C European Historical Economics Society 2010
European Review of Economic History, 14, 275–304. doi:10.1017/S1361491610000067 First published online 28 May 2010
Agricultural growth and institutions:
Sweden, 1700–1860
M AT S O L S S O N A N D PAT R I C K S V E N S S O N
Department of Economic History, Lund University, Sweden,
[email protected], [email protected]
The dating of, and explanation for, the agricultural revolution in Europe
remains an elusive research task. When and why did a low-productive
pre-industrial agricultural sector turn into a fast-growing, more productive
one? Unique data from Sweden, consisting of more than 80,000
observations of farm production output for the period 1700–1860, are used
to calculate and explain decisive changes in pre-industrial agricultural
production. Our estimations show that crop production more than
quadrupled during the period studied, and from the 1780s and onwards
production growth by far outstripped population growth. Furthermore,
the data allow us to estimate the determinants of change at individual farm
level. The results show that enclosures, markets and property rights were
of significant importance. Institutional changes, affecting the incentives
and the organization of production, made peasants invest in production
and productivity. In a general sense this shows the flexibility and awareness
of pre-industrial European peasants in exploiting markets and initiating
institutional change.
1. Introduction
In the early eighteenth century, Swedish agriculture rested to a large extent
upon institutions created several centuries earlier. Land management was
regulated by the inherent collective character of the open-field system,
the land market was controlled by the state and by kin-relations, internal
migration was restricted, trade was only allowed to take place within the small
towns and exports of many food items were prohibited. A hundred and fifty
years later land was managed individually, new crops and crop rotations had
been introduced and markets for food, labour, land and capital had emerged.
During the same period Sweden turned from being a grain importer to
having grain as one of its foremost important export items. This was achieved
although population increased more than two and a half times, from around
1.4 million in 1700 to 3.8 million in 1860. Was this apparently simultaneous
development a coincidence or did a changing institutional structure have an
effect on agricultural growth? Were enclosures, the strengthening of property
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rights and the deregulation of trade decisive factors explaining growth? If not,
what caused Swedish cultivators to increase their production?
The impact of institutions on growth has been discussed extensively.
Proponents of the positive effects of the ‘right’ institutions have advocated
the economic incentives of secure and stable property rights (North and
Weingast 1989), the possibilities of flexibility with individual decision making
in agriculture (Overton 1996), and the commercial possibilities of integrated
and deregulated markets (Persson 1999). Critics, on the other hand, have
downplayed the role of institutions, pointing to cases where well-functioning
institutions have emerged long before growth took place (e.g. Clark 1996
and 2007), or arguing that it was not institutional change within agriculture
but urban development that caused the rising output in agriculture (Allen
2009).
Most of these studies have been performed at a macro-level, but to delve
deeper into the elusive explanatory variables of growth and transformation
requires micro-level data. Although national accounts or macro-estimations
of production are of much value, among other things for making it possible to
date phases of growth and to relate growth to state policy, trade regulations
and other national factors, it is at regional or local levels that most causes
of, and constraints to, growth are to be found. The data must also reflect
the diversity of the rural society so that different factors put forward as
explanations for growth may be estimated and valued.
The aim of this article is to explain pre-industrial agricultural growth with
a special focus on institutional change. We accomplish this by providing
explanations for trends and variations in the development of agricultural
production in southern Sweden from the early eighteenth to the mid
nineteenth century. We use a regional approach to estimate production at
a micro-level by studying an area with unique source data on production,
population, prices and taxes. This area is Scania (Skåne), which contains a
variation of some of the most common types of north European agricultural
settings in terms of socio-economic and topographic conditions as well as
land management. Our main sources are local tithes that were proportional
to output, allowing us to estimate annual production for over 2,000
farms with different characteristics. We not only estimate the production
development during this period, but also compare different types of farms to
ascertain the effects of institutional changes and general commercialization
simultaneously in order to understand the important factors behind
growth.
Some of the most significant questions regarding the causes of the
development of agricultural production can therefore be elaborated in detail:
what institutions and institutional settings, such as property rights and
state initiatives, promoted growth and which of them were obstacles to
growth? How profitable were different forms of land management? Were
Agricultural growth and institutions
277
there differences between, for example, peasants1 and persons of rank?
How did the enclosure movements, the initial reallocations of land in the
eighteenth century and the radical enclosures in the nineteenth century,
affect production output? What was the role of the markets?
We start by discussing the potential impact of institutions on growth. From
this we move over to the implications of using tithes as sources for production
estimates. In the empirical part, we first measure agricultural production in
southern Sweden for the period 1702 to 1864 and discuss the overall trend
and variations. We then explain differences in economic performances at a
micro-level, elaborating a number of possible determinants in a multivariate
regression analysis.
2. Institutions and growth
The agricultural revolution is often used to imply a transformation from
a stagnant or slow-growing state of production to a fast-growing, more
productive agriculture. Over the years there has been much debate on
whether, and particularly if so when, an agricultural revolution took place
in different provinces and countries. Dating this event requires extensive,
detailed and trustworthy data on agricultural production and/or productivity.
This is, however, only half the story if we want to define what the
agricultural revolution really was; finding a marked and sustainable increase
in agricultural production opens up the possibilities of explanation. What
were the decisive factors for growth and transformation? After all, this is what
most of us want to know. Thus, the problem consists of two sub-problems
to be solved: (a) estimating output, and (b) assessing factors important for
changes in output.
Many scholars have devoted a massive amount of time to solving the
first part of the problem. Differences in available sources and variations in
methods have generated different outcomes even within the same country
or region. For England, the most studied country by far, these differences in
data and methods have caused a large debate on whether the agricultural
revolution occurred in the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth or
the nineteenth century (e.g. Kerridge 1973; Allen 1992; Overton 1996;
1
The concept of peasant (Swedish: bonde) is used when talking about all non-gentry
landholders managing farms that were subject to land taxes. This means that the peasant
group ranged from non-subsistence smallholders to wealthy farmers. The reason we use
‘peasants’ instead of ‘farmers’ is that the peasants formed a clearly defined social group.
The fact that they held independent political representation in the Diet of the Four Estates
(the Swedish parliament) separated them, not only socially but formally, from other
farmers, for example persons of rank. Almost 90 per cent of all land in southern Sweden
was managed by peasants in the early nineteenth century, either as freeholders or as
tenants (Olsson 2002, p. 295).
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Turner et al. 2001). For France, the traditionally held view of a very late
transformation (Bloch 1966) has been challenged in more recent work,
which states that farmers in some regions of France were as productive as
English farmers already in the eighteenth century (Hoffman 1996). Similar
revaluations of growth development for other countries are also taking place
(e.g. for Spain: Simpson 1995 versus Lana forthcoming).
This is, however, only part of the problem. As has been said, explaining
growth depends on the possibilities of using data not only for dating growth
but also for explanation. The research on European agriculture has drawn
attention to several important factors affecting growth. One set of factors
is related to institutions, particularly to the property rights structure. The
distributional effect of institutions is in focus when discussing the leaders
of the agricultural transformation. One explanation for growth is that new
groups appeared on the scene, introducing new and more efficient forms of
agricultural management. This view most often attributes growth either to
enlightened landlords or to newly engaged commercial classes, or to both
(e.g. Heckscher 1949; Brenner 1985). Others, however, have stressed that it
was the traditional groups of farmers that were actually responsible for the
transformation and growth (e.g. Allen 1992; de Vries 2001; Svensson 2006).
