Research

General interests

My main research interests circulate around the forming and creation of Modern Society, in Sweden, Europe as well as on a more global scale. As an economic historian I have undertaken studies about different aspects of industrialisation, technological change, and work. In more recent times I have began to expand this field of research by attaching questions about the Enlightenment and urbanisation. A central feature in all this is the question of a Swedish Enlightenment existed or not. A central theme in many of these studies is the Swedish and European iron industry, with a gradual opening towards a wider perspective in recent years.

Previous Research

My thesis, Hammarlag och Hushåll. Om relationen mellan smidesarbetet och smedshushållen vid Tore Petrés brukskomplex 1830-1850, from 1991, was a narrow study of a couple of ironworks in the counties of Gästrikland and Dalarna in the first half of the nineteenth century. The ambition was to analyse the relationship between the organisation of bar iron production and the structure of the ironworkers’ households. The main result pointed towards the very close link between these two spheres, and to the governing role of iron production. Work in the forges structured most aspects of household life at these communities, as well as the everyday life of its members; men, women and children.
This narrow empirical study of iron making constituted a starting-point for much of my subsequent research – the iron industry has remained important ever since. It’s fair to say that much of my later research has been a development in two related directions. On the one hand the productive aspect has been of utmost importance, with many studies of links between the skill of the artisans and technological development. These studies have been focused on the introduction of new technologies in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Sweden and Britain, but always related to the developments elsewhere in Europe. A kind of end-point to much of this research was reached with the publication of The Industrial Revolution in Iron. The Impact of British Coal Technology in Nineteenth-Century Europe, edited by myself and Chris Evans. This volume is a first attempt to undertake a comparative analysis of the different paths taken towards an industrialisation of the European iron industry.
A further step in my discussion about technological development within the European iron industry has taken a different route. Instead of focusing on technological development per se I have in recent years also discussed the intellectual background, or framework, for the establishment of a modern iron industry. This discussion have been inserted in the debate whether there was a Swedish Enlightenment, or not, as well as the most recent discussion around the concept, founded by Joel Mokyr, Industrial Enlightenment.
A second theme, developed since my thesis, take the spatial aspect of iron making as a starting-point. It was obvious from the very start that narrow empirical analysis could only initiate more questions, but hardly answer them. More theoretically informed investigations were required, on spatial analysis within historical studies as well as a comparative approach. The Swedish development was linked to other important regions. Russian developments as well as British industrialisation were crucial in the path taken by the Swedish industry. It was also obvious that analysis of production needed to be supplemented by investigations of trade. The forthcoming study, from Brill Academic Publishers in 2007, Baltic Iron and the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, written together Chris Evans, is an attempt to summarise a discussion about production and commerce, centred on iron making, starting in the Baltic but stretching out to European markets as well as over the whole Atlantic World.

Present Research

1) Social planning and everyday life in eighteenth century Leufsta bruk

Leufsta bruk, in the county of Uppland, was from the seventeenth century the largest ironworking community in Sweden, and the centrepiece of the important iron making empire owned by the De Geer family. From the early years of the eighteenth century Leufsta was totally re-built according to a rational and well-structured plan – still existing today – and the community can be seen as a creation of rational and enlightened ideas. In spite of its enormous importance the community has not been thoroughly investigated, with only a few minor published studies. My ambition is to do so, and the aim is to investigate it from an Enlightenment perspective, centred upon questions such as social planning, reason and progress. It is, in short, a question of how the De Geer family wanted to organise life and work for the workers at Leufsta. However, the ambition is also to take a different perspective, and investigate and analyse how the people at Leufsta reacted to these ambitions and plans, and how they lived their everyday life.

2) Visiting London and Industrial Towns. Swedish Attempts to Describe the British Urban World.

To a large extent the urban world, with cities and towns, is a major feature in what we today consider to be the Modern World. Perhaps one could say that urbanisation, together with technological change, industrialisation and secularisation may be seen as the major components of Modernity. However, urbanisation as a major process took its start well ahead of anything that might be seen as the advent of the modern society. This project is about the process in which the urban world became integrated with how we perceive modernity, and it aim to do so by analysing how Swedish travellers to Britain perceived the rapid urbanisation and the urban world that differed so much from what they could see in Sweden. It was only Stockholm, with about 70.000 inhabitants around mid-eighteenth century that constituted a Swedish urban environment worth mentioning, while Britain experienced a rapid urbanisation as well as having London as perhaps the largest city in the World, about ten times as large as the Swedish Capital. The main questions are what Swedish traveller saw in London and the expanding industrial towns, and how these descriptions changed from the beginning of the eighteenth century to mid-nineteenth century. A more general point might be related to the aspect of urbanisation as a feature of progress.