This article examines the organisation of Sweden's Board of Antiquities, Antikvitetskollegium, which the Lord High Chancellor Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie commissioned in 1666 to investigate the prehistoric monuments and ancient artefacts of the realm, as well to publish works on Swedish history, Icelandic sagas, legal history, and numismatics. The Swedish Empire (1611-1721) saw the state expand quickly in both territory and bureaucracy, and this article explores the position of the Board of Antiquities in this expanding administration. While earlier research has investigated the use of history to legitimise the expanding power of the Swedish state and provide it with a glorious past, this article clarifies how the Board of Antiquities was organised-its leadership, terms of employment, and position in the state administration-in light of the theory of how a knowledge elite develops distinct fields of expertise, placing it in the framework of the early modern state. The analysis reveals that the leadership of the Board of Antiquities was not determined by appointment or rank, but rather that Johan Hadorph emerged as its leader by taking on a range of functions and creating the necessary networks and connections. By travelling to investigate prehistoric monuments, he was the Board's representative with local clergy, officials, and the public. By corresponding assiduously with high-ranking officials, he secured and managed the Board's finances, paying the other staff's wages. The financial accounts he left show that, beyond the prominent members of the Board, it came to employ a large number of people, including draftsmen, carvers, scribes, and printers. Wages were a challenge throughout the period as the state finances were unreliable, and Hadorph made a conscious effort to achieve a closer connection between wages, contributions, and competence in the antiquarian field. Between 1666 and 1692 the Board of Antiquities came to define what constituted antiquarian competence, and previous work for the Board became a qualification when applying for a position or promotion in the antiquarian field. From around 168o, the Board relocated from Uppsala University to the Royal Chancellery in Stockholm and changed from a collegium of learned men to an antiquarian workshop with a clear leader who managed a group of individuals with specialised competence in the antiquarian field.
From the mid-i8oos to the First World War, Sweden transitioned from being a predominantly agrarian country to an industrial nation and living standards increased rapidly. However, poverty among the agricultural underclass-es remained severe well into the twentieth century, evident in the poor housing, inadequate eldercare, and poor health. In this essay I examine poverty as expressed in poor living conditions in earth huts and shacks - examples of poor housing-in the Swedish countryside in the nineteenth century. Behind high levels of material welfare, there can also be significant restrictions on people's freedoms, curtailing their human rights, political freedoms, access to healthcare and education, eldercare, housing, and so on. Amartya Sen calls these restrictions `capability deprivation' and a way to define poverty and identify the poor. The factors beyond low income that drive loss of capability include age, gender, class, illness, economic resources, disabilities, social roles and positions, and other conditions over which an individual has limited or no control. In other words, poverty is not only expressed in material life because of economic conditions; in the form of a loss of basic capabilities, poverty can also mean shameful social relationships with the individual's community. However, housing cannot be reduced to the quality of the dwelling alone, because it has implications for a person's well-being, self-esteem, and status in society. An overcrowded, drafty home with a leaky roof and no heating, ventilation, or natural light not only affects the individual's well-being and health, but also their social opportunities to live a good life and how they are perceived by others. The official reports by Sweden's provincial doctors provide an insight into the capability deprivation that poverty entailed for those living in poor housing. There were recurring descriptions of overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, poor health and disease, wretched housing standards with cold rooms, signs of uncleanliness and untidiness, poor lighting, low ceilings, and floors made of earth, stone slabs, or boards. These descriptions complement information from memory records, interviews, and photographs, where the condition and state of rural dwellings are particularly evident.
In this article we investigate how divorce in 1950s Sweden was conceptualised not primarily as a private failure but as a threat to social cohesion, and how family counselling emerged as a key institutional response. We drawn on a rich source material: articles and other texts by the staff of the Stockholm Family Counselling Bureau between 1952 and 1959; the archives of the official inquiry into family counselling, which reported in 1957; and the Swedish Medical Association's responses to the inquiry's work. Using Donileen Loseke's constructionist model of social problems, we trace how claims-makers-including the Stockholm Family Counselling Bureau, the Swedish Medical Association, and individual psychiatrists and social workers-defined the grounds, diagnosis, and solution to the divorce problem'. The grounds were sought in a combination of statistical analyses of rising divorce rates and a moralising history of social disintegration. The diagnosis located the cause in psychological maladjustment brought on by modernisation and women's changing roles. The solution was framed as a psycho-scientific intervention, above all one that was individualised. The initial ideal of an inter-professional collaboration between social workers and physicians gradually gave way to turf wars over scientific authority, jurisdiction, and institutional control. Although the causes of marital breakdown were located in societal transformation, interventions increasingly targeted individuals-typically women-with ego-psychological therapy. This therapeutic individualisation was consolidated in the 1960 government Bill that nationalised family counselling. We argue that the psycho-scientific expertise served as a non-authoritarian technology of governance: a means to normalise the nuclear family and contain the gendered consequences of modernisation under the guise of care and adjustment. At the same time, early feminist voices in the counselling profession and the press problematised the same norms, paving the way for later debates about autonomy and equality. By linking professional practice to broader projects such as welfare state regulation and gendered citizenship, we offer a historically grounded explanation for why individualised therapy-rather than couples counselling or social reform-came to define Swedish family counselling in the post-war period.
