Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T22:16:59.665Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Manorialism and Risk Management in Pre-Industrial Society: Sweden in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Martin Dribe ,
Mats Olsson  and
Patrick Svensson
Martin Dribe
Affiliation:
Center for Economic Demography and Department of Economic History, Lund University
Mats Olsson
Affiliation:
Center for Economic Demography and Department of Economic History, Lund University
Patrick Svensson
Affiliation:
Center for Economic Demography and Department of Economic History, Lund University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Throughout pre-industrial Europe, the manorial estate was an important institution in the rural economy. Related literature communicates the widespread view that the estates insured their tenants against uncertainties, for example, in times of economic hardship. By distributing grain or accepting deferment of rents, the manors helped to alleviate hunger in times of scarcity. If this insurance was indeed effective, then manorial tenants should have experienced less fluctuation in income or food availability than other peasants. However, there has not been much empirical confirmation that the pre-industrial estates were effective in providing this kind of insurance. This study uses the impact of grain prices on demographic outcomes as a measure of the efficiency of the manorial system in protecting its inhabitants against economic stress. Looking at four hundred parishes in Sweden (1749-1859), the manorial estate seems to have been able to insure its inhabitants against risks of economic stress, but the protective effect was imperfect and only visible in the short term.

Type
Communities and Exchange
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 337 - 353
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank the Linnaeus Center for Economic Demography, Lund University, and the research project “Economic Development and Social Dynamics: Swedish Agricultural Transformation in European Perspective” for financial support. We are also grateful to Lars Persson of the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Lund University for sharing his land ownership data. Previous versions of this article have been presented at the IUSSP seminar “Demographic Responses to Sudden Economic and Environmental Change” held at Reitaku University in Japan in May, 2009, the CNRS/EHESS workshop “A Critical Re-Examination of Demographic and Economic Crises in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the early Twentieth Century” in Treviso, Italy in June 2009, and the World Congress of Economic History in Utrecht in August 2009. We thank the participants in these sessions for their comments and suggestions, particularly Gérard Béaur, who provided the idea for and nurtured our publication proposals.

References

1. Blum, Jerome, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

2. Brenner, Robert, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, eds. Ashton, T. H. and Philpin, C. H. E. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10-63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dobb, Maurice, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1946; repr. 1963)Google Scholar; Sweezy, Paul, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1954; repr. 1976)Google Scholar; and Hatcher, John and Bailey, Mark, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History and Theory of England’s Economic Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

3. Bloch, Marc, “The Rise of Dependent Cultivation and Seigniorial Institutions,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. Postan, M. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 236 Google Scholar.

4. North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert Paul, “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model,” Journal of Economic History 31-4 (1971): 777-803 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Bloch, , “The Rise of Dependent,” 245 Google Scholar.

5. Blum, , The End of the Old Order, 91 Google Scholar.

6. Thompson, E. P., “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Ibid.

8. Bengtsson, Tommy and Reher, David, “Population and the Economy, Part D. Short and Medium Term Relations Between Population and Economy,” in Debates and Controversies in Economic History Google Scholar, ed. Núñez, Clara Eugenia (Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces, 1998), 99-115 Google Scholar; Bengtsson, Tommy and Ohlsson, Rolf, “Age-Specific Mortality and Short-Term Changes in the Standard of Living: Sweden, 1751-1859,” European Journal of Population 1-4 (1985): 309-26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Ronald D., “Short-Term Variation: Vital Rates, Prices and Weather,” in The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction, eds. Wrigley, Edward Anthony and Schofield, R. S. (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 356-401 Google Scholar; and Galloway, Patrick R., “Basic Patterns in Annual Variations in Fertility, Nuptiality, Mortality, and Prices in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Population Studies 42-2 (1988): 275-303 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Bengtsson, Tommy, “Living Standards and Economic Stress,” in Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 Google Scholar, eds. Bengtsson, Tommy, Campbell, Cameron, and Lee, James Z. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 45-46 Google Scholar.

10. Hiltpold, Paul, “The Price, Production, and Transportation of Grain in Early Modern Castile,” Agricultural History 63-1 (1989): 73-91 Google Scholar.

