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Dimensions of Free and Unfree Labour in the Swedish Servant Acts, 1664–1858
Carolina Uppenberg
The Servant Acts regulated labour relations for a large part of the population through compulsory service and other coercive measures, while at the same time creating a labour market where servants and masters could meet and decide whether to enter labour relations or not. In this chapter, the Servant Acts issued by the Swedish Crown, from the first one issued in 1664 to the sixth and last one in 1833, are analysed from the theoretical perspective of free/unfree labour.
Service in rural, pre-industrial Sweden was ubiquitous. Although exact numbers are not easily discerned, studies suggest servants made up 10 to 20 per cent of the population during the whole period under study here. The demographic structure followed the European marriage pattern already in the seventeenth century, so most servants were lifecycle servants, meaning that they served during adolescence and early adulthood and left service when they married.
1 Beatrice Moring, ‘Nordic Family Patterns and the North-West European Household System’, Continuity and Change, 18 (2003), 77–109; Christer Lundh, The World of Hajnal Revisited: Marriage Patterns in Sweden 1650–1990 (Lund, 1997); Christer Lundh, ‘The Social Mobility of Servants in Rural Sweden, 1740–1894’, Continuity and Change, 14 (1999), 57–89. This should not be exaggerated, however; older servants existed as well, but generally the position was associated with youth and unmarried status.
2 Cristina Prytz, ‘Life-Cycle Servant and Servant for Life: Work and Prospects in Rural Sweden c.1670–1730’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 95–111.Servants in early modern Sweden were neither as unfree as slaves nor as free as modern wage labourers, but rather part of an intrinsic system of free and unfree dimensions that structured the labour market. Admittedly, to use the term ‘free labour’ is risky, both since it could be questioned whether a modern-day wage labourer is free and since any freedom for most people in a pre-industrial setting was severely curtailed. Free labour should not be conflated with any inherently positive meaning of the word ‘free’, but should rather be understood in the Marxist sense of a free worker as someone legally free to choose between work and hunger. As such, although work is almost always surrounded by constraints, there is both a theoretically and practically different logic between labour extracted through legal and physical compulsion and labour extracted through economic compulsion. As will be shown, these can be combined in a labour contract, and this is the reason for a thorough study of different dimensions of certain labour relations. In the article ‘Labor – free or coerced?’ Robert J. Steinfeld and Stanley L. Engerman argue for a better understanding of the history of labour by scrutinising how laws constructed the coercive practices of work relations; what measures different laws admitted the state, employers and workers; and how free and unfree dimensions formed each part of the labour contract.
3 Robert J. Steinfeld and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Labor – Free or Coerced? A Historical Reassessment of Differences and Similarities’, in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues (Bern, 1997), pp. 108–9. Following Steinfeld and Engerman, I take it as my theoretical starting point that legal and physical compulsion in labour relations is of a different kind than economic compulsion, and that the different nature of compulsion needs to be analysed for each step of the labour extraction process.
4 Steinfeld and Engerman, ‘Labor – Free or Coerced?’ pp. 109–15. A detailed extension of this model is suggested by Marcel van der Linden.
5 Marcel van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, in Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García (eds), On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery (Leiden, 2016), pp. 293–322. See also Christian G. De Vito, Juliane Schiel and Matthias van Rossum, ‘From Bondage to Precariousness? New Perspectives on Labor and Social History’, Journal of Social History, 54 (2020), 644–62.In practice, the option that the Servant Acts posed service against was day labouring: that is, working on short contracts for different employers. Day labouring by people without a clear household affiliation – ‘masterless’ people – was what the regulations of the Servant Acts aimed to counteract. This means that a servant was distinguished from a day labourer not by the work tasks performed but by the specific position and connection to the employer. A servant became part of the household in which he or she served, but was at the same time a contracted labourer who could resign once the contract ended. Therefore, the specificities of the servant contract can also be used as a tool to understand the development of labour relations at large. In this chapter, this is done by unpacking the free and unfree dimensions of the Swedish Servant Acts. I use the theoretical perspective of free/unfree labour as an analytical tool to dissect the dimensions of the servant institution that were stated in law, in order to empirically analyse the Swedish Servant Acts and to theoretically expand the free/unfree labour debate with this example.
6 A similar analysis concerning the Danish/Norwegian servant legislation is made by Hanne Østhus, ‘Tvunget til tjeneste? Tjenesteplikten i Danmark-Norge på 1700-tallet og begynnelsen av 1800-tallet’, Arbetarhistoria, 163–4 (2017), 26–31.There are two debates in previous research that I would like to refer to as reasons for adopting this model in an analysis of the Servant Acts. The first is related to the importance that used to be attributed to the existence of a free peasantry in western Europe.
7 Trevor H. Aston and Charles H. E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1995). Landed Swedish peasants belonged to an estate with both political power and economic opportunities to act in the land market as well as the labour market.