As Sweden industrialised in the late nineteenth century, the new working class faced unique chances and challenges. In the Swedish historiography of working-class culture, their evolving cultural attitudes have been grouped together as conscientiousness (skotsamhet), which Bjorn Horgby argues had both individual and collective elements. It has also been connected to the rise of the Swedish labour movement, which fostered the conscientious mindset. The culture of conscientiousness expected self-discipline from each worker in order to achieve his long-term goals. In this article, we study the heterogeneity of the culture of conscientiousness by looking at workers' strategies, whether individual or collective, at the household level. We also connect the various strategies to each household's socioeconomic circumstances. To that end we have created a database of 207 households headed by workers or lesser officials, using the weekly reports from the official cost-of-living survey (Levnadskostnadsundersokningen) for 1913-1914. It was based on the participants' household accounts, where they recorded income and expenditure for one year. We used expenditure to identify their strategies. We find that while the trades unions were central to the workers' collective culture, they did not matter as much to lesser officials. Therefore, having categorised them according to union membership and membership of other civil society organisations, we conclude it was the better-off workers who were the driving force behind collective conscientiousness. Whether they were members of trades unions or other civil society organisations, they were usually more skilled, had more disposable income, and were more likely to take out insurance than other groups. Thus, they used a combination of both collective and individual strategies to ensure a secure future. However, those who were members of trades unions did not invest as much in their children's education as the non-union group who were members of other associations-mostly lesser officials with larger incomes. Individual strategies for social mobility were thus not commonly combined with collective strategies.
In the early to mid-197Os, the Swedish government agencies involved in defence planning identified the plummeting domestic production of clothing and shoes as a concern. As part of the state's total defence planning, the country was to withstand up to three years of severely limited imports in times of crisis or war. The objective was to maintain domestic shoe production in line with the defence planning assessments of annual production requirements. Measures taken included various forms of support, favourable loans, and attempts to restructure the shoe industry. A privately owned conglomerate of six shoe companies was formed on the government's initiative. However, the programme ultimately failed and was disbanded in 1987. By then, the domestic shoe industry's production capacity was only a fraction of what was deemed necessary a decade earlier. In this article we examine the stakeholders who controlled or influenced the measures implemented to secure the supply of leather shoes in times of crisis and war in the 1970s and 1980s. We find that while private companies benefited from the support programmes, it primarily reflected considerations of defence policy and national security interests. The direction of economic defence policy was so decisive in the support for the leather shoe industry that more common factors behind industrial subsidies-such as employment and labour market considerations-were marginalised. This, in turn, meant that the exchange between the parties involved was asymmetric and essentially on the state's terms. In other words, defence policy in the Cold War had a far-reaching impact on Swedish society, even in peacetime. However, we also demonstrate that while general contingency planning resulted in extensive government support for the leather shoe industry, there were still problems that neither the public nor the private sector could deal with. Available resources were insufficient, regardless of who was attempting to mobilise them. Some companies were struggling even before the support programmes were cancelled following the 1987 Defence Review, which set out to shift expenditure away from economic and civil defence into modernising the country's military defences.
Ever since Hans Lindberg's 1973 book about Sweden's refugee policy in the late 1930s, the consensus among Swedish historians has been that the Swedish Foreign Ministry (UD) lobbied Germany to introduce the regulation (Verordnung uber Reisepasse von Juden or VuRvJ) that put a large red J in Jewish passports from October 1938. UD's purported demand has been portrayed as essentially the result of antisemitism towards Jewish refugees. In this article I take a long-overdue critical look at the accepted view. I test the hypothesis that UD caused VuRvJ-adding previously unused sources from Swedish, German, and Swiss archives-and show that there simply is no evidence to support it. The consensus, I argue, is based on sloppy handling of sources, anachronistic reasoning (based on hindsight knowledge of the Holocaust), flawed methodology (not distinguishing between correlation and causality, let alone how to prove or falsify the latter), chronological mistakes, inadequate source criticism, and even mistranslations of German documents (as in the case of the recent claims that Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler was personally engaged in the UD negotiations). The German sources and international scholarship alike point to Switzerland as the only party with which VuRvJ was negotiated. I also adduce a range of facts that have hitherto been unknown or overlooked. The marking of Jewish passports was suggested by the head of the Gestapo and SD, Reinhard Heydrich, as early as September 1935 if not before. Moreover, by the summer of 1938 a "J" was already printed on Jewish national identity cards (Kennkarten), proving that such a marking was Nazi policy before UD first contacted the Germans about the passport issue. A very different picture emerges when UD's actions are interpreted in their historical context. UD was trying to balance several difficult problems at once and were in a catch-22 because of the Nazi policy towards the Jews. UD did not want to aid the Nazis' forced deportation of German citizens and hoped that the Refugee Committee set up in London after the & Eacute;vian Conference in mid-1938 would solve the refugee crisis in the long term. But by denying entry to many Jews seeking refuge in Sweden from the Third Reich, the Swedish authorities inadvertently and unintentionally put Jewish lives at risk.
