The Rural Working Poor in Sweden, 1300–1600

This project aims at studying how coercive labour institutions structured the rural economy in medieval and early modern Sweden, and will answer the questions of how such institutions were created, upheld, and ideologically justified, as well as how the occupational structure of the rural working poor varied over time and between different regions.

The studies will be based on e.g. legislation, court records, and taxation lists, which will be analysed through the theoretical lens of labour coercion, recently developed in the international research field of labour history.

The project will combine qualitative methods of language and ideology analyses with quantitative methods using a classification system, developed at Campop, to study changes in the occupational structure of the working poor.

The research will consequently be carried out at Campop at the University of Cambridge (2-years), a leading research group studying premodern European labour and economic history, and at the Division of agrarian history at SLU (1-year), with experts on Swedish rural history.

The results of the research project will challenge the dominant narrative of premodern Sweden as a homogenous ‘peasant society’ through demonstrating the continuous presence of coercive labour institutions which formed the lives of the landless rural population, hereby opening up new research areas concerning the political, economic, and social history of the working poor in medieval and early modern Europe.