Making iron, producing space! How coerced work defined a Swedish early modern ironmaking region

Abstract

Swedish ironmaking took place in mines, forests and rationally structured ironmaking communities (bruk), merging different forms of labour and coercion, wage labour, household labour and corvée labour often in the form of transport duties, as well as leases paid in kind. The aim is to analyse this diverse structure from an angle of motion, movement and mobility, and see how subordinated ironmaking artisanal and peasant households set the limits for the regions in which they were living while undertaking that work. It is essential to link this work to the owners’ ambition to control production, the workers and the tasks they were set to do. It meant to supervise production at the workshops, but more importantly, it meant to monitor the movement of raw material, grain and commodities, between these sites and markets outside the region. I use an extensive accounting material from one region to unravel patterns of work, and the owners’ ambitions to keep track of subordinated artisans and peasants. These patterns of work and supervision were, together with legal structures, a crucial element in the making of the spatial structuring of Swedish ironmaking.