One argument for the latter view is that more secure and widened property
rights to land for these traditional groups of farmers allowed them to retain
a larger share of production for themselves (Kerridge 1973, p. 135; Herlitz
1974; Winberg 1990).
This argument is in line with arguments supporting the general positive
effect of stable and secure property rights. Even if some researchers see
a direct link between the establishment of these kinds of property rights
and economic growth (Olson 1993), others argue that even if they did not
create growth entirely by themselves, they made it possible to expand and
continue growth, something that would have been much less viable in a
society with insecure property rights (North and Weingast 1989, p. 805). On
the other hand, Clark (2007, p. 147), as one of the critics of the institutional
explanation, argues that medieval England had a structure containing higher
economic incentives than modern England has today. This finding of a
pre-industrial society with institutional stability and a developed economic
incentive structure, but lacking major technological advance, makes Clark
conclude that institutions did not matter for growth.
The positive effect of individual, as opposed to collective, property rights
has also been debated. As regards agriculture, this has mainly focused on the
impact of enclosures on growth and transformation. One side has highlighted
the idea that the enclosure of land, and the subsequent abolition of the openfield system, led to a more efficient agriculture where individual farmers
could adopt inventions and change their management in accordance with
their specific soil conditions and personal ideas. In all, this increased the
possibilities of growth as compared to farmers still using the open-field
Agricultural growth and institutions
279
system. Several researchers have rejected this proposition and stated that
change was just as possible in the open-field system (e.g. Allen 2009, pp.
67–74). Estimates of the gain from enclosures have varied significantly,
but in most studies there is a positive effect on growth and productivity
(McCloskey 1975; Allen 1982; Clark 1998). Whether this growth is large or
not is debatable, depending on what it is compared to.2
Another set of factors concerns markets; some researchers consider
changes outside the agrarian sector as the most important factors affecting
economic incentives to raise production and increase productivity. Rising
prices emanating from increased demand from urban areas or other countries
(Slicher van Bath 1963, p. 116), stable prices due to increased market
integration combined with trade deregulation (Persson 1999, chapters 5–6)
and a supply of superior goods from the outside (de Vries 1975, pp. 205–
9) are examples of this. Allen (2009, chapter 3) argues that a combination
of these factors caused the growth in agriculture in England. It was the
expansion of cities and the high-wage economy that made agriculture raise
output, not institutional change within agriculture causing cities to grow.
Higher output and increased productivity in agriculture were achieved when
agricultural labourers moved to urban areas, forcing the remaining farmers
to economize on labour. The farmers also desired an increased supply of
non-agricultural goods and, as argued by de Vries, became industrious and
raised output to be able to buy these products. For France, Grantham has
shown that agricultural supply during the nineteenth century was price
elastic. Farmers responded to demand, primarily from urban centres but
also emanating from regional specialization, and were able to enlarge their
production substantially (Grantham 1989). The outside forces, markets and
institutions, are also highlighted in other studies of France (e.g. Hoffman
1996).
Our intention in the following is to contribute to, and deepen, this
discussion by estimating the development of production in one Swedish
region and by assessing the importance of different factors, primarily
institutional and market factors, for growth.
3. Tithes and production
Starting in the Middle Ages, the tithe was an important part of the tax
system in most parts of Europe. In some countries this form of taxation
of agriculture survived into the twentieth century, but was, by then,
seldom proportional to annual production output. Originally, the whole
tithe in principle corresponded to 10 per cent of every peasant’s production
2
Allen (2009, pp. 63–7) compares the positive impact of enclosures on output per worker
and yields in terms of the total gain from the Middle Ages to 1800 and finds it rather small.
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output. The 1960s and 1970s saw extensive historical research on tithes in
many European countries. The question at issue was typically agricultural
production output and its interaction with demographic change, from the
Middle Ages until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The results of this
research, which are mainly regional grain production estimates for the period
before 1800, indicate an increase in agricultural production in the eighteenth
century for major parts of western and central Europe. This development,
however, was not in any way uniform (see Le Roy Ladurie and Goy 1982).
The most serious criticism against tithe research and its results is based on
the notion that the tithes paid and registered to a certain cathedral or other
ecclesiastical institution did not correspond to the entire farm production of
the decimants. Other parties, such as local priests or secular interests, could,
for example, claim the surpluses from new crops or from altered land use
(Hoffman 1996, pp. 83–4).
Aggregated tithes at county level in Sweden have been used in a study
on agricultural development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Uncertainties about what is really included in these tithe series (number of
decimants, change in collection premises, etc.) have led to the conclusion that
they cannot be used for simple production output estimates (Leijonhufvud
2001). However, tithe rolls at the individual farm level have been used by
Swedish researchers to estimate changes in grain production (Helmfrid 1949;
Olsson 2005; Berg 2007).
In the southernmost province of Sweden, Scania, grain tithes were divided
into three distinct parts, with three distinct recipients: the crown, the church
and the local clergy. The two former parts of the tithes were regulated to
a fixed yearly amount per farmstead in 1683, and stayed unaltered until
the abolition of tithes in 1904. However, the clergy’s grain tithes in many
Scanian parishes remained a constant share of output until the middle of
the nineteenth century. The same goes for the animal tithes, which in their
entirety were reserved for the parish priest. Together they constituted a
substantial share of the clergyman’s personal income and therefore he kept
close and elaborate accounts of each payment and of each peasant’s animal
breeding.3 This was made possible by the fact that the clergyman himself
was an active farm manager living next door to the peasants paying the
tithes. Every thirtieth sheaf from each peasant was collected annually and
went directly from the field to the clergy’s barn. Thus, to prevent fraud it
was possible for the clergyman himself to go out into the fields and count
the number of sheaves each peasant had harvested. This must have been
3
The clergymen did not have to report this in any way to higher levels of the church
bureaucracy. This implies that the level of fraud must have been very small in the tithe rolls
from the clergymen’s side since they only registered the tithes for two purposes: for their
own use to keep track of their personal income, and as a written agreement between each
peasant and the clergyman on how much had been paid.
Agricultural growth and institutions
281
Table 1. Number of farms in the
sample by year
1710
1720
1730
1740
1750
1760
1770
1780
1790
1800
1810
1820
1830
1840
1850
1860
Number of farms
18
181
282
312
229
493
673
700
756
869
1,001
933
962
378
273
62
Note: Only every tenth year is shown although
data exist for all the years in between as well.
quite easy as long as the open-field system prevailed, but even afterwards the
clergymen could keep track of each peasant’s production. There are indeed
several indications, also in the nineteenth century, in the tithe rolls that
the clergymen actually went out into the fields to check production. One
example is from the parish of Billinge, where the parish clergyman wrote
regarding the tithe collection from one farmer in 1846: ‘Of the rye, one and
a half sheaves were inferior, while the rest was bad. Next year I must count.’
