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Abstract:  Households were the most fundamental economic unit in the early modern period, and spinning was among the most significant sources of non-agricultural income for women across Europe. A central question in this context is the extent to which household members, especially women, engaged in market-oriented spinning, and what shaped these decisions.

This paper examines the output and remuneration of individuals – mostly women – engaged in for-market spinning in Sweden between 1767 and 1797, with particular attention to differences across economic and geographic contexts. Sweden’s late eighteenth century was marked by technological change, institutional reorganization, and shifting mercantilist policies, all of which shaped access to and remuneration from spinning work as well as alternative employment opportunities. These factors varied substantially across geography, industry, and over the life course, affecting women differently by age and civil status.

The study draws on a comprehensive census of the Swedish “spinning privileges,” the licenses that regulated and subsidized proto-industrial textile production. Under this putting-out system, spinners worked from their homes but were recorded in detail by privilege holders, including age, family characteristics, output in weight and length, and wages. The full archive comprises around 135,000 observations. The analysis presented here is based on a quinquennial subsample of about 40,000 observations covering the entire country. This is combined with a series of fully extracted town- and estate-level subsamples of 1,000–9,000 observations each, which have been linked to parish registers and other records to reconstruct households. 

Initial findings point to pronounced regional variation in both age-specific and seasonal output, closely tied to differing local economic profiles. Ongoing analysis links individual spinners to both first- and second- level geographical characteristics including population density, distance to market towns, and agricultural suitability in order to more comprehensively investigate factors associated with variation in spinning production and income.

The Oxford Seminar in Economic and Social History series for Hilary Term 2026 is convened by Stephen Broadberry and Victoria Gierok. 

For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact stephen.broadberry@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.