The Agrarian History of Sweden: 4000 BC to AD 2000 (review)

This edited book is a condensed and revised version in English of a five-volume work about the agrarian history of Sweden that was published between 1999 and 2003 with Janken Myrdal as principal editor.¹ The overarching questions that guide the authors—alas, not explicitly mentioned in the present book—were presented in the foreword to the first of the Swedish volumes: What is agriculture? Who were the farmers? Which tools did they use, and how did they cultivate the land? What were their crops and the livestock? The contributors also consider the ideologies and the everyday life of peasants/farmers, as well as social structures and regional differences.²

The Agrarian History of Sweden comprises an introduction and seven chapters. The introduction and Chapter 7 are newly written pieces that aptly frame the rest of the book, which presents the salient points of Sweden’s agricultural development since 4000 b.c. The introduction relates the book to the historiography of agriculture in Sweden, identifying three waves in the twentieth-century scholarship. The first wave, in the early twentieth century, featured ethnology and human geography; the second, in the 1970s, featured economic history and social history; and the third accompanied the institutionalization of agrarian history in the 1990s. In addition, recent methodological advances in archaeology have led to several detailed studies of Sweden’s early agrarian history.

That agrarian history has grown into a truly interdisciplinary field is cogently demonstrated by the subsequent empirical chapters. The authors concentrate on structures and the longue durée (at the expense of individuals and events) and on how structural continuities and changes shape everyday life. They identify phases of expansion punctuated by stagnation or crisis, maintaining that the long periods of change were “governed by the inner dynamic of technological development” (267). For instance, the introduction of plowing implements, spades, harrows, watermills, and windmills was decisive for the expansion between 1000 and 1300. Although the authors attach great importance to the role of technology, they do not fall into the trap of determinism. By considering the interplay between cultural, economic, environmental, political, social, and technological factors, they avoid the danger of the simple, monocausal explanation. The final chapter places Swedish agrarian history in the wider context of European agriculture, arguing that the Swedish case can be seen as an example—albeit an extreme one because of its climate, its social structures, and its wealth of iron—of the development of a technology-oriented “European-style agriculture” that had a combination of arable and livestock farming as its fundamental characteristic.

The empirical and theoretical focus shifts from chapter to chapter, depending on the disciplinary background and interest of the authors. Thus, mentalities, rites, and myths are salient themes in the first chapter (3900–800 b.c.); landscape and tools in the second (800 b.c.–a.d. 1000), as well as the third chapter (1000–1700); production and expansion through the taming of nature in the fourth chapter (1700–1870); production against the background of the agricultural industrialization in the fifth chapter (1870–1945); and the official policies of the strong post-war state, as well as attitudes and ideologies, in the sixth chapter (1945–2010). The result is a surprisingly coherent narrative, in which terms and concepts are critically discussed and consistently used throughout the book. Moreover, the authors deal with the challenge of translating Swedish terminology in an exemplary way. The Swedish term bonde, to take one example, does not always equate with peasant. The authors have solved this problem by variously translating the term into peasant, peasant-farmer, or farmer, in accord with the temporal context.

By critically scrutinizing the existing sources and by presenting new evidence, the authors manage to debunk several widely held beliefs or popular myths, such as the role of monasticism in the High Middle Ages (overestimated) or the notion of peasant conservatism during the last three centuries (not always...