Furthermore, in 1853 he noted that another farmer ‘had sown over half a
hectare of peas, for which he has not reported [any tithe] to me’ (Tithe rolls,
Billinge parish).
The tithe accounts are very detailed, containing information on individual
crops. For most farms rye, barley and oats, which were the contemporary
staple crops of Scandinavia, were registered. For some farms wheat,
buckwheat, peas or beans were also accounted for, displaying the variation
in crop production in different areas of Scania. For the animals, every tenth
calf, foal, piglet, lamb and gosling born also found its way to the parsonage.
In principle, no farm production (except for potatoes in the nineteenth
century, see below) was exempted from priest tithes, not even production
outputs from newly reclaimed land.
The data set contains 34 parishes with tithe rolls of about 2,200 tithepayers. Together they cover the period 1702–1864, making a total of more
than 80,000 observations4 of farm production (see Tables 1 and 3; crofts and
4
One observation is the total crop production for one specific farm in one specific year.
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European Review of Economic History
Map 1.
The region of Scania and the 34 parishes in the sample
cottages omitted in the latter). On average, 450 farms are represented each
year. The material reflects a broad selection of the province’s geographic
and socio-economic conditions. For each farm in the sample the yearly tithe
payments have been registered into a database, the Historical Database of
Scanian Agriculture. The sample covers 162 years, but no individual farm is
included for the whole period. The lengths of observations vary – far from
all tithe accounts are preserved, and, furthermore, some farms or whole
parishes converted proportional tithes to fixed tithes during our period of
investigation.
One objection to tithes as sources for production estimates is that they
do not reflect changes in land use from arable to pasture, nor the outputs
from leys in crop rotation systems (Hoffman 1996, pp. 83–4). However, this
is not a problem in the Scanian case. The sample contains animal breeding
as well as outputs in grain production, and possible changes in land use are
thus reflected in one or both of the outputs. Another objection is that new
crops were not included in the tithes. During the eighteenth century potatoes
Agricultural growth and institutions
283
were mostly cultivated together with other vegetables in the peasant’s kitchen
garden, but in most parts of Sweden potatoes rapidly moved out into the
arable land in the century to come (Utterström 1943; Lägnert 1955). They
are seldom reflected in the tithe series. A royal ordinance in 1808 stated that
the clergy of Scania, who by then had already benefited well from a rise in
peasant productivity, was not entitled to tithes from potatoes, even when they
were planted in the fields.5 Fortunately it is possible, from other sources, to
calculate the potato share of production output for each parish (see below).
In all, the tithe rolls for Scania are very detailed documents creating a unique
opportunity for estimating production at the individual farm level over time.
4. The development of agrarian production, 1702–1864
An average peasant farm in the fertile plains of southern Sweden in the
middle of the eighteenth century consisted of about 25 hectares of land, of
which about 18 hectares were cultivated. In the more wooded areas the total
acreage of the farms could be five times as high, but the arable land was
smaller, often not more than 5–8 hectares.6 In the latter case, typically, all
the fields were cultivated each year, while in the plains one-third was bound
for fallow. Mantal was the major assessment for taxation in Sweden until
1900. Like the English hide, it was conceptually the amount of land needed
to support a peasant family, thus it was a virtual unit of land assessment
for purposes of taxation. All farms in Sweden were taxed by this rigid
measurement of production capacity. Normally, the highest possible rate
for a peasant farm was 1 mantal, while manorial demesnes could be assigned
5–6, and sometimes even 10 mantal. Since it was a tax capacity measure
the acreages varied. On the fertile plains a farm taxed one-third of a mantal
could consist of 20 hectares, while in the forests an equally taxed farm could
be 100 hectares in size. When a farm was divided, its mantal was divided
between the parties, but the total sum of mantal in Sweden and in Scania
was almost unaltered between 1688 and 1900. In the middle of the eighteenth
century the average farmstead in our sample was taxed 0.37 mantal; by 1850,
due to farm division, the average had reduced to 0.28.
Two enclosure movements, with completely different aims and results,
ran simultaneously in the Swedish countryside in the nineteenth century:
5
6
‘Kungligt brev den 12 Oct. 1808’ (Handbok innehållande . . . , p. 543).
Derived from Sommarin (1939, p. 25) and Historical Database of Scanian Agriculture. As
in Sweden, European farms differed in size both within countries and between countries,
due to soil conditions, topography and property rights structures. On average,
eighteenth-century Scanian plain land farms seem to have been comparable to early
eighteenth-century English and Danish farms (Allen 1991, p. 244; Baack 1977, p. 40) and
mid-nineteenth-century French farms (Grantham 1989, p. 47), somewhat larger than East
Elbian farms and most probably larger than average Russian and Ottoman farms (Melton
1998; Adanir 1998).
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European Review of Economic History
manorial enclosures and peasant enclosures. About one-third of the land, in
terms of mantal, was owned by the nobility in the early eighteenth century,
but in the eastern part of the country, in the districts surrounding the capital
Stockholm, as well as in the very south, the fraction was about half. This
part of the country experienced a late wave of manorialism, characterized
by demesne expansions by means of evicting tenant farmers. In Scania these
manorial enclosures in the nineteenth century implied that the sizes of
demesnes often increased from one-tenth to half of the affected parishes’
acreage. At the same time crown tenants in adjacent parishes turned into
freeholders by means of purchases, and became increasingly active in the
morphological and economic transformation of the countryside. After half a
century of more modest reallocations of land within these peasant villages,
the radical enclosure movement took off, supported by new legislation in
1803 (Scania) and 1807 (the rest of the country). In the course of a couple
of decades almost all plain land villages were broken up to build individual
farmsteads. Prompted by a new Act of legislation in 1827, the more wooded
parts of Sweden followed suit soon after.
During this relatively short period Sweden turned from a grain-importing
to a grain-exporting country. Thus, its agricultural transformation offers
an intriguing story of diverging developments in property rights and
institutional settings, trigged by the same commercial opportunities. But
how did these settings correspond to actual agricultural output?
To calculate the crop production from priest tithes we have to convert
sheaves into threshed quantities as well as weigh the different crops in relation
to each other. To solve the first matter, we use threshing accounts from
the clergymen collecting the tithes in three of the parishes. These accounts
display the amount of grain in litres that were threshed from the very sheaves
on which we estimate the production. We also use threshing accounts from
some of the manors in the area to cover all types of natural conditions present
in the sample. Second, we weigh the different crops using their respective
prices in relation to the mean price of the two dominant crops, rye and barley.
