Maria Ågren

Making verbs count : the research project 'Gender and Work' and its methodology

Abstract While gender relations in the post-1800 labour market have been subject to much scholarly scrutiny, less is known about how women and men supported themselves in the early modern period. This article discusses the reasons for this lacuna and explores various approaches that could be used to increase knowledge in the field. It describes the verb-oriented method, used by the Gender and Work project at Uppsala University and inspired by the work of Sheilagh Ogilvie. Understanding ‘work’ as ‘use of time with the goal of making a living’, the method consists in systematic collection of verb phrases such as ‘to fish herring’, ‘to sell clothes’, etc. The article also presents the database GaW, which is designed so as to make possible systematic analysis of large sets of verb phrases.

Emissaries, allies, accomplices and enemies: married women's work in eighteenth-century urban Sweden

Emissaries, allies, accomplices and enemies : Married womens work in eighteenth-century urban Sweden

Caring for the widowed spouse: the use of wills in northern Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Caring for the widowed spouse: the use of wills in northern Sweden during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Another Process of State Formation: Swedish Customs Officials, their Work and Households

ABSTRACT This article discusses why legitimacy remained a problem for the eighteenth-century Swedish state administration. Using the case of customs officials in the town of Örebro, the article shows that complaints from citizens about the behaviour of these men were rife. While not impartial, such complaints nevertheless highlight the problematic situation of lower state employees: they often lacked local networks and were poorly educated and badly paid. They were also subject to unrealistic expectations to carry out tasks in many places at the same time. This made it necessary for them to harness the human resources of the entire household. The author argues that while it is true that, in the long run, bureaucratization entailed a specialization and masculinization of state administration, in the shorter term the role of women, and particularly wives, probably increased.

Gender, Work, and the Fiscal-Military State

In contrast to the early twentieth century, when marriage could set an end to women’s working lives, early modern society was based on the fundamental necessity of married women’s work. This chapte ...

Historiography at the Court of Christian IV, 1588–1648: Studies in the Latin Histories of Denmark by Johannes Pontanus and Johannes Meursius: Skovgaard-Petersen, Karen: Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 454 pp., Publication Date: October 2002

constitutionalism of the parlernents and establishing the political discipline that became ii hallmark of his reign. Hurt argucs h i t . far from respecting the venal interests of thc pnrlrmmts, as revisionis1 historians have niaintained, the government of Louis XIV manipulated and exploited those offices to a degree that exceeded that of its predecessors. LJncler I -ouis XIV, the purlenzentaires suflcrcd from recurring forced loans and repeated sales of new offices, resulting in rising indcbtedness, the mortgaging of their offices, and the decline of office values. Hurt suggests that the victory won by I*ouis XIV accounts for the generally restrained and passive behavior (the Unigenitus controversy not withstanding) of the tribunals until the middlc of the eighteenth ccntury. Although revisionists attribute the relative calm to the skill with which ministers of Louis XV bribed key magistrates and outmaneuvered others, Hurt reminds us that the absertion of royal authority, applied in the memory and style of Louis XIV (such as Louis XV’s skoni:e de lo flagellation to the Parlement of Paris on 3 March 1766), remained powerfully effective. Although the pirlemenls eventually would play a significant role in the monarchical crisis of the later eighteenth century, the magistrates emerged from the reign of Louis XIV a weakened, almost endangered group, reeling from the

Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe: Kahn, Victoria, and Lorna Hutson, eds.: New Haven: Yale University Press, 355 pp., Publication Date: April 2001

“explore-control-exploit” syndrome draws its sustenance from some long-familiar sources i n Western political and cultural history. The other is the existence of, and usually fruitful interaction among, the three salient, largely autonomous sectors in Westem imperializing polities over the centuries covered: governance (beginning after about 1400 with a reasonably compact nation state), legally protected private property, and evangelical religion. (Although each of the other potential cnipire-building societies contained some of those elements, Abernethy shows how in both cascs some critical factor disposing the society to sea-borne expansion was cither absent or weak.) With the attitudinal triad providing the will and the sectoral one the capacity, the outward prqjection of European power thus becomes fully intelligible as does how its astonishing S U C C ~ S S ~ S unintentionally sowed thr reeds of its eventual undoing. This dcpiction of imperial dominance acknowledges the causal primacy of Europe’s outward thrust without scanting in the least the importance of all the other participants, from primary resisters and involuntary, sometimes enslaved workers, through wboteurs, withdrawers, and protonationalistb. to collaborators. Albeit in ;i necessarily condensed manner, Abernethy does essential

Land and Debt: On the Process of Social Differentiation in Rural Sweden, circa 1750–1850

ice to both the material conditions of the colonial experience and the psychological ones. Indeed, his reflections on the challenges and dilemmas that confronted generations of colonial subjects as they sought to recover, or gain for the first time, political control over their own destinies give the book ;I comprehensiveness, balance, and cinotional gravity not commonly found in studies of this kind. By way of conclusion Abemethy stages an imginary debate between the foremost critics and defenders of modern Western imperialisni, and he succeeds to a commendable extent in letting thc steam out of some overheated boilers by showing both how much the contending partics have in common and bow profitably they could focus their future exchanges on potentially resolvable, or at least reducible, points of difference. His own moral judgment of global dominance nicely seth the gains against the losses, freely conceding that, for all the rough passages, thc sprcad of economic development has improved humanity’s lot even as the propagation of feelings of inferiority among the nonI:uropean colonized sowed a bitter and protrattcd harvest whose end is not yet. When Abernethy writes about the global spread of the “explore-control-exploit” mentality, he adds the somber admonition that this may no longcr bc the most serviceable approach to our postimperial planet’s unmistakably finite resources. He may not have produced a fullyfledged “iheory” of empire, at least not with the rigor that natural science expects, but Abtrncthy has constructed an “explanation sketch” 01’ five hundred years of complicated historical cxperience that deserves an atten-