems that today face us all.

  Agrarian history has thus become part of the environmental movement, in the same way that its development in the twentieth century followed the major ideological and economic changes that characterized that century. If agrarian history’s first wave was connected with the tremendous upheavals that followed industrial society’s obliteration of the old agricultural society, and the second wave was linked with the great political changes that called the role of the peasantry to our attention, so the most recent wave is associated with a growing concern for both welfare and the environment, and with an encouraging convergence of the humanities and the sciences.

  In this book, the authors have concentrated their original five-volume work by selecting the salient points of Sweden’s agricultural development. It is our hope that this concise volume will offer the reader fresh insights into the long perspectives of Swedish agrarian history viewed in the light of international developments, and a greater understanding of present-day society, in which the future of agriculture remains crucial; for farmers not only feed us, they hold in trust many of our natural resources.

  An enterprise such as this is only possible with the assistance of many friends and colleagues. Most particularly we wish to thank Richard Hoyle, Deidre McCloskey, Thomas Lindkvist, Mats Olsson, and Mary Hilson for their critical commentary and suggestions. We would also like to thank Annika Olsson at Nordic Academic Press and the translator Charlotte Merton for fruitful cooperation. We are indebted to Stiftelsen Lagersberg for their encouragement and support throughout the project, first with the five Swedish volu
mes and now the single volume in English. Without Siftelsen Lagersberg there would not have been a Swedish Agrarian History either in Swedish or in English.

  CHAPTER 1

  Early farming households

  3900–800 BC

  Stig Welinder

  The introduction of agriculture to Scandinavia in about 4000 BC marks the dividing line between the Neolithic and Mesolithic periods. Scandinavia thus has an agrarian history that spans at least six thousand years, while a few ecofacts from southern Denmark suggest the possibility that the advent of agriculture in fact predated the accepted start of the Neolithic period by five hundred years. This first chapter of the history of agriculture in Sweden will treat the Neolithic and Bronze Age up to 800 BC.1

  Archaeology and agrarian history

  Archaeological finds are silent. They are tangible in a very real sense, but they cannot convey their meaning in words. This is not the same thing as being unable to convey ideas, however. Archaeological theories and methods amount to taking a really good look at mute objects, viewing them from all angles in an attempt to understand voiceless people’s actions and ideas. The requirements of archaeology mean that the many thousands of years of prehistoric agrarian history bear little resemblance to the thousand or so years of written agrarian history. In part, this is a product of the inherent difference in the substance of archaeological finds and written remains, but it also reflects the fact that prehistoric peoples and societies were different. Prehistory is a remote, different, elusive, and extraordinarily long period.

  It is the strength of a long-term perspective that phenomena that only slowly evolve, and which may appear insignificant at any given moment, can be studied in a broad overview. Fundamental changes can be distinguished from the continuous, chaotic flow of events. My main theme in this chapter, however, is the complete opposite; here it is the unchanging elements in early agricultural households–their composition, division of labour, and fundamental thinking–that are to the fore. Agriculture is one of the greatest forces of change to the landscape and the environment. Its effects are noticeable over decades and centuries, and in recent years it has become apparent that agricultural policy decisions can have consequences for the landscape from one year to the next. Yet today’s cultivated landscape began to take shape many thousands of years ago.

  Beginning in about 1000 BC there were clearance cairns, lynchets, stone walls, and a good deal more to be seen lying in the landscape; remains that can be mapped and combined to form a picture of the fossil cultivated landscape of a distant past that lies as much amongst the landscape of today as it lies underneath. This fossil cultivated landscape, with its farmyards, fields, meadows, and droves, is an excellent source of information about ancient agriculture. Agriculture before about 1000 BC was very different to what it would become, and for this earlier period there are hardly any traces of a fossil cultivated landscape to study. The landscape of that era must be reconstructed with more indirect methods, which, while a challenge, is not an impossibility.

  Agriculture in the Neolithic and Bronze Age used relatively simple tools. People rarely cleared stones or used the same ground for any length of time, two things that were to be the distinguishing marks of later periods. Agriculture exploited large areas of land with minimal labour –the term ‘extensive agriculture’ suits it well–which would seem to be part of the reason why no fossil cultivated landscape survives from this period. The importance of working with their own hands and their own bodies outweighed the use of draught animals. Mouldboard ploughs and harrows did not exist, nor, obviously, any machinery. Manure was not used, at any rate not systematically. Scythes and all other iron tools did not exist. This was, after all, the age of stone and bronze. Agriculture used simple technology and little energy. The designation ‘low energy technology’ is apt. However, the fact that the tools were simple does not mean that they were unsophisticated; indeed, far from it.

