Micro meets macro: Peasant diaries and the transformation of Sweden 1840-1920

The project studies a local rural context and its members over the agricultural and industrial revolutions using peasant diaries and other sources.

It addresses our overall view of societal transformations generally, this period specifically, and the role of the people living their lives in the midst of change.

We use source material and methodologies on the micro level, following individuals, families and communities, and relate them to changes at the macro-level.

Merging these levels on a number of different areas into a synthesis, we create a whole encompassing and holistic understanding of people and change during one of the most important societal transformation periods in Sweden.Focus is on six peasant diary-writing farms situated within 10 km in the mining district of Bergslagen, their knowledge, network, subsistence, agriculture, economy and labour during c. 1840-1920.

The uniqueness of the source material lies in both that it provides accounts from different actors with different socio-economic conditions all sharing the same community and outside context, and in that it provides perspectives lacking in any other source material.One important contribution will be to discuss whether the rural society should be regarded as a traditional setting with a reluctance to change, only changing when exposed to external forces, or as a potentially dynamic side of the society responding and creating change supplementary to urban change and development abroad.

Or perhaps both.