Histories of the free peasant in Finnish and Swedish historical research, ca. 1800–1980

The land-owning peasantry plays an essential role in the national memories of Sweden and Finland. This chapter examines the historiographic changes around the freeholder narratives in Sweden and Finland during the last two centuries. The discussion proceeds chronologically, and the focus is mostly on the research into the early modern period contextualized with scholarly trends and contemporary sociopolitical settings. The chapter begins with the nineteenth-century historians and then proceeds with the early twentieth-century accounts. The final section discusses the scholarly turn in the last decades of the twentieth century. The chapter concludes with discussion of the normative implications of the histories of freeholders in Sweden and in Finland. Although there are differences between these two neighboring historiographic cultures, the narratives of the free peasantry bear strong similarities. Most Swedish and Finnish historians discussed here have considered freeholders as historical defenders of the ideas of private property and legal political order who stabilized the dynamics of development. The peasantry has been considered as a social group able to ground the electrifying tensions within society and chase invaders out of the country. Hence, the free peasant has embodied the historical background of the democratic nation-state.