Jesper Larsson

Jesper’s research is focused on governance of common-pool resources and collective action during early modern period (16th century to 19th century). Jesper conducts research in Sami land-use governance and animal husbandry, especially transhumance systems and the evolution of agriculture systems. Jesper is Affiliated Faculty to The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Jesper's latest major grant is an ERC consolidator grant (ERC-2023-COG) for the project TransRein, which studies the transition to reindeer pastoralism in northern Eurasia. The project started on January 1, 2025 and will last to the end of 2029.

A short film about Jesper Larsson's research (English subtitle) 

Jesper's research addresses landscape use and settlement development in Northern Scandinavia during the seventeenth century. The starting point is the leap in the use of common-pool resources and collective action that appeared during the seventeenth century in Northern Scandinavia; large scale reindeer pastoral-nomadism, large scale tar distillation, a sharp increase in firewood and charcoal production, and the development of a new agricultural system based on a transhumance system. Important questions for a better understanding of landscape use and settlement development are; how institutions changed; what type of organizations users developed; implications for property rights; labor division; relations between users and the state; and changes’ in agriculture practice and reindeer breeding.
 

Books

Andersson, Martin, Ulrich Lange och Jesper Larsson (red.) 2025. Arbete och Skörd, en festskrift till Patrick Svensson på hans 60-årsdag. Stockholm, Skogs och lantbrukshistoriska meddelanden 84. 375 sidor.

Larsson, Jesper and Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja. 2022. Self-Governance and Sami Communities. Transitions in Early Modern Natural Resource Management. Palgrave Macmillan. xvi + 248 sidor.

Läs recentioner i tidskrifterna Pastoralism i Comparative Legal History i Transnational Environmental Law och i Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskrift (svenska, sidan 92–94)

Panjek, Aleksander, Jesper Larsson, and Luca Mocarelli, red. 2017. Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective: Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond. University of Primorska Press. 446 sidor.

Larsson, Jesper. 2009. Fäbodväsendet 1550 - 1920. Ett centralt element i Nordsveriges jordbrukssystem, Acta Universitatis agriculturae Sueciae 2009:51, Uppsala/Östersund, (English summary: Summer Farms in Sweden 1550 to 1920. An important Element in North Swedens’s Agriculural System), 432 sidor.

Articles (in journals and books)

Larsson, Jesper, and Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja. 2026. From Foraging to Dairy Pastoralism: Indigenous Transformation Among Sami in Early Modern Northern Fennoscandia, In: Global Food History. Online October 7, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2026.2742116

Larsson, Jesper. 2026. Samerna, skatten och staten. 1695 års skattereform, i: Lantmäteriet och Karl XI:s reduktion, statsförvaltningens utveckling under 1600-talets slut, red. Anders Wästfelt. Stockholm, Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien. s. 68-86. https://doi.org/10.62077/3tafpf.lx19df

Larsson, Jesper 2025. Odlingssystem i förändring. Domböcker som källa till åkerbruket i Gagnefs socken 1730–1800, i: Andersson, Martin, Ulrich Lange och Jesper Larsson (red.), Arbete och Skörd, en festskrift till Patrick Svensson på hans 60-årsdag, Stockholm, Skogs och lantbrukshistoriska meddelanden 84, sidan 276–296.

Larsson, Jesper, and Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja. 2025. “Self-governance and Adaptation: Rethinking Indigenous Arctic Histories”. International Journal of the Commons 19 (1): 307–321. https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1550

Larsson, Jesper och Jakob Starlander. 2024. Tidigmoderna instiututioner för hållbarhet: om gemensamt brukad och ägd mark i boreal skog och fjäll. i Hållbarhetens dimensioner. red. Seema Arora-Jonsson, Cecilia Waldenström och Emil Sandström. Verbal. Sidan 27–43.

Larsson, Jesper, 2022. Självförvaltning och tidigmodernt samiskt naturesursutnyttjande. Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien Årsbok 2022. Stockholm, KVHAA. s 117–134.