11. See, for example, Persson, Karl Gunnar, Grain Markets in Europe 1500-1900: Integration and Deregulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

12. Hoffman, Philip T., Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside 1450-1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 69-80 Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, “Rural Credit Markets and Aggregate Shocks: The Experience of Nuits St. Georges, 1756-1776,” Journal of Economic History 54-2 (1994): 288-306 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Svensson, Patrick, “Peasants and Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth-Century Agricultural Transformation of Sweden,” Social Science History 30-3 (2006): 387-429 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. See the discussion in Bengtsson, “Living Standards and Economic Stress.”

14. Wrigley and Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871.

15. Broadberry, Steven and Gupta, Bishnupriya, “The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800,” Economic History Review 59-1 (2006): 2-31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Scholar); Parthasarathi, Prasannan, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000 Google Scholar); Allen, Robert C., The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Vries, Jan de and Woude, Ad van der, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Zanden, Jan Luiten van and Riel, Arthur van, The Structures of Inheritance: The Dutch Economy in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 Google Scholar).

16. Lee, “Short-Term Variation”; Lee, Ronald D., “The Demographic Response to Economic Crises in Historical and Contemporary Populations,” Population Bulletin of the United Nations 20-1 (1990): 1-15 Google Scholar; Weir, David, “Life Under Pressure: France and England, 1670-1870,” Journal of Economic History 44-1 (1984): 27-47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bengtsson, and Ohlsson, , “Age-Specific Mortality”; Eckstein, Zvi, Schultz, T. Paul, and Wolpin, Kenneth I., “Short-Run Fluctuations in Fertility and Mortality in Pre-Industrial Sweden,” European Economic Review 26-3 (1985): 295-317 Google Scholar; Galloway, Patrick R., “Annual Variation in Deaths by Age, Deaths by Cause, Prices, and Weather in London 1670-1830,” Population Studies 39-3 (1985): 487-505 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Patrick R. Galloway, “Basic Patterns.”

17. Bengtsson and Reher, “Population”; Hammel, Eugene A. and Galloway, Patrick R., “Structural and Behavioral Changes in the Short-Term Preventive Check in the Northwest Balkans in the 18th and 19th centuries,” European Journal of Population 16-1 (2000): 67-108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feeney, Griffith and Kiyoshi, Hamano, “Rice Price Fluctuations and Fertility in Late Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 16-1 (1990): 1-30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Palloni, Alberto, Pérez-Brignoli, Hector, and Arias, Elizabeth, “Malthus in Latin America: Demographic Responses During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Population and Economy: From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth, eds. Bengtsson, Tommy and Saito, Osamu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 213-54 Google Scholar.

18. Carlsson, Gösta, “Nineteenth-Century Fertility Oscillations,” Population Studies 24-3 (1970): 413-22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bengtsson, Tommy, “A Re-Interpretation of Population Trends and Cycles in England, France and Sweden, 1751-1860,” Histoire &Mesure 8-1/2 (1993): 93-115 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Bengtsson, Tommy and Dribe, Martin, “Deliberate Control in a Natural Fertility Population: Southern Sweden, 1766-1894,” Demography 43-4 (2006): 727-46 Google Scholar; Bengtsson, Tommy and Dribe, Martin, “Economic Stress and Reproductive Responses,” in Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, eds. Tsuya, Noriko O. et al. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010 Google Scholar); and Dribe, Martin and Scalone, Francesco, “Detecting Deliberate Fertility Control in Pre-Transitional Populations: Evidence from Six German Villages, 1766-1863,” European Journal of Population 26-4 (2010): 411-34 Google Scholar.

20. Bengtsson, and Ohlsson, , “Age-Specific Mortality”; Bengtsson, Tommy, “The Vulnerable Child: Economic Insecurity and Child Mortality in Pre-Industrial Sweden: A Case Study of Västanfors, 1757-1850,” European Journal of Population 15-2 (1999): 117-51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bengtsson, , Campbell, , and Lee, , ed., Life Under Pressure Google Scholar.

21. See, for example: Utterström, Gustaf, Jordbrukets arbetare. Levnadsvillkor och arbetsliv på landsbygden från frihetstiden till mitten av 1800-talet (Stockholm: Tiden, 1957), 207-8 Google Scholar; Bengtsson, , “The Vulnerable Child”; and Oris, Michel, Derosas, Renzo, and Breschi, Marco, “Infant and Child Mortality,” in Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, eds. Bengtsson, Tommy, Campbell, Cameron, and Lee, James Z. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 359-98 Google Scholar.

