Wealth, work, and industriousness, 1670-1860: evidence from rural Swedish probates

Abstract

This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households' productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards - as measured by the contents of probate inventories - but the labouring households' ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and dependency on wage labour. For labourers' and farmers' households alike, textile production at home became more important; in the 1860s, half of the labouring households owned spinning wheels and weaving looms, and for farmer households, the shares were even higher. Our study reveals not only the dynamism of the rural pre-industrial Swedish economy but also the unequal nature of this dynamism.