Larsson, Jesper & Sjaunja, Eva-Lotta Päiviö, 2021. Hunting by Early Modern Lule Sami Households. Arctic 74(3):323–338. https://doi.org/10.14430/arctic73281

Larsson, Jesper & Sjaunja, Eva-Lotta Päiviö, 2020. Freshwater Fishing Strategies in Early Modern Sami Households. Arctic Anthropology 57(2):197-211; http://dx.doi.org/10.3368/aa.57.2.197 (published May 2021)

Larsson, Jesper, 2020. Kokonstanten – Kor och smådjur som kapital och inkomster i tidigmodern hushållsekonomi. Nötkreatur i Sverige: kulturhistoriska och samtida perspektiv, redigerade av Katharina Leibring & Ingvar Svanberg. Uppsala: Institutet för språk och folkminnen, s. 41–58.

Larsson, Jesper & Sjaunja, Eva-Lotta Päiviö, 2020. Early Modern Reindeer Husbandry, Sami Economy, and Grazing Rights. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1), pp. 91–107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.965

Larsson, Jesper. 2019. Lagpigor och döttrar i Orsa vallängder. Fäbodlandskap och vallmusik. Dalarna 2019, red. Jennie Tiderman-Österberg and Erik Thorell. Falun, Dalarnas Fornminnes- och hembygdsförbund. Sidorna 30–39, 277–278.

Lennartsson, Tommy, Ove Eriksson, Anamaria Iuga, Jesper Larsson, Jon Moen, Michael D. Scholl, Anna Westin and Carole L. Crumley, 2018, Diversity in Ecological and Social Contexts, In Carole L. Crumley, Tommy Lennartsson and Anna Westin, red., Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology, The past and Future of Landscapes and Regions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, s. 182-239. 
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108355780.007

Larsson, Jesper, 2017, The Importance of Commons in an Integrated Peasant Economy in Early Modern Northern Scandinavia. I: Panjek, Aleksander, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli, red. 2017. Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective: Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond, University of Primorska Press, s. 117–136.

Larsson, Jesper, 2016. Conflict-resolution mechanisms maintaining an agricultural system. Early modern local courts as an arena for solving collective-action problems within Scandinavian Civil Law. International Journal of the Commons 10(2):1100-1118.

Larsson, Jesper, 2016, Crises, commons and collective action: The changing use of woodlands and mountains in seventeenth-century upland Scandinavia, Rural History Yearbook 12 (2015):205-215 .

Larsson, Jesper, 2014, Labor division in an upland economy: workforce in a seventeenth-century transhumance system, The History of the Family 19(3):393-410.

Larsson, Jesper, 2014, Boundaries and Property Rights: The Transformation of a Common-Pool Resource, The Agricultural History Review,  62(1):20-40.

Blomkvist, Pär and Jesper Larsson, 2013, An analytical framework for common-pool resource–large technical system (CPR-LTS) constellations, International Journal of the Commons 7(1):113-139.

Larsson, Jesper, 2012, The Expansion and Decline of a Transhumance System in Sweden, 1550-1920, Historia Agraria 56:11-39.

Larsson, Jesper, 2011, “Fäbodens förändring: Från ryggrad i nordsvensk djurhushållning till upplevelser och märkesprodukter”. Jordbruk och skogsbruk i Sverige sedan år 1900 – studier av de areella näringarnas geografi och historia, H. Antonson & U. Jansson. (Red.)  SOLMED 53, s. 222–237. Stockholm: Kungl. Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien.

Larsson, Jesper, 2010, “Messmör och mesost – väcker känslor och smaklökar”, I: Kreativa traditioner - mat med historia, Jämten 2011, Östersund, s. 56-65, 187.

Raports

Larsson, Jesper, 2016, History, students, and education, a survey about students’ perspectives on history education at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and implications for future teaching. Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, Agrarhistoria 4, Uppsala. 83 sidor.

Film

Anna Rosling Larsson och Jesper Larsson. 2019. Reunited in Bishop Hill – with Hans Rosling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgmBQMhEsI