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  • Distribution and Differences: Stratification and the System of Reproduction in a Swedish Peasant Community 1620–1820
  • Carl-Johan Gadd
Distribution and Differences: Stratification and the System of Reproduction in a Swedish Peasant Community 1620–1820. By Jonas Lindström (Uppsala, Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 2008) 255 pp. $ 32.00

This work treats inequality and reproduction among Swedish landholding peasants, bönder, a category including both landowning and tenant peasants but excluding crofters, cottagers, and other landless people. Lindström sees his study area, the Central-Swedish lowland parish of Björskog, in the light of previous international studies, initiating the foreign reader into Swedish demography and rural history in a highly readable way. Having on hand one of the oldest parish registrations in the country, Lindström performs a family-reconstitution study covering the period 1620 to 1820, which he links to other sources such as income and property taxations, showing the economic situation of households at different points of time. Lindström investigates the causes of economic stratification and its manifestations among the landholding peasantry with regard to life course, inheritance, officeholding, and god-parentage, as well as gender differences.

In about 1640, the parish was comprised mainly of comparatively large-scale landholding-peasant households, which as a rule included [End Page 609] life-cycle servants. The economic differences within the community of bönder were considerable. Although many of them were able to retain only the bare necessities for simple reproduction and sometimes less, others were in control of a surplus. An important cause for these differences was the unevenness in the burden of taxes and rents.

By 1790, the number of peasant farms had increased by 80 percent, entailing a decrease in both arable acreage and household members per farm. The landholding peasants compensated for a decrease in the proportion of living-in servants with a more systematic use of the labor power from the growing number of crofters and other landless workers. The level of economic stratification among the bönder remained broadly unchanged, although land tax and rents were lower in real terms than they had been 150 years earlier. The proportion of landowners among them had increased, as had that of transfers of headship within a family. From 1790 to 1820, farms again became fewer and, on average, larger.

Lindström does not consider Chayanov's model, in which peasant surplus plays only a minor role, applicable in the Swedish case.1 He is also skeptical about the notion, strong in Swedish historiography during the last forty years, that surplus re-investment done by landholding peasants increased differences within the rural population and thereby became an important factor behind the transition from feudalism to rural capitalism. Lindström asserts that even though many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century peasants accumulated a surplus, they used any land that they bought to preserve the status quo rather than to increase the level of stratification. The basic pattern, according to Lindström, was the principle of fission: Landed properties big enough to create several viable farms were split in order to make more than one heir a landholder. This strategy seems to have been successful insofar as the wealthiest bönder had substantially more descendants in the parish after 100 years than had their poorer peers.

There is no reason to question Lindström's contentions that the economic differences among the landholding peasants did not increase and that the tendency to split the larger holdings was an important cause behind this relative lack of structural change. However, Lindström's observations apply to conditions among the landholding peasantry only. Although the number of people within this stratum remained largely unchanged from 1750 to 1850, rural landless households quadrupled, largely because of the downward social mobility of landholding-peasant children not being able to take over a farm. One of the main factors behind the increasing differences between the landed and the landless was the price of land, which multiplied during the eighteenth century following a decrease in the real value of the land tax.2 Given the increasing [End Page 610] land values in the hands of landowning peasants, we can infer that a process of...

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