As for potatoes, to overcome the problem of the only crop of importance
being omitted from the tithe series, we add its volume to the individual
series according to its share of total crop production at parish level. The
average potato share in the sample increased from 4.4 per cent (1802–4) to
11.8 per cent (1817–21) and 18.6 per cent (1857–60).7 Animal production
7
The share of potatoes in the total crop production is derived from the parish priests’
reports in the population censuses. At the time of the introduction of potatoes in the arable
fields, the yearly censuses started registering the seed and yield of all the major crops in the
parishes. The information is available in the church archives from 1802 to 1820, and
although this data has been criticized for underestimating total production, it is generally
accepted that the shares between different crops are reliable (Gadd 1999, p. 32). From
1820 we assume a linear trend up to the first official statistics in 1866 (BiSOS) on the share
of potatoes in the total crop production for each parish. Finally, for each individual
Agricultural growth and institutions
285
400
200
140
100
80
60
40
20
1710 1730 1750 1770 1790 1810 1830 1850
Crop production
Crop production trend
Total production trend
Figure 1. Production estimates 1702–1864, with trend (hectolitres per
farm), logarithm scaling
Source: Historical Database of Scanian Agriculture.
Note: Crop production is displayed with annual variation and trend for an average
farm size in 1770. The trend is an 11-year moving average, except for the last 23
years, which has been smoothed with a simple linear trend from 1841 to 1863.
is calculated by annual breeding of foals, calves, lambs and geese. These
figures are multiplied by annual prices, and aggregated to animal production
values for each farm. Animal production shares (Table A1) are derived by
comparing these figures with annual crop production values.
Production development is shown in Figure 1 and Table A1. It is measured
in hectolitres per average farm size in 1770; thus we follow the same farm
size over time. This makes it a total area productivity estimate regardless
of land use. The livestock husbandry shares of total production value for
all farms were 22 per cent in the eighteenth century but only 14 per
cent in the nineteenth century. The impression of a downward trend in
livestock production is strengthened by the fact that the relative price went
in the opposite direction: it increased for animals in the nineteenth century.
Still, foals and some of the calves were produced to be used as draught
animals, and must be regarded as investments in fixed capital and not pure
production outcomes. Grain production was actually predominant as early
as the eighteenth century, due to factors like Scania’s natural conditions,
observation we have multiplied the production estimated from the tithes with the share
derived from these sources.
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European Review of Economic History
its lack of major cities and the cattle plagues. The nineteenth century saw
a further decrease in animal gross output due to a change in farm capital
composition: new and better ploughs reduced the need for draught animals
(Gadd 1998, pp. 116–17; Olsson 2005, pp. 129–30).
The most important explanatory variables for short-term variations in
agriculture are temperature and humidity. The weather will not be elaborated
on any further in this study, but two important observations strengthen the
reliability of the data set. First, there is a strong short-term correlation of
different parishes in different parts of Scania. The correlation of annual
fluctuations in output at the parish level shows that parishes situated 50–
100 km apart from each other display correlation coefficients between 0.65
and 0.85. The mean coefficient for 293 pair-wise estimations is 0.56 and
in spite of ‘hard’ trend elimination, through first differences, it remains at
0.54. The strong short-term covariance on semi-aggregate level reveals that
yearly fluctuations in climate had a similar, but far from identical, impact on
production outcomes for farmsteads with varying natural conditions. It also
tells us that the clergy’s tithes, as they were registered per farmstead, varied
with these fluctuations.
Second, bad harvest years, as well as good ones, tend to correspond
with contemporary qualitative sources, e.g. reports from county governors.
Earlier researchers tried to systematize these reports into a 5- or 7-degree
scale, starting with ‘crop failure’ and ending with ‘plentiful’ (Hellstenius
1871; Utterström 1957). It is obvious that almost all reported years of
bad harvests (1 and 2 on the scale) correspond with crop failures in our
estimated outputs. Good harvests were more randomly reported in the
eighteenth century, but, even so, we find a surprisingly high number of
years with correspondence. The overall correlation coefficient between our
series and the qualitative sources, including all years with ‘normal’ harvests,
is somewhat above 0.5 after trend elimination. These findings shed new light
on the contemporary judgements of harvests, often strongly criticized by
researchers, and they again strengthen the reliability of Scanian priest tithes
as reflectors of variation in agricultural output.
Turning to long-term development, we find periods of strong growth,
but also periods of stagnation. The mean annual growth rate for the period
1702–1864 was 1.0 per cent, before 1780 more modestly 0.6, and after that
1.4 per cent. When comparing this to population growth, we find that the
annual growth rate of population in the selected parishes was 0.66 for the first
period and 0.86 for the second period, showing that production increased
much faster than population after 1780.8 In relation to other north-western
countries, Sweden experienced the most rapid per capita output growth in
agriculture during the first half of the nineteenth century, except for France
(see Table 2; cf. also Federico 2005, chapter 3). While Belgium, England
8
Parish population figures from Palm (2000).
Agricultural growth and institutions
287
Table 2. Output per capita and output per worker in Belgium, England,
France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Scania, c. 1800–50, annual
growth rates
Belgium
England (Clark A)
England (Clark B)
England (Apost.)
France
Netherlands
Sweden (K & S)
Scania
Output
0.85
0.73
1.08
0.76
1.33
1.09
1.32
1.77
Population
0.97
1.36
1.46
1.31
0.56
0.84
0.79
1.12
Agricult.
labour
n/a
0.42
0.63
0.10
n/a
0.68
n/a
0.93
Output/
population
−0.12
−0.63
−0.39
−0.55
0.77
0.25
0.53
0.65
Output/
worker
n/a
0.30
0.44
0.63
n/a
0.42
n/a
0.84
Sources: Belgium 1812–46: Goossens 1993, table 5; England Clark A: 1795–1865 and Clark B
1805–55: derived from Clark 2002, tables 3, 5 and 7; England Apost. 1800–50: Apostolides
et al. 2008, tables 15,17 and 18; France: derived from Smits et al. 2009; the Netherlands
1807–50: derived from Smits et al. 2000; Sweden K & S 1800–50: output from Krantz and
Schön 2007, table 1B, population from Historisk statistik för Sverige; Scania 1800–50: output
from Historical Database of Scanian Agriculture, population and agricultural population
derived from Palm 2000.
Note: The measurement of agricultural labour differs between the sources: Clark (2002)
uses male labourers in agriculture; Apostolides et al. (2008) use agricultural population;
Smits et al. (2000) use labour force in agriculture; for Scania we use the population in the
sampled parishes which were totally dominated by agriculture during this period (see van de
Putte and Svensson 2009). Finally, the output for Scania is the mean output 1796–1804 as
compared to the mean output of 1846–54.
and the Netherlands faced negative or slow per capita growth, Swedish, and
not least Scanian, agriculture grew much faster than population. Besides, the
growth per worker was faster in Scania, 0.8 per cent per year as compared
to 0.4–0.6 for the north-western European leading economies. Since growth
in output per worker was apparent in these countries at least during most
of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century (Allen 2000,
p. 21; Clark 2002, table 7; Apostolides et al. 2008, table 18), whereas it was
stagnant in Scania, the table probably illustrates a catching-up effect in the
Swedish case. This occurred during the period preceding the large increase
in urbanization, which explains the relatively similar growth rates of total
population and agricultural population. The difference between the growth
rates in Scania and the whole of Sweden is explained by the fast agricultural
change during the first half of the nineteenth century in the former case;
parts of Sweden still lagged behind. Some of the difference is perhaps also
explained by the sources of the output series. The Krantz and Schön series
are, like other comparable national agricultural accounts for this period,
estimated by means of population and price indicators; the Scanian series is
based on direct production indicators at micro-level.
