Ett revolutionerande skifte? : Skiftesreformer och jordbruksomvandling i Uppsala län 1750–1880

This is a study of three major enclosure reforms and their significance for the agricultural revolution in east-central Sweden between 1750 and 1880. More specifically, this is a study on how three central elements of the agricultural revolution – land clearance, crop rotation, and the number of farm units – changed before and after enclosure was conducted in the villages in Uppsala County (län). There is a long-held assumption that enclosures and the individualisation of property rights provided farmers with incentives to increase agricultural production through a number of beneficial investments. Whether farmers indeed acted in accordance with these new economic possibilities has been a topic of intense debate and it is here I contribute by conducting a thorough empirical study, not least comparing villages that were enclosed with villages that was not. The findings from this study highlight the significance of regional variations as well as local markets and prices when studying the consequences of enclosures. The pace of land clearance tripled after enclosure, resulting in an increase in land productivity and labour intensity. However, enclosure was not followed by a direct investment in new crop rotations in the region. Instead, possibly in response to the changing price of rye, and thus increasing land productivity within the traditional farming system, farmers changed the existing two-course rotation from within by actively growing fodder on former meadow land. Neither did the number of farm units increase in the aftermath of enclosure. On the contrary, there was a strong general process of amalgamation of farmsteads in the region. In villages both with and without enclosed plots, the number of farm units decreased by roughly 20 percent over the course of the period examined. The study concludes that the consequences of enclosure for agricultural changes benefit from being observed in their specific regional context.