22. Bengtsson, and Ohlsson, R., “Age-Specific Mortality”; Lee, , “Short-Term Variation”; and Galloway, , “Basic Patterns.”Google Scholar

23. Bengtsson, and Dribe, , “Deliberate Control”; Livi-Bacci, Massimo, Population and Nutrition: An Essay on European Demographic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 Google Scholar); Galloway, , “Basic Patterns”; Richards, Toni, “Weather, Nutrition and the Economy: The Analysis of Short Run Fluctuations in Births, Deaths and Marriages, France 1740-1909,” in Pre-Industrial Population Change: The Mortality Decline and Short-Term Population Movements, eds. Bengtsson, Tommy, Fridlizius, Gunnar, and Ohlsson, Rolf (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984), 357-90 Google Scholar.

24. Bengtsson, and Dribe, , “Deliberate Control”; Dribe, and Scalone, , “Detecting Deliberate Fertility Control.”Google ScholarPubMed

25. Richards, , “Weather, Nutrition and the Economy.”Google ScholarPubMed

26. Bengtsson, , Campbell, , and Lee, , Life Under Pressure; Allen, Robert C., Bengtsson, Tommy, and Dribe, Martin, ed., Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 Google Scholar); Tsuya, Noriko O. et al., eds., Prudence and Pressure: Reproduction and Human Agency in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010 Google Scholar).

27. Allen, , Bengtsson, , and Dribe, , Living Standards in the Past; Bengtsson, Tommy and Dribe, Martin, “New Evidence on the Standard of Living in Sweden During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Long-Term Development of the Demographic Response to Short-Term Economic Stress,” in Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well- Being in Asia and Europe, eds. Allen, Robert C., Bengtsson, Tommy, and Dribe, Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 341-72 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Bengtsson, and Dribe, , “Deliberate Control Google ScholarPubMed.”

28. Dribe, Martin, “Dealing with Economic Stress Through Migration: Lessons from Nineteenth Century Rural Sweden,” European Review of Economic History 7-3 (2003): 271-99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Bengtsson, and Dribe, , “Deliberate Control.”Google Scholar

30. Campbell, Cameron, Lee, James Z., and Bengtsson, Tommy, “Economic Stress and Mortality,” in Life Under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, eds. Bengtsson, Tommy, Campbell, Cameron, and Lee, James Z. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 69 Google Scholar.

31. Bengtsson, and Dribe, , “New Evidence on the Standard of Living”; Allen, , Bengtsson, , and Dribe, , Living Standards in the Past Google Scholar.

32. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, The Process of Capitalist Production (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1867; repr. 1906), 705 Google Scholar.

33. North, and Thomas, , “Rise and Fall,” 778 Google Scholar.

34. Dyer, Christopher, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 174 Google Scholar.

35. Fenoaltea, Stefano, “Risk, Transaction Costs, and the Organization of Medieval Agriculture,” Explorations in Economic History 13-2 (1976), 133 Google Scholar.

36. Henningsen, Peter, I sansernas vold. Bondekultur og kultursammanstød I enevældens Danmark (Copenhagen: Landbohistorisk Selskab, 2006 Google Scholar).

37. Ibid., 465-66.

38. Ibid., 468.

39. Christiansen, Palle Ove, A Manorial World: Lord, Peasants and Cultural Distinctions on a Danish Estate 1750-1980 (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996), 194-201 Google Scholar.

40. Moon, David, The Russian Peasantry 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made (New York: Longman, 1999), 94 Google Scholar.

41. Walter, John, “The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England,” in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, eds. Walter, John and Schofield, Roger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Dewald, Jonathan, The European Nobility 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 68 Google Scholar.

43. Lundh, Christer and Olsson, Mats, “Tenancy Contracts in Scania from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century,” in The Development of Leasehold in Northwestern Europe, c. 1200-1600, eds. Bavel, Bas J. P. van and Schofield, Philipp (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 113-37 Google Scholar; Olsson, Mats, “Peasant Freedom and Noble Dominance – Scania in Early Modern Times,” in Leibeigenschaft. Bäuerliche Unfreiheit in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klußmann, Jan (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2003), 117-34 Google Scholar.