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The trend curve with moving 11-year averages helps us to reveal the secrets
of the eventful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century peasant agriculture. Our
point of departure is that the peasants at any point in time, given their
technological, institutional and commercial prerequisites, were optimizing
their grain output. This meant that eighteenth-century Scanian agriculture
was still balancing on the edge of its traditional ecological potential,
threatening to impoverish the soil’s nitrogen potential. The innovations
before the nineteenth-century radical enclosures did not remove this
fundamental production obstacle, but led to improvements in farming
techniques, better drainage and more efficient allocation of plots.
A first stagnant period at the beginning of the eighteenth century occurred
during the Great Nordic War, which affected the peasantry of Scania through
forced army enlistments and levied tax burdens. Battles between Swedes
and Danes took place in Scania 1709–10, but mainly affected the town of
Helsingborg and its close vicinity (Johannesson 1971, pp. 310–13). From 1711
till the end of the 1730s a first growth period took place, which may also be
seen as a time of recovery after the decline at the beginning of the century.
Moreover, in terms of peasant prosperity, the growth in grain production
was counteracted by serious cattle diseases, which severely reduced the
livestock. The 1740s again saw a stagnant period. This was connected to
harvest failures and cattle plagues and might be an explanation for the
rising concerns from the government in Stockholm and its officials about
the productivity in Scania, by then the only major grain surplus district in
Sweden. Increased attention was given to farming techniques, drainage and
consolidations of scattered field strips, leading to some early initiatives for
the reallocation of land within the villages in the plain lands. This was, for
example, the case in 1748 in Hög, and in 1752 in Västra Karaby, two of
the villages in our sample. Better drainage and land consolidation were two
motives for land reallocation put forward by the peasants in these villages
(Olsson 2005, pp. 110–11).
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the real tax burden was
decreasing for the freeholders and tenants under the crown in Sweden. With
rising prices in the mid eighteenth century, this development accelerated
and created new long-term incentives for peasants to raise production. The
growth period was only interrupted by a short stagnant period in the 1780s,
shortly after the ‘coin conversion’ in 1776, which meant doubled land taxes
from one year to another for some peasants. As can be seen in Figure 2, this
was more an incidental interruption in the overall real tax reduction than
a serious blow to the peasant economy. In the 1710s an owner-occupying
peasant (freeholder) in Scania typically paid 30–35 per cent of the farm’s
gross production in taxes; in the 1850s this fraction was down to 5–8 per cent.
Crown tenants’ land rents were identical to these taxes and they experienced
the same pattern of real tax reduction. Manorial tenants paid hardly any
taxes at all to the crown, but their land rent was raised in the nineteenth
Agricultural growth and institutions
250
289
40
Production
35
200
30
150
25
20
100
15
50
10
Taxes
0
5
1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860
Figure 2. Production and taxes 1710–1860, hectolitres of grain per farm
Sources: Olsson 2005, p. 98; Historical Database of Scanian Agriculture.
Note: Ten-year averages, production scale to the left, tax scale to the right. Total
tax estimates for a freeholder’s or crown tenant’s farm of average size in 1770 (0.37
mantal), inhabited by four adult tax-payers: man, wife, farmhand and maid.
century, most often in the form of increased corvée dues, and the total sum
of tax and land rent remained over 25 per cent of the farm gross production
throughout the period of investigation (Olsson 2005, pp. 172–7).
After a major harvest failure in 1783, followed by a severe winter and some
hard years, production began to rise even faster. The intense growth period
lasted until 1824. The early form of reallocation of land, and from 1803 the
radical enclosures, ran continuously in the villages. Sometimes they led to
temporary stagnation or drops in farm production, but were soon followed
by even higher rates of growth. The period 1825–33 saw a weakening in farm
production growth. Grain prices had been falling or stagnant from 1820.
For many farms this can be characterized as an adjustment period. Many
villages that had not gone through radical enclosures between 1803 and
1819 did so after a new enclosure Act in 1827. The enclosed farmsteads took
important steps towards a new farming system, which would raise production
dramatically. The fallow was reduced or abolished and fodder plants and
potatoes were integrated in the crop rotation system. The following growth
period, once more encouraged by rising grain prices, was the gain from these
adjustments.
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European Review of Economic History
5. Determinants of agricultural output
The overall estimation of crop production indicates phases of growth and
stagnation. Some of these results are new findings, while others correspond
to earlier notions of agricultural development. In order to explain agricultural
development we must, however, return to the micro-level and analyse
possible determinants of individual farms’ output. We estimate a regression
model of the crop production using a panel data approach, which could
be characterized as estimating cross-sections over time. All taxed farms
with crop production, 2,125 farms providing over 71,000 observations, are
included in the regression and the independent variables are used to explain
variations, within the specific farms as well as between farms, over time.
These explanatory variables correspond to some factors that earlier research
has regarded as crucial for agricultural growth.
The dependent variable is crop production, in grains and potatoes. The
mean value of this variable, for the whole period, is 54 hectolitres per
farm. The independent variables are farm size, type of ownership, type
of management, early enclosures, nineteenth-century radical enclosures,
change in population density, and natural conditions expressed in terms
of whether the farm was situated on the plains or in the intermediate or
wooded parts of the province. The natural conditions to some extent also
reflect transport costs, since the harbours and cities in Scania were located
on the plains and the forests were more remote. Natural conditions are also
strongly correlated with population density at parish level. To control for
population we add a parish-unique variable, an index for population change,
each parish starting with 100 in the year 1700. The impact of markets is
measured with the expected real prices of grain and with dummy variables
for deregulation of trade in 1775, 1810 and 1828. Finally, we control for time,
i.e. for unobserved events and uneven distribution of covariates, using period
dummies every tenth year.
From Table 4 we can see that the overall r-square is 0.55, with a higher value
of explanation between farms than within individual farms. Between farms
the variables explain 58 per cent of the variation in production outcomes,
but within each farm they only explain 32 per cent of the variation. This
is to be expected, since a large share of the within variation was caused
by weather, a short-term factor that is outside the scope of our investigation.
According to earlier research, one important factor explaining differences
is what type of land ownership the peasant faced on his farm. Insecure
tenancies give bad incentives for long-range investments in farm production.
Unforeseeable increases in land rents, which threaten the entire farm
production growth, are likely to have the same effect (e.g. Herlitz 1974;
Olsson 2005; Svensson 2006). Following this, if farmers have more secure
property rights, it is more likely that growth will occur.