8 Carl-Johan Gadd, ‘The Agricultural Revolution in Sweden 1700–1870’, in Janken Myrdal and Mats Morell (eds), The Agrarian History of Sweden. From 4000 BC to AD 2000 (Lund, 2011), pp. 118–64. However, the peasantry was not without internal antagonism. In fact, the Servant Acts serve as an illustration of this, since they were decided upon in parliament, in which the landed farmers, but not the landless or semi-landless part of the peasantry, were represented.
9 The double role of peasant farmers as originators of the servant legislation and employers of servants is addressed in Carolina Uppenberg, ‘Masters Writing the Rules: How Peasant Farmer MPs in the Swedish Estate Diet Understood Servants’ Labour and the Labour Laws, 1823–1863’, Agricultural History Review, 68 (2020), 238–56. Although the group of landed farmers were free – indisputably, in comparison with peasants under serfdom – there are reasons to add more nuance to the free-peasants perspective. If the term ‘peasantry’ is taken to include all people working the land, including servants who were children of both landed farmers and of landless people, unfree dimensions were prevalent. Therefore, this study adds a detailed analysis of free/unfree dimensions of the labour laws affecting a large part of the rural, pre-industrial population, which in turn nuances the labelling of western Europe as characterised by free peasants and eastern Europe by unfree peasants.
10 For a call for the nuancing of the labelling of free and unfree labour, but in the context of slavery, indentured service and free wage labour, see Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, ‘Introduction’, in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, 2004), p. 28.The second reason for using the perspective of free/unfree labour is related to previous research on Servant Acts. The focus in previous studies has been on economic and demographic aspects, with the Acts being understood as an effect, rather than a driving force in themselves. Furthermore, in previous research the development towards a free market has been taken for granted, and the story of the development of the Servant Acts has been told against this background. This means that the seventeenth-century Acts have been understood as a way to ensure the availability of soldiers during the many wars of the time. Mercantilist ideas about the advantages of a large, hard-working and poorly paid population have been used as the explanation of the increasingly detailed and restrictive Acts of the eighteenth century. In contrast, the Acts of the nineteenth century have been understood as the first steps towards a liberalised labour market. The quantity of restrictive measures in the Acts have also been attributed to variations in harvest results and regional labour market features. Although there are merits to these perspectives, I argue that they veil two important aspects. Firstly, the servant legislation was not only a feature of the labour market but also shaped the relationship between the state, masters and servants. Secondly, the Servant Acts show a remarkable continuity over the centuries that is not explained with this perspective.
11 Arthur Montgomery, ‘Tjänstehjonsstadgan och äldre svensk arbetarpolitik’, Historisk tidskrift, 53 (1933), 245–76; Gustaf Utterström, Jordbrukets arbetare: levnadsvillkor och arbetsliv på landsbygden från frihetstiden till mitten av 1800-talet. Del 1 (Stockholm, 1957), pp. 234–319; Börje Harnesk, Legofolk: drängar, pigor och bönder i 1700- och 1800-talens Sverige (Umeå, 1990). This is, of course, not only true in studies of Swedish servant law: see a discussion about the lack of studies taking the statutes seriously in Hay and Craven, ‘Introduction’, pp. 11–27; Samuel Cohn, ‘After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Attitudes towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe’, Economic History Review, 60 (2007), 457–85. A Swedish exception is Monica Edgren, Från rike till nation: arbetskraftspolitik, befolkningspolitik och nationell gemenskapsformering i den politiska ekonomin i Sverige under 1700-talet (Lund, 2001). The focus of her study is how the Servant Acts defined and structured citizenship and the role of a citizen that was made available to men and women through the Servant Acts.Another reason for adding to these previous studies is that they have mostly assumed that the strict legislation could not have been followed.
12 Utterström, Jordbrukets arbetare, pp. 250–1; Harnesk, Legofolk, p. 38. I have previously studied how and when the Swedish Servant Acts were followed through an analysis of court cases and found that the legislation was actively used by masters and servants and often enforced rather strictly.
13 Carolina Uppenberg, I husbondens bröd och arbete: kön, makt och kontrakt i det svenska tjänstefolkssystemet 1730–1860 [Servants and Masters. Gender, Contract, and Power Relations in the Servant Institution in Sweden, 1730–1860] (Gothenburg, 2018); Carolina Uppenberg, ‘The Servant Institution during the Swedish Agrarian Revolution: The Political Economy of Subservience’, in Jane Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe 1400–1900 (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 167–82. I make some references to show how legislation was used in practice, and I argue that the legislation was part of the lived experience of both masters and servants. However, the main focus of this article is not about compliance, but is on the careful segregation of the free and unfree dimensions of the regulations of servants and masters. Although legal clauses cannot reveal how people lived their lives, it is not possible to reveal how people lived without knowledge of the laws surrounding them. The structure of the article follows van der Linden’s suggestion to analyse three steps of labour relations: entry, labour extraction and exit.
14 Van der Linden, ‘Dissecting Coerced Labor’, p. 298.