44. Dribe, Martin, Olsson, Mats, and Svensson, Patrick, “If the Landlord So Wanted: Family, Farm Production and Land Transfers in the Manorial System,” Economic History Review, forthcoming.Google Scholar

45. Lundh, Christer and Olsson, Mats, “The Institution of Retirement on Scanian Estates in the Nineteenth Century,” Continuity and Change, 17-3 (2002): 373-403 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Jeppsson, Gert, “Hospital och huvudgård. Adelsdonationer under 1500- och 1600-talen,” in Skånska godsmiljöer, eds. Arcadius, Kerstin and Sundberg, Kerstin (Lund: Skånes hembygdsförbund 2001), 81-104 Google Scholar.

47. Blum, , The End of the Old Order, 91-92 Google Scholar.

48. Lund Regional Archives, church archives, minutes of the Parish Council to Hasslöv and Wåxtorp (sockenstämmmoprotokoll), September 25, 1803, and in Torup, May 2, 1784.

49. Olsson, Mats, Storgodsdrift. Godsekonomi och arbetsorganisation i Skåne från dansk tid till mitten av 1800-talet (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2002), 129 Google Scholar.

50. Englund, Peter, Det hotade huset. Adliga föreställningar om samhället under stormaktstiden (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1989), 202 Google Scholar.

51. Bloch, , “The Rise of Dependent,” 236 Google Scholar.

52. For a detailed sample of every empirical analysis accompanied by a complete description of the sample and the methods used, see Dribe, Martin, Olsson, Mats, and Svensson, Patrick, “Was the Manorial System an Efficient Insurance Institution? Economic Stress and Demographic Response in Pre-industrial Sweden,” European Review of Economic History, forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

53. Svensson, , “Peasants and Entrepreneurship.”Google Scholar

54. Olsson, Mats, “Manorial Economy and Corvée Labour in Southern Sweden 1650-1850,” Economic History Review, 59-3 (2006): 481-97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Sköld, Peter, Kunskap och kontroll. Den svenska befolkningsstatistikens historia (Umeå: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001 Google Scholar).

56. Jörberg, Lennart, A History of Prices in Sweden 1732-1914 (Lund: Gleerup, 1972), 8-18 Google Scholar. Market prices followed an administrative pricing scale that was used to measure the value of different payments-in-kind. The rules governing the establishment of these prices varied to some extent over time, but they were generally indexed to the lowest-level market prices—i.e., those of the burgs, judicial districts (fögderi) or county parishes. The procedure for adjusting prices within the scale also evolved over time, sometimes resulting in negotiations between different brokers or the simple calculation of an average. Despite the administrative character of these prices, they faithfully reflected actual market prices and thus represent an inestimable source regarding the history of prices in Sweden.

57. This map indicates the manorial parishes in which at least 80% of the peasants were fiscally categorized as owing their labor to the estates. Note that one estate is hidden by the insert.

58. Taken from Gillberg, Johan L., Historisk, Oeconomisk och Geographisk Beskrifning öfver Malmöhus Län uti Hertigdömet Skåne (Lund: Berling, 1765 Google Scholar); Gillberg, Johan L., Historisk, Oeconomisk och Geographisk Beskrifning öfver Christianstad Län uti Hertigdömet Skåne (Lund: Berling, 1767 Google Scholar). Manorial estates and presbyteries are not included in these estimates.

59. In Dribe, Olsson, , and Svensson, , “Was the Manorial System,”Google Scholar we make the same comparison with the parishes dominated by landowning peasants, but the difference between these and the mixed parishes in terms of demographic responses to economic stress are negligeable.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., table 5.

62. These figures are based on estimates based on models of interaction in which the degree of manorialism as a categorical variable is combined with the price of rye.

63. Fridlizius, Gunnar and Ohlsson, Rolf, “Mortality Patterns in Sweden 1751-1802: A Regional Analysis,” in Pre-Industrial Population Change: The Mortality Decline and Short-Term Population Movements, eds. Bengtsson, Tommy, Fridlizius, Gunnar, and Ohlsson, Rolf (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984), 299-328 Google Scholar.

64. Created based on estimates drawn from interactive models. To consult the entire data and for a discussion of sources used, see Dribe, , Olsson, , and Svensson, , “Was the Manorial System.”Google Scholar