Edward Blom on the emergence of farming in Sweden

If anything can put me in a good mood, it's when Edward Blom appears in the box. That's why I was particularly pleased the other week when I stumbled across a number of videos from 2011 in which Edward Blom, as Centre for the History of Business an expert on trade history, talks about selected photographs and events from Swedish history. The clips have had a low profile since 2011, to say the least, but we're going to change that! I'll be sharing more of the clips with you in the future, where you can follow along and hear Edward talk about square traders, milk shops, the first trucks, intermediate beer, dry milk, and more, and I'll do my part and dig up some appropriate old photos from the archives too.

But first, a little about the country store! Until the 19th century, it was actually so weird in Sweden that ordinary people were not allowed to trade with each other anyway in this country. It was strictly forbidden for the common people to trade in the countryside, for the simple reason that the state could not ensure that they got "their" share of the pie (which makes me think of Tim Gumun's fight against the Tax Agency the other year in order to be able to continue running his pasture). The state wanted to use the trade ban to restrict the people's trade to the towns, where they could keep an eye on the sale of the peasants' crops and the craftsmen's goods, and tax the fruits of the work of the commoners. But then, towards the middle of the 19th century, trade took a more liberal turn. Edward tells us:

In two events, 1846 and 1864, we had free trade in Sweden. Before that, it was forbidden to sell things other than in the cities. If you lived very far in the country, there could be an annual market too. That meant that a couple of times a year at most you traded things and then you had to travel a long way and buy everything.

With these two events, the Swedish state stopped infringing on the right of the common man to trade freely in his native land. The result was, as Edward describes, an explosion of "small shops, small businesses in every little town, every little village, every little community around the country."

Suddenly you have access to spices, groceries, tools, newspapers, a whole new world opens up. Even if you can't afford it, you can go there and look and buy something small.

Today, the trend is the exact opposite, with shop after shop in rural areas closing again. Why? I don't think I'm out of line if I say that the state has a hand in this too. Could it be that the state has its fingers too far down the cookie jar again?

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