Rural wealth during the initial stages of industrialization in Finland

Abstract

Abstract Until the late nineteenth century Finland remained an almost wholly agricultural country; in the 1870s it gradually began to become industrialized, and this process accelerated in the boom of the 1890s. A good deal of academic debate has passed on the extent to which the general increase in Finnish wealth before the attainment of independence in 1917 benefited various social groups, but in the absence of statistical data much of it has been ineffectual. As these questions not only bear directly on social but also indirectly on political history, the dearth of solid research has been strongly felt.