Agricultural growth and institutions
291
Table 3. Descriptive statistics of the sample, percentage of observations
Variable
Type of land
Manager
Early enclosures
Radical enclosures
Natural conditions
Mean farm size
N
1702–1864 1702–80 1781–1864
per cent
per cent per cent
Freehold land
37
27
42
Crown land
21
26
19
Manorial land 1 (ins) 25
26
23
Manorial land 2 (uts) 17
21
16
Peasant
95.0
94.0
95.4
Tenant to peasant
2.5
2.8
2.4
Demesne
0.5
0.4
0.5
Servants
0.7
0.4
0.8
Person of rank
1.3
2.4
0.9
Not enclosed
70
91
61
Enclosed
26
9
34
Re-enclosed
4
–
5
Solitary unit
6
4
6
Not enclosed
77
96
69
Enclosed
17
–
25
Plains
17
13
19
Intermediate
44
48
44
Woods
39
39
37
Mantal
0.33
0.36
0.32
71,557
22,755
48,802
When controlling for other factors such as farm sizes and natural
conditions,9 we find that tenants produced significantly less, as compared
to freeholders. This is true for all forms of tenancies even if the effect
differed among the different tenant categories (see Table 4). Starting with
the differences between freeholders and tenants of the crown, the land rents,
in the form of taxes, were more or less fixed for both groups from 1680
to 1900 in Sweden. Both groups also had, in practice, similar and secure
farm possessions during the whole period of investigation. How can we
then explain the differences in production outcomes between them? One
argument is that owning a freehold farm gave better opportunities than crown
tenancy for mortgages and for division and partition of the farm (Gadd 2000,
p. 201). Those peasants who were aware of their farms’ economic potential,
and were willing to use this potential for economic transactions, were to a
great extent the same peasants who purchased their farms as freeholds.
In order to test for the economic benefits of the subdivision of farms,
we make a simple calculation of average production output during the
nineteenth century for divided and non-divided peasant holdings in our
9
We have also controlled for change of cultivator. In the first year, farm production was on
average 3 per cent lower compared to years when cultivators had been on the farm at least
one year.
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European Review of Economic History
Table 4. GLS regression of crop production in hectolitres 1702–1864,
random effects
Category
Farm size
Land ownership
Variable
Size in mantal
Freehold
Crown
Manorial 1
Manorial 2
Early enclosures
Not enclosed
Enclosed
Re-enclosed
Radical enclosures Open-field
Enclosed
Solitary, initially
Managed by
Peasant
Manor
Person of rank
Tenant to peasant
Servants
Population density Change in density
Change of cultivator First-year effect
Natural conditions Plains
Intermediate
Woods
Trade deregulations Mercantilism
Rural sales 1775
Interior toll 1810
Export trade 1828
Expected prices
price/wage, exp. 5 y.
2.20
Constant
No. of observations
No. of groups
R-sq:
Within
Between
Overall
Wald chi2(18)
Prob > chi2
Coefficient
111.99
r.c.
−5.84
−7.12
−2.98
r.c.
1.66
4.97
r.c.
9.49
0.94
r.c.
−4.32
0.92
−1.65
3.67
0.14
−1.75
r.c.
−30.70
−32.91
r.c.
3.72
5.52
0.31
3.73
Std. error
3.03
Z
P>z
36.90 0.000
0.56
1.02
0.92
−10.47 0.000
−6.98 0.000
−3.24 0.001
0.32
0.67
5.25 0.000
7.48 0.000
0.37
2.72
25.39 0.000
0.34 0.730
1.36
0.92
0.80
1.18
0.28
0.28
1.49
1.64
0.43
0.85
1.00
0.28
1.91
−3.18
1.00
−2.06
3.11
13.50
−6.21
0.001
0.316
0.039
0.002
0.000
0.000
−20.60 0.000
−20.06 0.000
8.57
6.51
0.31
13.50
0.000
0.000
0.754
0.000
1.15 0.251
71,557
2,125
0.32
0.58
0.55
35,468.67
0.0000
Note: r.c. denotes reference category. The period dummies are included in the regression but
not shown in the table. The model is estimated using a random effects GLS estimator
exploiting the panel character of the data. Standard OLS generates nearly the same results
but some of the effects are somewhat stronger in the OLS regression.
sample. This calculation reveals that output per area was almost 40 per cent
higher for farms that were divided than for those that stayed non-divided. The
effects were strongest in the plains, 60 per cent, but weaker in the wooded
lands, where production was around 20 per cent higher on divided farms.
Agricultural growth and institutions
293
In the early eighteenth century only around 10 per cent of all farmland was
freehold, and the rate of farm subdivisions was low. Over time this changed
as a majority of the crown tenants bought their farms, turning them into
freeholds. Since production was higher among freeholders, this change in
property rights implied a growth in agricultural output.
From the results in Table 4 it is also obvious that tenants who were, by
fiscal definition, corvée peasants (Sw: insockne), and thereby more controlled
by the manor (‘Manorial 1’ in the table), performed significantly worse than
freeholders. In Scania most of these tenants lived in the same parish as the
demesnes of the manors and paid between 300 and 400 days per year as
labour rent by the mid nineteenth century. Thus, in reality, they had to hire
extra servants for the boon work at the manor (Olsson 2006). This group
experienced a substantial increase in land rent over time. They also had
insecure tenancies, particularly in the nineteenth century when about every
other tenant was evicted for demesne expansions in Scania. However, in
some cases landed estates were put on the market for purchase by peasants,
turning tenants into owner-occupiers. In these cases we identify a major
increase in production on average. The effects of ownership differences are
quite large, amounting on average to over seven hectolitres less in production
(around 12 per cent lower production) as a tenant under the strict control of
the manor as compared to being a freeholder. For tenants living outside the
landowners’ demesnes, i.e. Manorial 2 in Table 4, development was more
heterogeneous in terms of security of tenancy and forms and amount of land
rent, a fact that can explain their relatively better economic performance.
These farms were often situated in villages where the majority of the farms
were freehold or crown farms and were thus to a large extent sharing the
same context. For these farmers, buying their farms and turning them into
freeholds resulted in only a small increase in production.
Another factor, widely discussed not only in Sweden but also in the rest
of Europe, is the potential impact of enclosures on agricultural growth (e.g.
Allen 1992; Clark 1998; Fridlizius 1979; Heckscher 1949; McCloskey 1975;
Overton 1996; Svensson 2006). In relation to these earlier estimations of the
effect of enclosures, our panel data approach allows us to estimate the effects
both within farms that were enclosed and between farms, where some were
enclosed and others not, controlling for other characteristics.10
In Sweden, two main types of reallocations of land took place during
the agricultural transformation. The eighteenth-century enclosures most
often did not imply a break with the open-field system, but were merely
rearrangements of holdings for the purpose of reducing the number of strips.
These enclosures, as well as those arising as a result of later enclosure Acts,
depended upon an application from one of the landowners in the village.
10
This is the approach put forward by Allen as the best way to measure these effects (Allen
1999, p. 227, footnote 68).
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European Review of Economic History
Only if an application was put forward would the village be enclosed. On
the other hand, if one landowner applied for enclosure, the rest of the village
had to participate regardless of whether they desired an enclosure or not (see
Svensson 2006). For us, this means that not all villages were enclosed during
the period studied, and for those that were enclosed the timing of enclosure
differed substantially. The early enclosures in Scania had a small positive
effect on production, as can be seen in Table 4. A second rearrangement
according to these enclosure Acts made production increase even further.
One potential explanation for the positive effect is that each peasant had fewer
strips to manage and therefore spent less time moving to different locations.
Another, perhaps more important factor, is that investments in drainage
often took place in conjunction with the enclosures, which improved the soil.
