Martin Andersson

Docent, associate senior lecturer, and Head of the Division of Agrarian History.

Wallenberg Academy Fellow 2025. Member of the Royal Society for the publishing of manuscripts concerning the history of Scandinavia (LSkS).

I was elected to Wallenberg Academy Fellow 2025. In my Wallenberg project FloGrain I will study how grain flowed through pre-industrial Sweden, 1550 to 1750, by analyses of toll registers, court protocols, state accounts, aiming to understand how people gained access to food in their everyday lives.

Another central research aim is to understand what influenced economic inequality in pre-industrial Scandinavia. A recent work, A population history of sixteenth-century Sweden (2025), presents population and social structure studies, based on accounts, wage lists, and taxation records. This includes estimates of urbanisation, how large the proletarian population share was, and what the effects were of the mortality crises caused by the large plague epidemic 1565–6, and the starvation in the 1590s. Building on this, I am currently studying population dynamics in Scandinavia also for the previous Medieval centuries. 

I have previously worked on the landless population of Medieval and Sixteenth-century Sweden. When I first joined SLU in 2019, I studied the working poor, which resulted in a Swedish monograph "From Slaves to Servants: Hired labour in Sweden 1250–1600" (Nordic Academic Press, 2023). An important part of this work was made during my years as visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, 2021–3. In the book, I show how the system with hired farmhands and maids replaced the previous slavery in Sweden by being institutionalised in legislation in the 1200s, and how this system was subsequently changed until the year 1600. In related studies, I have also analysed how the work and livelihood of cottagers.

A final important strand in my research has been migration, which I first studied in my dissertation (Södertörn University, 2018), published as a monograph by Universus Academic Press. This study showed that the rural population was much more mobile than previously thought, especially in the agrarian districts in Southern and Central Sweden. I also studied how the seventeenth-century Swedish state sought to minimise emigration; the main 'migration question' of preindustrial society was people trying to leave the country. In more recent returns to the field of migration history I have anslysed how migration was conceptualized in pre-industrial Swedish, and how the Swedish Crown during the sixteenth century implemented a system with yearly involuntary transports of thousands of Finnish young men and women over the Baltic Sea to meet the expanding labour needs at castles, manorial farms, and mines.

I am currently involved in three externally funded research projects.

In 'Milling capacities and milling monopolies in Early Modern Sweden (1625–1825)', I, Patrick Svensson and Max Strömberg explore how the grain milling industry developed in Sweden during the pre-industrial era. We are constructing a database on all mills in Sweden ca. 1625, detailing ownership, technology, and the amounts ground at each mill. By the nineteenth century, it had become a political issue that the total milling capacity in Sweden was deemed much too low: we want to study if this was due to an institutional framework which hindered the construction of new mills, which resulted in de facto local milling monopolies. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council.

In the project 'Early modern inequality', I, Evelina Berggren, Kerstin Enflo at Lund university and Olof Karsvall at the Swedish National Archives study how large the economic inequality was in Sweden during the sixteenth century, based on wealth taxation records. These detail how much each household in the country owned, in terms of money and silver, but also in numbers of oxen, cows, horses, and other animals. An important part of the project is to develop digital methods that can handle unstructured numerical data in Early Modern handwritten sources, such as the detailled Swedish taxation lists. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council, and by Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser för ekonomisk forskning.

I am also part of the ERC-funded research project 'Transrein', which is led by Jesper Larsson. The project studies the transition to large-scale reindeer pastoralism in (parts of) the Sami societies during the Early Modern period. My part of the project primarily concerns the period berfore 1650, for which I study Crown accounts detailling ownership of reindeer, and the organisation of labour, including the introduction of a servant system.

I am the main supervisor of two doctoral students: Max Strömberg, who studies legal records concerning the milling industry during the 1600s, and Evelina Berggren, who studies economic inequality in Sweden in 1571.

I am also assistant supervisor of William Renström, who studies forest ownership and usage in the Swedish mining districts Norberg and Skinnskatteberg during the seventeenth century.

I do not currently teach in our undergraduate education, but am as Head of division responsible for all the education in agrarian history. I have previously been course leader of the distance cource 'Agriculture and society', which primarily deals with agriculture in Sweden from the Middle Ages up to the Agrarian revolution.

A population history of sixteenth-century Sweden, Agrarhistoria nr 10, Uppsala: SLU (2025).

Arbete och skörd: en festskrift till Patrick Svensson, redaktör (tillsammans med Jesper Larsson), Stockholm: Kungl Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien (2025).

"The cottage economy in sixteenth-century Sweden", Agricultural history review 73:1 (2025).

“Swedish income inequality in 1613” (tillsammans med Jakob Molinder), Economic History Review 77:4 (2024).

Från trälar till tjänstefolk: legofolk i Sverige 1250–1600, Lund: Nordic Academic Press 2023.

Migration i 1600-talets Sverige: Älvsborgs lösen 1613–1618, Malmö: Universus Academic Press 2018.