Sewers,wastewater and newspapers: the early environmental debate on water pollution in Turku,Finland, 1887–1934

Abstract

A century ago, city dwellers became increasingly aware of urban environmental problems caused by the waste products of industry and the growing population. Like elsewhere in Europe, water pollution became an acute issue also in the city of Turku, in south west Finland, The sewer system built after 1895 discharged all the municipal and rapidly increasing industrial wastewater untreated into the River Aura in the centre of the city, As a result, the quality of the river water worsened rapidly, and the first complaint on this was published in the local newspaper in 1899. In this study we document the press debate on river water quality and wastewater problems in the local newspapers of Turku for the period from 1887 to 1934, when the plan for a wastewater treatment plant was finally completed (the plant was, however, not built until 1966). The failure of the city administrators to present any solution to the river pollution problem caused the first major public environmental debate in the city at the turn of the 20^th century. Our results show that (1) sewers were recognized by newspapers as the primary cause of worsened river water quality, (2) the necessity of a wastewater treatment plant was understood long before the actual plan was drawn up, (3) the local industries were hardly ever criticized in public for water pollution, and (4) the initiative for improvements was considered to be the responsibility of the city administrators. The debate in the local press was often hectic, many decades before the 1960s, when the environmental debate is commonly said to have started.     

Peasant shipping as a profitable trade

Abstract

Finnish peasant shipping has so far only been discussed in books on local history and in a few rather brief specialised articles dealing with the earlier centuries. Consequently, Dr. Kaukiainen's academic dissertation, published in the spring of 1970, is virtually a pioneering study. He has chosen the period from the Swedish Russian War of 1808-09 to the Crimean War; this was fortunate because Finland was compelled by its new political alignment partly to re-route its shipping.     

Sweden's iron ore exports to Germany, 1933–1944

Abstract

Rolf Karlbom's article about Swedish iron ore exports to Germany during the Nazi era¹ is an attempt to examine a very important problem as yet unsolved—the significance of the Swedish ore deliveries to Germany. His study begins with the following two questions:² 1. ‘How much of the total consumption of this raw material by German industry did Swedish ore cover during these years?’

2. ‘How far was access to Swedish iron ore a sine qua non for the continuance of the armaments programme?’

3. These basic questions indicate the main problems. Karlbom's answers to them are not wholly convincing because of some weaknesses in his approach.

     

Book Reviews

Abstract

Dr. Utterström's dissertation completes the large project initiated in the 1930s under the auspices, and mainly at the expense, of Landsorganisationen (the Swedish TUC): the production of a comprehensive history of the Swedish working classes.Throughout the undertaking basic research in public and private archives has been necessary, the source material having been used before only to a very limited extent. The final work comprises 12 volumes, written by nine authors, including some of Sweden's leading political scientists and economic historians. This investigation of working class history became one of the main themes of Swedish research in social and economic history for several years; it has accordingly affected the direction of that research in several important respects.     

Sweden's first bank-notes

Abstract

Sweden's first bank, Stockholms Banco, began to function in 1657. Its name is familiar among economic historians because it was the first bank in Europe to issue bank-notes in the modern sense of the word. It is exactly three hundred years since this issue began, and to celebrate the jubilee the Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) has published a work on the first Swedish bank-notes; its author IS Aleksandrs Platbārzdis of the Royal Coin Cabinet, Stockholm. The book is beautifully produced and richly illustrated.     

Strip fields and enclosure in Sweden

Abstract

A study of the history of field systems and land reform in Europe makes one acutely aware of the difficulty of translating the terms used in one language into another. The cause of the difficulty is that practices differ from country to country and even within one single country. A two-field system is not the same in southern Sweden (Skåne) as further north in the Malar provinces. The former had a 4-year, the latter a 2-year, cycle. The term cannot be used therefore to describe both systems unless a clear definition is given, explaining the common features and identifying the differ-ences. The problem is still more difficult when two or more countries are being compared. The differences are often so great that it is more useful to use two different words and it is sometimes more appropriate to retain the original word without translation. The terms run-rig, bocage, Rundling and zadruga are internationally understood by the specialists and any translation would be less meaningful and less accurate than the original. The difficulty of putting the Swedish words enskifte and laga skifte into English has led the author, after consulting the editor of this review, to attempt to give a definition of these and other Swedish terms and then to use them untranslated in the subsequent text.     

Engineer training in Sweden during the postwar period in the context of technical and structural change

Abstract

A predilection for far-reaching social planning has been the norm in Sweden for most of the postwar period. During the Second World War, for example, planning ideas were developed by Swedish economists and officials (most of them associated with Social Democratic circles) serving on the Myrdal Commission, as it was called.1 Many of these ideas turned up subsequently in the labour movement's postwar programme and were implemented to some extent during the 1950s and 1960s. In this way a kind of supply economy came into operation. Many prominent Swedish economists became heavily involved in the work of forecasting and planning, in which oneimportant planning aim was the avoidance of structural problems. The end in view, in other words, was to plan in such a way that mutually complementary combinations of productive resources were to hand at every given point in time. Manpower forecasts and socio-economic ‘long-term planning commissions’ were some of the instruments that came to.be employed.     

