Suchergebnisse

In pre-industrial society, choosing a marriage partner was a crucial process, and especially so for landowners. This study focuses on social aspects of mate selection in five rural parishes in southern Sweden between 1829 and 1894, using an individual-level database containing information on a large number of marriages and the social origins of the marrying couple regardless of whether they were born in the relevant parish or not. The information makes it possible to study homogamy without introducing the possible selection biases implicit in looking only at non-migrating population, a consideration which is of great importance in a society characterized by very high levels of geographical mobility. The results show a community marked by quite strong homogamy but with pronounced differences among social groups. Landholding peasants were the most homogamous. The pattern of homogamy also remained fairly constant despite fundamental economic and social change.

In pre-industrial Sweden (and other parts of northwestern Europe) retirement arrangements were used by peasants to keep their property intact and to transfer it to one of the children while the other children were compensated with, for example, movable property or plots of land. In this article we study the frequency and form of this strategy in pre-industrial rural Sweden. While the literature on retirement arrangements mainly concentrates on the functionality of this system, the focus of this study is on what happened to the institution of peasant retirement in the nineteenth century when an active land market developed and the relative price of land rose. In this study, we use two different sources of land transmission: poll-tax registers, indicating the management of farms, and records of land certificates, showing changes in ownership. The results clearly show that peasant retirement remained an important strategy of intergenerational land transmission at least until the mid-nineteenth century, but the way it was carried out changed profoundly from being mainly an intra-family affair to being channelled through the market.

This article deals with the high mobility of servants in preindustrial northwestern Europe. By combining both a qualitative and a quantitative approach we analyse the determinants of servant migration in the province of Scania, in southern Sweden, during the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that about half of the moves were connected to the structure of working-life organization, servant hierarchy and marriage. The rest depended on a range of other factors such as the type and structure of the master's household, variations in the demand for labour caused by fluctuations in harvest yields, conflicts within households, or a wish to gain additional training.

Abstract2021 marked the 30-year anniversary of the publication Fatal Years: Child Mortality in the late Nineteenth-Century United States, a pioneering work in historical demography by Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines. This special issue showcases the current state of historical mortality studies through a collection of articles originally presented at two commemorative sessions at the 2021 meeting of the Social Science History Association. It provides new and more nuanced evidence on several of the major themes of Fatal Years in terms of the mortality experience and includes studies of a wide range of contexts, from North America, to Ireland, England and Wales, and continental Europe. They all bring new evidence and leverage the dramatic development that has taken place in availability of large-scale micro-level data in the 30 years since Fatal Years was published. This introduction first provides some background to the collection and then summarizes the main findings from the different articles included. Preston and Haines provide a coda to this collection with a short reflection article on researching and writing Fatal Years.

"This chapter introduces the research presented in the book. It starts by highlighting the importance of an individual-level perspective to understand how long-term economic and societal changes connected with industrialization and post-industrialization have affected individuals and families during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. It discusses a detailed periodization, linking the developments in Landskrona to broader economic and societal developments in Sweden and internationally. The chapter also presents the study area and the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database and discusses the core concepts, variables, and methods used in the different chapters of the book."

AbstractWe examine selection by class origin and gender in the emigration from Sweden to the United States during the age of mass migration. We use full-count census data linked to emigration lists to create a panel of over one million men and women. Class selection was similar for men and women, with children from medium-skilled backgrounds being most likely to leave. Selection on class origin was most pronounced in poorer and less industrialized regions, but similar in rural and urban areas. These patterns suggest that not only returns to skill determined migrant selection but also class-specific costs of migration.

The social consequences of agrarian change have been widely debated. The traditional view of the lower classes becoming increasingly vulnerable due to the loss of access to resources has been met with the revisionist view that this change was counteracted by an increase in the volume and regularity of employment due to investments and new farming practices. This article address this issue by studying the agricultural revolution in southern Sweden using aggregate data at the parish level. New micro‐level data on actual harvest outcomes, supplemented by price data, make it possible to differentiate between the development of the local economy and exogenous price shocks. Our results indicate a clear mortality response to harvest fluctuations in general and to harvest failures in particular. The response differed greatly between farming regions, being strongest in the areas most dependent on grain production. The response also diminished during the agricultural revolution, indicating the increasing efficiency of the local economy. This indicates employment effects in line with the revisionist view. At the same time, vulnerability to fluctuations in prices of basic foodstuffs remained high until the second half of the nineteenth century and was also quite similar across farming regions.

The first part of this paper aims at identifying the timing of famines in the Nordic countries since the middle ages. This is done by using qualitative famine reports from the literature since quantitative data on famines are scarce or non-existent, at least before the early modern period. We supplement the reports with climate data and price data. Our survey indicates that widespread famine was always a rare occurrence in the Nordic countries, despite frequent crop failures. The second part studies the regional famine pattern and its demographic characteristics in Sweden 1750–1910. This part is based on demographic data on parish level from the official statistics and price data. We identify two periods of excess mortality: the last major famine in Sweden in the early 1770s and the excess mortality in 1809 due to epidemic outbreaks. Examining the age-specific mortality and seasonality pattern in these two years of mortality crises in Sweden we show a highly similar pattern explained by similar causes of death being involved: dysentery and typhus. All age groups were affected during the crisis, but children over the age of one were hardest hit. Mortality was highest during the summer and early fall as epidemics spread rapidly through water and food. Thus, while Nordic people clearly were vulnerable to economic fluctuations, conditions rarely deteriorated to famine levels, which can be explained as a combination of a reasonably well-functioning market, a diversified economy, a population density in line with resource availability and the absence of serious political or war-related conditions conducive to famine.