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- Johnsson, Theresa, 1969-
(författare)
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Vårt fredliga samhälle : ”Lösdriveri” och försvarslöshet i Sverige under 1830-talet
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Between 1664 and 1885 labour in Sweden was regulated by compulsory-service statutes. Able-bodied but idle persons could be compelled to submit to employment as a servant. Compulsory service was part of a larger system of laws and regulations that regulated mobility, settlement, begging, and poor relief, all of which aimed at restricting the labouring poor’s freedom and agency. Some parts of this system had medieval roots, such as vagrancy laws. From the perspective of the propertied classes, this system of interacting regulations served several purposes, such as fighting idleness, labour shortage, high wages, begging, demands for poor relief, unwanted settlement in the parishes, and geographical movement. The obligation to serve was abolished in 1885. Failure to comply with these service statutes was punishable by being treated as a ‘vagrant’, which could mean being jailed in a house of correction, or simply being ordered to find employment within a specific time. In short, it was illegal to be without work or other means of supporting oneself, such as property.The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the social practices of the compulsory-service statutes and related issues such as mobility and settlement. The thesis has dealt with four areas of inquiry: the judicial framework, the policing of ‘vagrancy’, in what situations people were exempt from having to comply with the compulsory service statues, and the identity of the ‘vagrant’. The system for dealing with ‘vagrancy’ has left a large number of sources, and different sources give different images of the poor. This applies most clearly in the case of the Swedish Romani population, the Resande. The thesis deals with the county (län) of Västmanland during the 1830s. It highlights how the compulsory-service statutes and related vagrancy laws shaped the lives of people and points to how these institutions restricted poor people’s agency and formed their experiences.
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| 2. |
- Pajur, Astrid
(författare)
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Dress Matters : Clothes and Social Order in Tallinn, 1600-1700
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the relationship of clothes and social order in early modern Europe. The period has often been characterised as inert and immobile, with especially middling and poorer people living in a sartorially drab world, but a number of historians have demonstrated that it was also a period of profound material change, with consumer demand, democratisation of fashion and global trade engendering cosmopolitan sensibilities earlier than thought. Based on an examination of seventeenth-century Tallinn, I analyse how social order influenced sartorial expression and how clothes shaped order through affirmation, negotiation and subversion. The interaction between clothes and social order was complex, with both elements acting as moving parts within the ideal. While on the normative level, clothes were thought to have the primary function of visualising order, on the everyday level clothes could often obscure order and complicate the desired visualisation. Through the circulation of clothing as fungible items and as mediators of intricate emotions and social relations, much of clothes’ complexity in the seventeenth century stemmed from their resistance to being anchored to a single function, whether manifesting status, demonstrating appreciation or helping poor people survive. The results arrived at have two key implications. Firstly, Tallinn, while undeniably an unequal and hierarchical society, was hardly static. The inherent dynamism suggests that social order, rather than being considered as an independent structure, should be viewed as negotiable and requiring the participation of people, space and materiality. Secondly, the study problematises the chronology that has a modern consumer society gradually replacing the ancien régime of fashion. Rather than an uncomplicated narrative of progress, I argue that aspects of both systems co-existed in parallel within a society that did not necessarily demonstrate any of the other tendencies assumed by proponents of ‘consumer revolution’.
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