Swedish shipping with the Netherlands in the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

In March 1792 the Amsterdams Galley of 90 lasts (ca. 180 metric tons), commanded by Captain Henrik Melle Feddes of Stockholm, left for Amsterdam. It carried 260 shippounds (à 136 kg) of bar iron, 900 barrels of tar, 240 barrels of pitch and 42 shippounds of alum. Five Stockholm merchants were responsible for the cargo, which was valued at 2,374 Swedish rix-dollars. The ship was registered as having arrived in Amsterdam on 6 July 1792. The Dutch customs officers determined its lastage as 126 gross and 82 net, but registered no further details about its cargo.     

Origin and rise of the crofter problem in Finland

Abstract

Crofters (Swedish torpare, Finnish torppari) are in Finland and Sweden the peasants whose principal means of subsistence derived from the cultivation of some small part, held in tenancy, of an estate. The crofter paid the bulk of his rent by putting in so many days work on the parent farm.     

Landowners and tenants in Norway

Abstract

During the past two decades Norwegian historical research has to a considerable extent been concentrated on problems connected with the peculiar nature of the distribution of landownership in Norway before 1661, in which year the king of Denmark and Norway embarked upon a large-scale selling of Crown lands and secularised ecclesiastical estates. The results of the investigations so far carried out have for the most part been published only in parish or other local histories or in short articles in Norwegian periodicals, especially in Heimen, the organ of Norwegian local historians. It is only quite recently that a more comprehensive work has been published in this field, Halvard Bjørkvik's Jordeige og jordleige i Ryfylke i eldre tid.¹ In the present article I propose first to review this book and then to supplement it with a survey of the results of earlier research.     

Price formation in the Danish stock market in the 1890s

Abstract

Trading¹ in stocks has a fairly long history in Denmark. It dates back to the end of the 17th century at least, as evidenced by M?glemes Articler from 1684, where one can find information about brokerage fees for sales and purchases of shares of the East Asian, West Asian and other chartered trading companies. In the beginning of the 18th century, newspapers started carrying information about transactions in stocks. Stock exchange price quotes were listed in the newspapers fairly regularly from around 1760.     

Neutrality and free trade: Sweden and trade liberalisation, 1948–1958

Abstract

This article discusses the Swedish attitude to European economic cooperation, an attitude that has been described as reluctant. The traditional explanation for this has been Sweden's neutrality. This explanation has been challenged by researchers, who have claimed that a nationally self-sufficient social democracy was responsible for the reluctance towards Europe. In this article, neutrality is still seen as the main explanatory factor. Swedish strategies for dealing with European integration linked the concepts of neutrality and global free trade. Nordic cooperation was also seen as a strategy to meet demands for European integration. Swedish activities within the European organisations were limited by neutrality concerns. Within these limits Sweden worked for economic policy solutions, which might be called social democratic.     

The Birkarlians in the melting pot

Abstract

In 1924 the Finnish historian, Jalmari Jaakkola, published a study Pirkkalaisliikkeen synty (The Birth of the Birkarlian Movement) in which he argued convincingly for the theory that the Birkarlians (Pirkkalaiset), who lived in the sixteenth century in the northernmost corner of the Gulf of Bothnia and levied taxes on the Lapps, were of Finnish origin. In Jaakkola's opinion, the Birkarlians were the successors of even older west-Finnish armed Lapland-farers, the men of Kainuu, who from at least the thirteenth century onwards made long hunting treks, chiefly from the parish of Pirkkala (Birkala) in Upper Satakunta, into Lapland and along the coast of the Arctic Ocean, and gradually subjected a great proportion of the Lapps to taxation. This theory has been generally accepted in Finnish historical literature, and a number of Swedish scholars have even given it their blessing with minor reservations.¹ In the summer of 1964, six months after the death of Professor Jaakkola, a complete surprise was sprung from the Swedish side. Birger Steckzén, former keeper of Sweden's military archives, published a 500-page work entitled Birkarlar och lappar (Birkarlians and Lapps). In it, he tried to refute the Finnish theory and made the Birkarlians of the Far North into Swedes. The Swedish word 'birkarls', in his opinion, is an archaic form of the ‘biurkarl’ (biur = beaver in Old Swedish). The Birkarls, i.e. beavermen, were thus, he claimed, Swedish beaver trappers who subjugated the whole of Lapland in the early Middle Ages.     

