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AbstractSweden's population doubled in size between 1750 and 1850 despite a century of stagnating per capita incomes and real wages, which has led many historians to attribute the population explosion to the introduction of the potato. This article provides the first systematic evidence on the potato's contribution to Swedish living standards and population growth. Potatoes at least doubled output per acre, and welfare ratios that account for potato consumption imply that they raised living standards significantly for labourers. Estimates that exploit regional differences in the suitability of land for cultivating potatoes further show that cities, counties, and rural parishes with more land suitable for potato cultivation experienced a sharp relative acceleration in population growth as the potato spread in the early nineteenth century. An expansion of the population was mainly driven by relative increases in fertility and, consistent with Malthusian predictions, there was no long‐run impact on per capita incomes. According to these estimates, the introduction and spread of the potato can account for one‐tenth of population growth between 1800 and 1850, thus suggesting that it was an important catalyst for the Swedish population explosion.

AbstractThis paper uses longitudinal establishment‐level data to trace the rise of the factory during Sweden's industrialization between 1864 and 1890. We document a sharp shift from the small artisan shop to the mechanized factory, which can largely be ascribed to differences in survival. Whilst non‐mechanized establishments could compete with the factory during early industrialization, a distinct survival advantage of the factory appeared at later stages of industrialization. The evolving advantage of the factory can mainly be attributed to its larger scale, labour productivity, and technology use. By the end of the nineteenth century, these factors became increasingly important determinants of firm survival.

AbstractA large literature emphasizes that elite capture of political institutions hampered the spread of mass schooling in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We collect new data on investments in elementary education and the distribution of voting rights for more than 2,000 local governments in nineteenth‐century Sweden and document that educational expenditure was higher where the distribution of political power was more unequal. In particular, areas governed by local landed elites—even those where a single landowner had de jure dictatorial powers—invested substantially more in mass schooling relative to areas where political power was more widely shared, or where it lay in the hands of capitalist elites. Our findings lend quantitative support to an earlier literature produced by economic and social historians which argues that landed elites advanced mass schooling as part of their historical role as patrons of the local community and as a response to the increasing proletarianization of the rural population, while also furthering our understanding of how Sweden maintained a high level of human capital despite its low level of economic development and restricted franchise in the nineteenth century.

Did economic and political inequality hamper the spread of mass schooling in the 19th century? This paper analyzes the link between investments in primary schooling and the spread of voting rights in 19th-century Sweden using newly collected data on educational expenditure and the distribution of voting rights in local governments. We find that municipalities governed by local elites spent substantially more on primary schooling relative to those that were more egalitarian. This empirical result is robust to using matching estimators, comparing municipalities located within the same county or district, and using differences in agricultural suitability as an instrument for the presence of local landed elites. Broadly, these findings suggest that elites were historically not always a barrier to the diffusion of elementary education and further our understanding of how Sweden managed to maintain a high level of human capital despite its low level of economic development and restricted franchise in the 19th century.

We use historical census data to show that Sweden exhibited high levels of intergenerational occupational mobility several decades before the rise of the welfare state. Mobility rates were higher than in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century European countries, closer to those observed in the highly mobile nineteenth-century United States. We leverage mobility variation across Swedish municipalities to shed light on potential determinants: economic growth and migration are positively correlated with mobility, consistent with the patterns observed across countries.