Hotspots and hinterlands: peasant industrial entrepreneurship in premodern Sweden

This article examines why and how peasant farmers participate in non-agricultural market exchanges, and the conditions that enable them to do so. The case, set in late medieval and early modern Sweden (ca. 1520–1800 CE), uses a collective action approach to highlight differences between how this period is theorized: the “industrial revolution” of orthodox economists and economic historians, which assumes a state government and institutions based on top-down authoritarianism, versus the “industrious revolution” of historical archaeologists and social historians which postulates a collectivized society in which agency and self-determination are widespread. Archaeological, ethnographic and historical data suggest that despite difficult environmental conditions, the collectivized sociopolitical setting provided ample motivation and pathways for peasants to improve their livelihoods and well-being. As knowledgeable actors, through three different kinds of entrepreneurial manufacturing activity, they targeted different kinds of “hotspots” with production in primary, secondary and tertiary economic sectors. Far from being “proletarianized” by the era's emerging capitalists, many were able to thrive despite the hardships of an increasingly encroaching state and life in a boreal subarctic zone.