The distribution of wealth in Finland in 1800

Abstract

In the year 1800 a capital levy was imposed by the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament), and in connection with this levy a property valuation was made which affords a unique cross-section of the distribution of property among the different districts, occupational sections, and families in Finland and Sweden.     

Could Sweden have stopped the second world war?

Abstract

In a recent article in the Scandinavian Economic History Review, R. Karlbom raised an important issue, and one which had not up to that point received the attention it merited.¹ This issue is the degree to which Germany was dependent on Swedish exports of iron ore between her invasion of Poland and her defeat of France. Could Germany have conquered Norway, Denmark, France, Holland and Belgium without a regular supply of iron ore from Sweden? Could Sweden, as Mr. Karlbom implies, have stopped the war?     

Swedish iron and steel, 1600–1955

Abstract

The sources which may be used to shed light upon the history of the Swedish iron industry from the first half of the sixteenth century onwards are, by any criterion, very impressive. Well-preserved series of accounts give detailed information on the activities of a number of iron-works which the Crown began to establish during the reign of Gustav Vasa (1523–1560) and which were carried on until the opening decades of the 17th century. The Swedish kings energetically directed not only their own enterprises but also the production at the many small privately-owned furnaces and forges which continued to be responsible for the major share of the total output; they were also an important object of taxation of which the Crown kept detailed accounts. The state's own iron-working activities were abandoned in the 16205, but central direction of the industry continued and was shortly entrusted to a special department of state, the Board of Mining and Metallurgical Industries (Bergskollegium], The archives of Bergskollegium provide a fund of information on the history of the metallurgical industries looked at from the viewpoint of the central government. The customs' accounts offer primary material for the statistics of exports during the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. Thereafter, however, the primary material has only been sporadically preserved. But as early as the 17th century customs' accounts were worked up into statistics of foreign trade in order to provide information for purposes of commercial policy.¹ After 1738 they continue as a most impressive series of uninterrupted statistics.     

The general strike in Sweden 1909

Abstract

This book deals with the events leading up to the great Swedish labour conflict of 1909, which began in June of that year with an extensive lockout by the three national employers' associations led by the newly formed confederation of big industrial concerns, Svenska Arbetsgivare Förening (SAF), and was extended on 4 August by the Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions (Landsorganisationen or LO) into a general strike involving 300,000 workers. By 4 September the trade unions were compelled to look for a way of terminating the conflict. After the defeat they had consequently lost half their members by 1910. The employers' organisations were then able to ensure peace on the labour market right up to 1917. Nevertheless they accepted the principle of collective bargaining, although they did not achieve the basic general agreement with established negotiating procedure which had been their aim in the struggle of 1909.     

The Swedish iron industry during the First World War and the Post-War depression

Abstract

In a paper read at the annual meeting of Jernkontoret (The Swedish Ironmasters' Association) in 1912 Professor E. F. Heckscher gave an estimate of the proportion of the total annual outpout of the Swedish iron industry which was exported. Including material entering into the exports of steelusing industries, it was estimated at 65–70 %. Assuming this to be correct, then only the saw-milling and paper- and pulp-making industries were at that time more dependent upon foreign markets than the iron industry. ¹ Jernkontorets Annaler (hereafter cited JKA) 1912. p. 183 ff. Cf. E. F. Heckscher, Svenska produktionsproblem, p. 107 and JKA 1919, pp. 181–202.      

Dispersion of engineers in a transitional society; Teknologins nytta

Abstract

The increasing interest shown in recent years by economic historians in the role of technology and technicians in industrial development has produced surprisingly few attempts to analyse technical phenomena within their social context, i.e. utilising the theories and methods of social science. These attempts include a group of Swedish projects under the heading ‘Technicians and Scientists in Swedish Industrialisation’ located at the History Institute ofUppsala University and financially supported by The Bank. of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Rolf Torstendahl publishes in Dispersion of Engineers in a Transitional Society the results of those parts of the studies particularly concerned with the social mobility of Swedish engineers during the period before and especially during industrialisation. His other project report, Teknologins nytta, deals mainly with aspects of the political background to the growth of technicians' training during the decades before the industrial breakthrough. The publication of other reports by participants in the studies may be expected soon.     

Family Capitalism within Big Business

Abstract

The article addresses central questions in the research of family business, corporate governance and the transformation of Swedish industry. The analysis is drawn from the example of the Wallenberg family in Sweden, an industrial dynasty of five generations. Ideas of ownership and overriding values are discussed in relation to pressures of change in international industries. In detail, the article deals with 1) the concepts of corporate governance, long-term active ownership and networking capacity and the chronology of successful family capitalism, 2) the pressures for change experienced in early post-World War II Swedish industry in general and in the three multinational companies in particular, 3) how the owners and top management of the three companies responded strategically to these pressures and 4) the extent to which the provision of capital was accompanied by industrial competence or if simple patience on the part of capital was sufficient.