Wealth, Consumption, and Industriousness : Evidence from southern Sweden, 1570-1860

This dissertation utilizes a new dataset on the belongings of early modern households, gathered from southern Sweden, to map the development of wealth and material living standards over the course of the early modern period. Together, the four papers making up the main part of the dissertation depicts a significantly more economically dynamic early modern period – especially eighteenth century – than have been often assumed. The south-Swedish household, no matter their socio-economic position, greatly improved their material standards over the early modern period; they diversified their stock of household objects and furniture, acquired larger and more varied wardrobes, and greatly expanded their range of cooking and eating options through more cook- and dinnerware. In the towns, the bulk of these improvements are visible for virtually everyone already from the mid-eighteenth century, while their penetration into the countryside proved slower; though clear and significant improvements are visible there as well from the mid-eighteenth century onward, a majority of the rural population would not enjoy most of these improvements before the nineteenth century.

While merchants, as well as most peasants, saw their political and economic position improve over the eighteenth century through the reforms of the Age of Liberty, the quickly growing and proletarianizing group of urban and rural labourers instead faced continuously higher cost of living. In the face of this economic uncertainty rural peasants and labourers alike increased their labour output. They did so mainly through a diversification of household production, mostly proto-industrial textile work, which allowed them to greatly increase the labour intensity of women and children. Apart from simply providing an extra source of income to counteract the increased costs of living, this diversification would also have connected these rural households to urban merchants, and through them wider trade networks through which they could acquire the manufactured goods which made up the backbone of material improvements of the period.

Though not a definite proof, the findings presented in the dissertation give tentative support of the presence of an industrious revolution in early modern Sweden. However, unlike as presented by de Vries in his original theory, this is not an industrious revolution driven by consumer demand for novel colonial goods, such as tea, coffee, and sugar. Instead, the industriousness of the Swedish households appears to have been driven by the interaction between the increased cost of living – necessitating an increased labour output to survive – and a decrease in the cost of the manufactured goods of the consumer revolution, which allowed for a large-scale shift in consumption strategies.