The Agrarian History of Sweden: From 4000 BC to AD 2000

349 Pages·2011·4.31 MB·English

by  Janken Myrdal

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
1
Societies and Rural History in the North Sea Area. Neither book mentions
Swedish research of any date, and for this reason we felt it appropriate to open
2
the book with a brief account of the Swedish literature.
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 explosion 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