The Norwegian textile market in the 18th century

Abstract

The topic of this article is not one that Norwegian historians have discussed before, although students of cultural history have studied textiles from their specialised standpoints. There are three reasons which suggest that the topic may be worth examining. First, it is concerned with the satisfaction of one of the primary needs of human beings: keeping warm. Arising from this, clothing has an important social aspect and is a good index of the prosperity of a community. Again, the study of the textile trade and market has a bearing upon the problem of Norwegian self-sufficiency.¹ If there was any textile market worth mentioning, then peasants must have bought textiles, for in 1801 only one-tenth of the populace lived in towns. This article is not concerned with the problem of self-sufficiency, however, and it will not deal with the relationship between domestic production and the purchase of textiles from that particular standpoint. Lastly, the topic has more than purely national implications, both because of the existence of a Scandinavian transit trade and more especially because the question how far down the social scale the consumption of foreign textiles extended has been debated by Swedish and Finnish historians. The problem concerns the period both before and after 1600, and involves the whole of northern Europe.

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Notes on contributors

Stein Tveite

Stein Tveite, born 1930, is professor of economic history at the Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen. Professor Tveite's field of study is Norwegian economic and social history. Among his contributions is his dissertation from 1961 on English-Norwegian timber trade from 1640-1710. The present article is based on a paper read at the Scandinavian historical meeting at Helsinki in 1967. Were the peasantry of northern Europe consumers of foreign (e. g. English) textiles?2