The present analysis of the Swedish system of price scale deputies of the four Estates (markegangsdeputerade) sheds light on the fluctuating political influence of the Estate of Peasants as well as on other changes in the four-estate system. In 1731, during the so-called Age of Liberty, the Diet (riksdag) decided that the official market price scales (markegangstaxor) should be determined by the county at annual meetings between the county governor and deputies from the four Estates: nobility, clergy, burghers and peasants. The market price scales were important because they formed the basis for calculating how in-kind taxes and other contributions to the Crown would be valued in money. The rules governing the activities of price scale deputies were subsequently changed quite frequently, sometimes to the tax-paying peasants' advantage and sometimes to their disadvantage. Notable successes in the 1730s and 1740s were followed by setbacks, especially in the early 19th century during the absolutist rule of Gustav IV Adolf. The significance of the price scale deputies is illustrated by the fact that they were protected in the constitution of 1809, established after the deposition of Gustav IV Adolf and remaining in force until 1974. Both in 1731 and 1809, the four Estates agreed to limit the powers of the county governors in setting the market price scales. However, the governor retained an important role as chairman of the price scale deputies. The practical significance of the price scale deputies diminished towards the end of the 19th century. The four-estate Diet was abolished in 1866 and shortly after, in 1869, the new bicameral parliament permanently fixed in-kind contributions to the Crown in monetary value, something that the peasantry had striven for since 1723. In certain contexts, however, the market price scales system was still applied and price scale deputies remained in existence until 1982, although appointed in a different way than during the Estates' period. As for further studies, a closer examination of the work of the price scale deputies would enhance our understanding of the peasantry's influence at the regional level and the roles of the four Estates in the political system of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Swedish nobility gradually lost several of their privileges, including the exclusive right to hold feudal lands, the monopoly on offices of state, and the ability to bequeath their estates in entail (fideicommiss). Also, despite fierce opposition from the nobility, , the Inheritance Code was revised in 1845 introducing equal inheritance rights for sons and daughters. However, the transfer of property to the next generation could still be influenced by testators' wills, putting heirs on an equal if not better footing. In this article, we examine the extent to which the Swedish nobility tried to push inheritance in certain directions in the decades prior to the enactment of the equal inheritance law. We use an analysis of wills and probate inventories to identify how individual nobles allocated their assets, who was favoured or disadvantaged, and how those decisions affected the economic balance between sons and daughters. Our findings uncover a discrepancy between the position taken in parliamentary debates by members of the Estate of the Nobles and the practical measures taken by nobles in southern Sweden. Several families chose to distribute property in ways that diverged from traditional inheritance hierarchies, which typically favoured sons over daughters. Instead, marital bonds were often prioritised: spouses appointed each other as the primary beneficiaries before their own children, and it was not uncommon for couples to divide property equally between sons and daughter long before the legal change made it standard. Such behaviour challenges the conventional perception of Sweden's nobility as conservative and resistant to change. Instead, it aligns with the broader economic, political, and cultural transformation of Western society. Patriarchal systems were strong in the older societal structure, as were beliefs in the collective and the significance of biological kinship; over time, however, the rights of women and individuals began to be emphasised more. Rather than resisting the new ideals, some segments of the nobility appear to have voluntarily adapted to new circumstances, thereby contributing to the very developments their peers opposed at the national level.
While historical studies of fascism in Sweden typically start in the interwar period, this article traces the political-ideological roots in the nationalist era leading up to the Great War. It depicts the genesis of Swedish radical nationalism, a political ideology centred on tying an imagined people to a bordered territory. In the early twentieth century, radical nationalism in Sweden articulated that the people were diluted by cultural decadence and uncontrolled migration while the territory was threatened by geopolitical aggression from Russia. This radicalisation of national defence was driven by a gendered logic of masculinist protection, reinforced by an emergency temporality oriented towards national rebirth. Whereas national conservatism cultivated the memory of paradise lost, radical nationalism became the politics of resurrection: Swedishness restored and Sweden reborn. This ideational assemblage of defence and rebirth was articulated in a series of books, articles, and journals published by three men-Rudolf Kjellen, Adrian Molin, and Teodor Holmberg-who have become ideological sages for the nationalist movement today; radical-nationalist think tanks are republishing Kjellen's and Molin's political manifestos while the Sweden Democrats publicly acknowledges its debt to Holmberg's political thought. In that sense, the genesis of Swedish radical nationalism serves as an ideological resource when demanding the reinforcement of the exclusionary mechanisms of the modern nation-state.