However, a much larger effect on production came with the more radical
enclosures starting in 1803. These enclosures implied a break with the
open-field system, introducing individual management of land on unified
holdings. An enclosed farm, controlled for farm size, natural conditions,
period and ownership, produced on average almost 10 hectolitres more than
an unenclosed farm producing within the open-field system (around 17
per cent higher production). There were several potential reasons for this
result.11 First, after the enclosures, the farmer could adapt crops to specific
soil conditions and individually decide the time for seed and harvest. In
Scania, for example, a more elaborated crop rotation including fodder crops
was not adopted until after the break-up of the village organization. Second,
as the radical enclosures implied that the village was dissolved and farmers
moved out to the more remote parts of the village land, this included the
conversion of previously non-cultivated land to arable land. Third, creating
unified holdings made it easier to divide them among the children or to sell
parts of the land to non-kin. As we have seen above, division or partition of
farms increased the output per area unit. In conclusion, the overall effect of
enclosures was a significant growth in crop production.
Solitary farms that had not been part of the open-field system, mainly
because of their remote and isolated geographical position, showed no
significant difference from farms within the open-field system, despite having
their land in one unit. This could indicate two things: first, it was the timing
of the enclosure that mattered. Breaking up the village system in a period
of increasing commercialization had an effect on production, while being
outside this system made no distinct difference. Second, these solitary farms
might have had some special characteristics affecting their production, such
as their remoteness, which is not controlled for in the regression.
A contemporary notion was that peasants were conservative towards
change and that progress was due above all to enlightened landlords and
persons of rank spreading their ideas to the peasants, the latter accepting
11
For further estimates and explanations, see Svensson (2008).
Agricultural growth and institutions
295
them either voluntarily or by force. This notion has been put forward among
Swedish and other researchers (e.g. Heckscher 1949; Thompson 1971;
Brenner 2001; Henningsen 2001; for a thorough discussion, see Svensson
2006). From the tithe rolls and tax material we can follow who actually
managed the farms and, thus, separate peasants from other social groups.
If this contemporary notion is accurate we would expect to find higher
production among persons of rank as compared to peasants. We know that,
on average, persons of rank managed somewhat larger farms than peasants
did, but when controlling for this by measuring the extra impact of being
a person of rank as compared to peasants facing the same conditions, our
results show that farms managed by persons of rank display no significant
difference from farms under peasant management. Although the number of
observations for the former is low, less than 2 per cent of the sample (i.e. 859
observations of production outcome), we can state that there is no indication
that persons of rank and other gentry performed significantly better than the
peasants. Since we do not study production on the manors, and thus not
the manorial lords, we cannot address the full extent of this discussion.
However, as we have seen, the more closely connected the peasants were
to the manors, the worse was their economic performance. Furthermore,
farms managed directly by a manorial estate performed significantly worse
than farms managed by peasants.
Management effects differ for other types of farm. Sometimes the owning
peasants for some reason could not manage the farm themselves, but had
to lease it to another peasant or someone else in the village. This could be
the case during periods of widowhood or when heirs were underaged or
if the farm manager was struck down by disease. These leaseholders did
not differ significantly in their production capacity from farms run by the
owners themselves. However, farms managed solely by servants, without the
manager present, performed significantly better (around 7 per cent better).
These farms were owned either by wealthy peasants or persons of rank
and they reflect the emerging land market in the early nineteenth century,
where entrepreneurial farmers bought more than one farm to increase their
production capacity (cf. Svensson 2006). Although they were few in number,
we can assume that this category was the most commercialized type of
farmstead within the peasant community.
Finally, let us look at the commercial opportunities: deregulations of
markets and grain prices. One important factor explaining the increase
in production was an increasing demand for grain. Demand during the
eighteenth century came from interior trade with deficit areas of Sweden
as well as through the population growth and social differentiation which
followed the initial rise in production (see Olsson and Svensson 2009 for
a more detailed discussion). From an initial mercantilist position, Sweden
was liberalized during our period of investigation. With the lifting of the
prohibition on rural trading in 1775 and the abolition of the interior toll
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European Review of Economic History
in 1810 and export regulations in 1828, new channels for Scanian grain
were opened. Trade deregulations show significant positive effects on grain
production, particularly the lifting of the interior toll, an action which
also had an immediate effect on consumers’ grain prices. However, the
abolition of export regulations shows no additional effect, inasmuch as this
deregulation is not expected to have had any immediate effect on peasants’
sales opportunities.12
Price incentives are measured with a regional index of rye prices divided by
an index of rural day labourers’ wages.13 We assume that peasants’ economic
behaviour was not dependent only upon price changes from one year to
another, so we use a Nerlove model to calculate expected prices (Askari and
Cunnings 1977; Schäfer 1997, pp. 110–11). Our model is:
Pet =
5Pt−1 + 4Pt−2 + 3Pt−3 + 2Pt−4 + 1Pt−5
15
Here Pet is the expected price for an actual year, built on the preceding five
years’ prices, weighted higher the closer in time they get. Our results indicate
that peasants did react to price incentives: with higher real prices of grain,
production increased. The figure can be interpreted thus: if the expected
real prices of grain doubled, an average peasant increased grain output by
3.6 hectolitres, which means a 7 per cent higher production.
6. Conclusion
To summarize our findings, Scania, the granary of Sweden, displayed a large
increase in agricultural production from the eighteenth century to the middle
of the nineteenth century. In effect, production more than quadrupled, with
the largest growth taking place after 1780. In this latter period production
outperformed population growth substantially, with a per capita growth of
12
13
The trade deregulations variables are constructed to estimate the effect of markets
becoming more and more open over time. In Table 4, each coefficient measures the effect
of trade liberalization compared to the period before 1775, i.e. the lifting of the
prohibition against rural trade in 1775 is estimated to have resulted in an increase in
output of 3.72 hectolitres, while the subsequent abolition of the interior toll in 1810
further increased output by around 2 hectolitres, resulting in a 5.5 hectolitre higher output
compared to the period before 1775.
All regional grain prices are highly correlated during the period of investigation, e.g. 0.98
(rye–barley), 0.98 (barley–oats) and 0.96 (rye–oats). The day labourers’ wage series have
been constructed from the Malmöhus län series 1781–1864, for 1733–80 interpolated with
the Kalmar län series (Jörberg 1972) and for 1697–1732 interpolated with the wages of
unskilled labourers in the Stockholm series (Söderberg 2007). See Figure A1 in the
Appendix.
Agricultural growth and institutions
297
between 0.5 and 0.6 per cent per annum, while production and population
grew at the same pace during the period 1700–80. In a European perspective,
excluding England and the Netherlands, this implies that Sweden did fairly
well in the eighteenth century, when many European countries experienced
falling labour productivity in agriculture (Allen 2000, p. 21). Although a
general growth seems to have taken place in European agriculture during
the first half of the nineteenth century, our results put Swedish per capita
growth among the best in Europe during this period. The growth in Scania
consisted above all of increasing crop production: the staple crops, rye and
barley, as well as other seeds such as oats, wheat, beans, peas and buckwheat,
and the emerging production of potatoes. The crop share of the total value of
production increased over time, due partly to an expanded crop production
and partly to animal production decreasing over time.
