New three year research project

Technological shocks and regional resilience: changing occupational structure and development in the Swedish regions (1640-1900)

This project studies the emergence, disappearance and relocation of economic activity at the regional level in Sweden from the pre-industrial times to the first industrialization of the country. We construct a new database of the occupational structure of the Swedish parishes by gender from 1640 to 1900 using both censuses and non-census sources.

We then test whether Swedish regional economies during the industrial take-off responded to external factors, such as openness to trade, or to internal conditions such as pre-industrial occupational specialisation and land ownership.