Proletarianization and standard of living
The period of agricultural transformation from the late eighteenth century onwards also witnessed a dramatic change in the social structure of the Swedish population during what has been termed the proletarianization of the countryside.
While the number of peasants increased by 10% between 1750 and 1850, the number of landless quadrupled (Wohlin 1909: 197, 257; see also Winberg 1975: 17). This increase of the landless population came mostly as a result of increased household formation in the landless groups, and not from social differences in fertility. It became increasingly common that the children of landed peasants could not maintain the social status of their parents. The development of agriculture, in particular the increased demand for labour that development gave rise to, made it possible to establish an independent household without having access to land; something that was much more difficult before the agricultural transformation. Malmohus County was proletarianized earlier than the country as a whole, and the proportion of the landless there was already considerable in the second half of the eighteenth century (Lundh 1999).The question is whether this proletarianization process also implied a pauperization of the population, thereby increasing the number of poor and destitute. In a pioneering study of nineteenth-century middle Sweden, Lundsjo used taxation data to measure poverty ratios, in which the poor were defined as those who could not pay even the lowest tax. The poverty ratios varied closely with the harvest outcome indicating that the number of poor according to this definition was highly dependent on the economic circumstances. However, it is difficult to find a clear pattern linking proletarianization with increased poverty. Quite the contrary, the region with the most pronounced agricultural development and proletarianization (the western parts of the country) showed declining poverty, while the eastern part, with a much slower economic and demographic development, experienced rising poverty rates (Lundsjo 1975).
Similarly, Soderberg, using the same measure for southern Sweden in the nineteenth century, found declining poverty rates in the areas that were changing most rapidly, while the areas of slower growth saw their poverty ratios increase (Soderberg 1978).It appears that a more pronounced increase in the standard of living for the lower social strata did not take place until the second half of the nineteenth century. From then onwards agricultural production and real wages for agricultural workers grew, and the literacy rate increased as did heights. Life expectancy at birth increased due to a decline in mortality rates in all age-groups, and while proletarianization increased, pauperization decreased. The earlier pattern of development is less clear. The agricultural transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century raised the incomes of market-producing peasants, widening the gap between landed peasants on the one hand and the landless and semi-landless groups on the other. However, to what extent the standard of living of the landless and semilandless declined or remained unchanged during this process remains unclear from the
evidence presented here. Several indicators point to stagnation rather than a decline, while the development of stature, and possibly also mortality, could indicate a worsening of the situation at least among children. Moreover, since the demographic data presented above refer to the whole population and it seems likely that the landed groups saw an improvement in their situation, the standard of living of the landless could actually have been even worse than the aggregate figures indicate.
In the remainder of this chapter we try to shed new light on this issue of the standard of living of the landless groups during the agricultural transformation and early industrialization. Our approach to the study of standard of living focuses on the vulnerability of landless groups to economic fluctuations. Our empirical analysis examines three phases of the period 1766—1895: the pre-transformation phase (1766—1815), the transformation phase (1815—65), and the post-transformation, or industrialization, phase (1865—95).
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