This chapter has argued for the continued need to bring ‘vagrancy’ into labour law studies. The imprecise legislation and its enforcement placed the masterless labouring poor in a state of legal uncertainty; in a state of exception in relation to the constitution. Compulsory service, which was abolished in Sweden as late as 1885, had served many different functions over the centuries. In the 1830s, its main purpose was not to force people into the service of particular employers. Instead, legal protection could be given importance in innumerable situations, which had fundamental importance for the living conditions of the labouring poor: when people wanted to settle, when they applied for a passport, when they moved across the landscape, when they tried to end an employment contract and so on. It constituted a flexible power technique deeply entwined with the criminal justice system.
The system of legal protection has been explored in this chapter through the narrow lens of detainments in jail. Notwithstanding the experiences of all those whose legal protection was questioned but who were not sentenced or even detained, the symbolic value of detentions and sentences to houses of corrections should not be undervalued. Being apprehended by state officials could cut deep into people’s intimate lives. Children were separated from their caregivers and couples were split up and sent to different counties. People’s survival strategies were affected. Encountering the highest police authorities, and spending time, sometimes weeks, in jail, the detainees were interrogated in the castle concerning their identities, belongings and legal protection. Vagrancy policing, and thus compulsory service practices, was central to everyday nation- and state-building.
Previous Swedish historical research has argued that ‘law-abiding’ and ‘work-willing’ people ran only a negligible risk of being sentenced. Was Brita Stina Åkerström aware of those odds, during her and her daughters’ three weeks in jail, or did she not consider herself work-willing? To reduce the system of legal protection to its ultimate consequence is to silence central aspects of the workings of class politics in a time of mass poverty. Brita Stina Åkerström manoeuvred in the system, but she was constrained by her poverty, by her status in society and by being an unwed mother. In recent years the concept of ‘agency’ has won momentum to describe the room for tactical manoeuvre among the labouring poor.
1 E.g., Hitchcock et al., ‘Loose’, 511. While this perspective is laudable, a focus on ‘agency’ must not obscure the harsh class-based realities of compulsory service and the societies of which it was part. Otherwise, there is a risk that the ‘vagrant’ once again is transformed into the phantom of the work-shy sturdy beggar, who knowingly navigates between the systems of criminal justice and the laws of labour and vagrancy.