Sabbatical Fellow, SCAS;
Professor of History, Uppsala University

Hybrid event.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/65802739142 External link.

ABSTRACT:
This paper argues that the historiography of the Swedish Model has systematically overlooked agricultural workers and the legal regime that bound them. Though rarely recognized today as unfree labour, Sweden's Master and Servants Acts (legostadgan) made breach of a farm servant's employment contract a criminal offence until the 1920s, decades after industrial employment relations had ceased to be coercively enforced. Both dominant accounts of the Swedish Model's origins, the traditional narrative of class compromise between labour and capital, and the revisionist thesis locating its roots in a centuries-old free peasantry, marginalize agricultural workers, even though they outnumbered industrial workers until around 1940. Drawing on the Act's specific provisions, contemporary workforce statistics, and comparative Master and Servants legislation across Western Europe and its colonies, the paper shows that strict, non-pecuniary contract enforcement remained integral to Swedish agriculture well into the twentieth century.