  Silent and different people

  The landscape, agriculture, and actions of the prehistoric population, like the broad patterns of their lives, must be understood from their material culture. By ‘material culture’ is meant the buildings and objects of all kinds, from clothing to tools, that they used, but also a variety of things such as cooking refuse, tattoos, murals, and earrings. It is the way in which they created and used their material culture that articulated their relationship with one another and their environment. Words and thoughts, work and patterns of life, all exist as material culture–as the archaeological finds of a once living people’s material culture.

  In the present context, it is people’s work in creating and maintaining a cultivated landscape that is paramount. For the period before 1000 BC this landscape survives in countless traces, barely distinguishable to the untrained eye. From archaeological excavation sites and from geological samples there is the evidence of pollen grains, pieces of bone, charred seeds, and other remains from the prehistoric landscape’s flora and fauna. These are small fragments of our picture of the prehistoric landscape and prehistoric people’s relationship to the landscape.

  Archaeology’s mute source material creates silent archaeological people. This has both its limitations and its opportunities compared with the study of written history, although in this chapter it is the advantages that are more in evidence. However, it is not merely the nature of the source material that makes the people appear different from us. They were different. Prehistoric people had very different types of house and clothing than we do now, organized themselves as communities differently, and supported themselves in different ways. They spoke languages that would be unintelligible to us, thought in different ways, and had different emotions. As people they were both similar to us and different from us, and they would be as incomprehensible to us as we would be to them should we chance to meet.

  Prehistoric people can be labelled ‘pre-industrial’, ‘pre-scientific’, and ‘primitive’; the latter meaning that they approached very different circumstances from our own with a different kind of logic. Yet it is the very profundity of these differences that mean it is more interesting to approach the people of the Stone Age and Bronze Age by taking our lead from present-day, non-Western societies in Australia and Africa, rather than by attempting to draw a line from recent peasant societies in Scandinavia back in time through the Middle Ages to the Iron Age. In capturing the different ways of life in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, I will not build on explicit ethnographical analogies, neither on ethnographical–historical comparisons, but rather on the archaeological finds. The comparisons hover in the background, of course, impossible to ignore completely: the words to describe what we find cannot be pulled out of thin air.

  In archaeological agrarian history, change is viewed in terms of the immensely long perspective of the prehistoric period; yet if at the same time prehistoric societies are thought of as fundamentally different to our own, this becomes problematic. After all, the central question remains how and why change occurred. How are we to know which changes were important, or what the causes of change might have been, in societies that are so hard for us to understand? This is one of archaeology’s paradoxes, and one that the reader would do well to bear in mind over the following pages, and particularly in this chapter’s conclusions, which range over the first three thousand years of Scandinavian agriculture. There is no simple way around the paradox.2

  The European background

  From 5500 to 5000 BC, agricultural settlements were built across the central European continent from the Ukraine in the east to France in the west. Similar houses, graves, objects, and ways of life go by the name of Linearbandkeramik kultur (Linear Band Pottery Culture, or LBK), and are found in the region of the Baltic’s southern coastline by 5000 BC. The seashore was home to the hunter-gatherers. In the LBK settlements, long-houses were built with slanted roofs supported on posts that were sunk in postholes. Each of these long-houses was the equivalent of a household, perhaps a constellation better described as an exten
ded family than as a nuclear family. In this way the tradition was established in northern Europe of long-house farms and long-house settlements that was to last thousands of years, spanning the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and only fading in the historical period with the shift to family-based agriculture accommodated in other kinds of house. But for now the long-house and the household were one and the same.

  Southern and central Scandinavia was part of this northern European long-house tradition. Starting in around 3900 BC, the first Scandinavian long-houses were built to house agricultural households. They have been found in Denmark in the south up to central Sweden and the region around Lake Mälaren. Much of what follows centres on the long-house farms’ households. The geographical perspective is the artificial one of the modern state of Sweden. For the Stone Age and Bronze Age this imposes arbitrary geographical distinctions, but it does offer an interesting ecological gradient. The southernmost part of the country, the plains of Skåne and Halland, is a continuation of the European plains, and from there the gradient stretches as far north as central Italy is to the south–through a landscape of primary rock, marked by glaciation and land-upheaval, to the snow-covered fields of Lapland.3

  Complex change

  The spread of agriculture to new regions is sometimes said to conform to a three-step process:4

  (i) Availability. Agriculture is known to the people of the region, but they do not cultivate the land themselves.

  (ii) Substitution. Agriculture makes noticeable inroads into the subsistence economy.

  (iii) Consolidation. Agriculture becomes the dominant source of food and other necessities.