Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 144

The last decades have seen an increasing interest in agrarian history among Swedish scholars. One proof of this was the publishing of the five-volume work Det svenska jordbrukets historia between 1998 and 2003. It was a splendid piece of work, in both substance and appearance, written by eight well-known authorities in the field, directed at the general public and academics alike. This book is a condensed version of those five volumes, translated into English for an international audience. The texts are, moreover, updated by research undertaken in the last ten years.

The book has six main chapters, ordered chronologically, from the very oldest archaeological finds of charred grains and bones of domesticated animals dating from 3900 BC to today, when agriculture is as much about preserving a pastoral landscape and providing ‘experiences’ as it is about producing food. In addition, there is a short introduction that includes a brief historiographical account of agrarian history in Sweden, a synthesis that puts Swedish agriculture in a wider context, a statistical appendix, and a comprehensive bibliography. Unfortunately, but unavoidably, most of the many beautiful and informative illustrations that made up much of the five-volume work have been omitted in this abridged edition.

The guiding idea is that the Swedish experience is relevant to international research. I share this view, and therefore welcome this book. I believe, however, that more explicit international comparisons would have helped the foreign reader. From the general account it is clear, however, that Sweden’s agrarian history belongs to a wider European story. Stig Welinder, whose article covers the first three millennia, points to the fact that the first findings of agricultural activities are associated with finds of Funnel-Beaker pottery. Agriculture seems to have been introduced as part of a wider cultural package, common to a large area around the Baltic and the North Sea. In the subsequent chapter, Ellen Anne Pedersen and Mats Widgren explore at length when and where the different elements of Northern European mixed farming – cattle byres, hay-meadows, permanent fields, and iron implements such as the scythe – turn up in the Swedish setting. In the third chapter, Janken Myrdal tells a story familiar to most British readers, that of medieval growth and decline. Sweden in the high middle ages was characterized by demographic expansion, land clearance, and rising productivity. In the fourteenth century, times were bad, culminating in 1350 with the Black Death. A dramatic drop in population, warfare, and efforts to increase rents – a ‘feudal reaction’ – followed. However, in the end, peasants’ conditions improved. A new era of expansion began.

A main and recurring theme in the book is the view that agricultural development is by-and-large a discontinuous process, characterized by times of rather rapid transformation and times of relative immovability. Carl-Johan Gadd describes a radical transformation in the fourth chapter, ‘The agricultural revolution in Sweden 1700–1870’. Here we are told how Sweden changed from being an importer of agricultural produce to an exporter, despite a growth in population from 1.4 million in 1700 to 4.2 million in 1870. A ‘technological complex’, to use Myrdal’s term, consisting of iron ploughs, the use of scythes to harvest grain, new crops and crop rotations, and land reforms (inspired by English enclosures), made this possible. But Gadd also gives credit to ‘underlying socio-economic and institutional changes’ that strengthened the position of the peasant-farmer, who is depicted as the chief carrier of change.

In the two last chapters, written by Mats Morell (covering 1870–1945) and Iréne A. Flygare and Maths Isacson (1945–2010), we meet a very different agrarian society, now inextricably dependent on, but at the same time at odds with, industrial and urban society. In 1900, half the Swedish population was still employed in agriculture. During the twentieth century this number was in constant decline; in the 1990s it was 4 per cent. In its place, machines driven by electricity and fossil fuels made possible an unprecedented increase in production. We are also told about the political and ideological struggles between agrarian interests and the rest of the Swedish society, within the context of an ever more important market economy and a rising welfare state.

This is an impressive book, spanning a wide range of topics: cultivation techniques, structures of landholding, the gender division of labour, to name but a few. The importance of forestry in Swedish rural society, not the least in the northern area, could have been emphasized more strongly. But the large regional differences that characterize Sweden are still accounted for; even brief, but repeated, references are made to the pastoral economy of the Sami, otherwise sadly neglected by Swedish historians. My guess, and hope, is that this will be an important book of reference for many years to come.