Making public property: a digital history of allemansrätten in Sweden and Finland, 1880–1950

The project studies the roots of the Nordic allemansrätten, a right of public access to nature.

Despite allemansrätten’s role today as a constitutional principle, a building block of Nordic identity, and a slogan for country branding, its history remains little researched and unproblematized.

This project fills the gap and examines the diverse perceptions, local conflicts, and future visions about the use and access to non-timber nature (wild berries and mushrooms) in Sweden and Finland in 1880-1950, a period before the term “allemansrätten” was commonly used.

The project has three main contributions: first, it challenges today’s interpretation of a traditional allemansrätten and sheds light on the conflicts, structural inequalities, and differences in conceptual trajectories in making this public property in the two countries.

Second, it adds to our knowledge about how public property regimes over natural resources, instead of privatizing them, are established and justified.

Third, the field of digital history is advanced by combining computational analysis of large bilingual textual corpora (parliamentary sources, newspapers) with the use of archival material (court cases, association sources), to avoid digital silos and methodological nationalism.

By theorizing allemansrätten through the lenses of “property as social relations” and “commodity frontiers”, the project provides knowledge about more equal and community-guided approaches for accessing and using wild nature.