Labor division in an upland economy: workforce in a seventeenth-century transhumance system

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze strategies families used to maintain a transhumance system in early modern Europe. The study examines an animal husbandry system in upland Sweden where women worked as herders and took care of the animals during the summer. By examining a late-seventeenth-century herder register of 1340 herders and combining it with demographic data from a defined area, it is possible to reveal the strategic choices that households had to make to create a workforce able to harness the vast forests with a transhumance system (summer farms). The work at the summer farms was performed as a collective action, and this study demonstrates that a prerequisite for this agricultural system to function properly was a labor market for herders. Most herders were household members or relatives, but maids represented 27% of the workforce and worked together with household members. Maids were usually young or older widows and unmarried women, many from poor households. These maids came to play an important role in knowledge transfer to new adolescent herders and were necessary to maintain the agricultural system. Compared with daughters and wives, the maids worked with other households’ assets. The results indicate that specialization and labor division were strategies for subsistence peasants to expand animal husbandry.

Keywords::

• labor division
• demography
• households
• transhumance
• commons
• early modern Sweden
• gender

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Rosemarie Fiebranz at Uppsala University for valuable comments on earlier drafts and to independent editor Joanna Broderick.

Notes

^1. See Archival Sources.

^2. The herder register also includes eight herders for 1693 and 43 herders for 1694, but since these years are far too incomplete, they were omitted from further analysis.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was made possible in part by funding from the August Teodor Larsson Foundation at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Disclosure Statement: I do not have any financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of my research.