Recent research in Sweden on the standard of living during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Abstract

The elucidation of the living conditions of ordinary people has always been one of the principal concerns of Swedish economic history research. The aim of this brief survey is to depict the orientation of that research during the past 10–15 years. I shall confine myself to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since scholars have generally concentrated on that very interesting period, during which there took place a dramatic structural transformation of Swedish agriculture, large-scale movements of population, and a rapid process of industrialisation.