Traditional Finnish agriculture

Abstract

Abstract The author has mainly relied upon contemporary literature and official reports to write a comprehensive account of the development of Finnish agriculture from the 1720s to the 1870s, i. e., from the Great Northern War to the period when the rapid rise of the timber trade and the introduction of a modernised farm economy based on livestock began to revolutionise economic conditions even in Finland. The task has by now means been simple. For a start, earlier studies of the period contain many contradictory features, and not even the statistical material presented in them is consistent. In order to make sense of the official statistics it has therefore been necessary to base broad comparative calculations on a more or less random selection of the original material. This has affected the figures for the agricultural population, its share in the work force (it dropped from 88 per cent in 1769 to 84 per cent in 1865), its social groupings, their regional distribution, and so on. On the other hand, as Soininen points out, contemporary literature does not provide a good basis for an account of conditions in early times because the writers themselves were thoroughly familiar with contemporary agricultural conditions and thus spent more time discussing what things would be like in the future than what they were like at the time.