Though there was a general increase in Scanian agricultural production,
the increase was not uniform across all types of farms. Differences in
production were of course attributable to differences in farm size and natural
conditions. Large farms produced more than small farms and farms on the
plains produced more than farms situated in more forested areas of the
region. However, it is when we control for these factors that we reveal
the most interesting differences in production achievements. First, property
rights mattered: freeholders produced more per area unit than tenants on
crown and noble land. Secure property rights among self-owners, together
with rising prices and fixed taxes, promoted investments in crop production.
For those peasants that were tenants under the nobility, rising rents and
the threat of eviction prevented such immense investments. Thus, with a
continuing process of tenants buying their land during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, i.e. becoming freeholders with more secure property
rights, growth was promoted.
Furthermore, the growth in agricultural production was not a linear
phenomenon; there were phases of growth and stagnation. Growth came
about after periods of reallocation of land and subsequent investments. A
pronounced growth phase started with the intensification within the old
village system. However, this was not a viable solution over the long term.
With the introduction of the radical enclosures, containing among other
things the break-up of the village system and the introduction of new crop
rotations, growth increased even faster. At the same time, liberalization of
trade contributed to growth, and the peasants reacted to price incentives by
increasing grain production.
In all, the unique Swedish data allow us to draw some more general
conclusions on the development within pre-industrial agriculture. Moving
from a low-productive agriculture to a fast-growing more productive
agriculture was as possible in an economy dominated by peasants as in
one where persons of rank dominated. Our estimates reveal that changes
in property rights, institutional changes breaking with the traditional
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European Review of Economic History
organization of production and growing markets for agricultural products
made peasants increase production and productivity. In this way agriculture
could make a dynamic impact on the overall economic development. In
the case of the Swedish peasant economy, production increased to turn
imports of grain into exports, commercialization spread among large layers
of the population and so did income. Deepened property rights were
established and successive investments in human capital followed. Together,
these provided the prerequisites and the framework for the subsequent
industrialization process.
Acknowledgements
This is a study within the project ‘Economic Development and Social Dynamics.
Swedish Agricultural Transformation in European Perspective’ financed by the
Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). We are grateful to the editors and
referees of this journal, and to John Abbott, Bruce M. S. Campbell, Carl-Johan
Gadd and Mats Morell for comments on earlier text drafts.
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Appendix
Table A1. Production estimates 1702–1864, hectolitres per farm and
additional percentage value of animal gross output
1702
1703
1704
1705
1706
1707
1708
1709
1710
1711
1712
1713
1714
1715
1716
1717
1718
1719
1720
Crops
47.5
48.7
41.4
37.4
37.7
42.2
46.0
42.3
43.0
46.1
52.7
61.4
48.1
58.2
56.5
55.5
53.8
47.6
54.2
Animal
share
0.23
0.29
0.28
0.29
0.28
0.15
0.09
0.07
0.16
0.25
1757
1758
1759
1760
1761
1762
1763
1764
1765
1766
1767
1768
1769
1770
1771
1772
1773
1774
1775
Crops
44.0
66.8
55.7
79.6
71.0
57.4
74.0
69.9
64.0
74.9
78.7
65.2
69.3
64.1
61.7
62.2
72.7
77.6
65.4
Animal
share
0.15
0.13
0.24
0.26
0.35
0.19
0.13
0.16
0.28
0.32
0.29
0.18
0.21
0.19
0.11
0.10
0.26
0.35
0.28
1812
1813
1814
1815
1816
1817
1818
1819
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
Crops
118.9
123.7
107.2
119.7
105.2
121.3
104.7
142.0
155.0
130.4
132.4
161.4
147.3
142.5
101.4
148.7
147.7
138.7
140.4
Animal
share
0.14
0.17
0.23
0.16
0.16
0.13
0.15
0.13
0.17
0.18
0.15
0.16
0.25
0.23
0.12
0.14
0.22
0.19
0.12
Agricultural growth and institutions
303
Table A1. Continued
1721
1722
1723
1724
1725
1726
1727
1728
1729
1730
1731
1732
1733
1734
1735
1736
1737
1738
1739
1740
1741
1742
1743
1744
1745
1746
1747
1748
1749
1750
1751
1752
1753
1754
1755
1756
Crops
53.6
65.7
56.3
60.7
59.9
38.6
34.2
46.8
55.7
57.6
63.8
62.3
58.3
57.2
62.1
59.9
59.5
67.0
55.7
52.2
56.9
61.2
64.4
60.9
49.2
56.8
56.6
53.5
59.0
70.4
58.1
69.7
69.1
71.1
51.3
65.6
Animal
share
0.28
0.33
0.26
0.26
0.20
0.17
0.18
0.25
0.27
0.38
0.34
0.23
0.23
0.21
0.24
0.19
0.31
0.27
0.23
0.06
0.09
0.17
0.22
0.20
0.18
0.11
0.17
0.18
0.28
0.16
0.26
0.22
0.27
0.24
0.23
0.13
1776
1777
1778
1779
1780
1781
1782
1783
1784
1785
1786
1787
1788
1789
1790
1791
1792
1793
1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
1801
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806
1807
1808
1809
1810
1811
Crops
75.9
78.2
74.0
77.6
74.9
68.7
74.7
50.0
75.1
65.0
64.5
71.2
69.4
77.3
88.7
79.5
80.5
84.8
80.6
87.4
97.2
102.0
82.1
90.6
82.6
88.9
96.0
93.6
98.2
110.1
88.5
91.3
92.9
110.8
110.5
95.7
Source: Historical Database of Scanian Agriculture.
Animal
share
0.30
0.26
0.24
0.28
0.30
0.19
0.15
0.17
0.23
0.23
0.20
0.23
0.21
0.21
0.25
0.28
0.22
0.19
0.16
0.23
0.37
0.39
0.29
0.15
0.11
0.18
0.19
0.19
0.19
0.16
0.11
0.13
0.13
0.21
0.32
0.24
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
Crops
134.3
169.1
159.6
148.9
155.0
147.7
131.0
178.2
178.6
231.1
181.6
155.8
215.8
215.5
180.8
192.4
256.9
279.2
263.1
247.3
208.0
170.7
132.1
245.5
198.4
215.1
169.5
250.5
238.6
246.4
205.8
225.7
229.3
238.3
Animal
share
0.09
0.11
0.19
0.17
0.14
0.12
0.09
0.07
0.12
0.13
0.11
0.08
0.07
0.11
0.08
0.07
0.05
0.07
0.07
0.11
0.07
0.12
0.08
0.10
0.15
0.15
0.20
0.16
0.15
0.13
304
European Review of Economic History
100.00
10.00
1.00
Rye
Barley
Oats
Figure A1.
scaling
1861
1854
1847
1840
1833
1826
1819
1812
1805
1798
1791
1784
1777
1770
1763
1756
1749
1742
1735
1728
1721
1714
1707
1700
0.10
Grain prices 1700–1864 (kronor per hectolitre), logarithm
Sources: Jörberg 1972; Bengtsson and Dribe 1997.