Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 177

This is the first of three volumes which will constitute the definitive history of Finnish agriculture and it spans the period from Stone Age settlement to the 1870s. It is intended for the Finnish specialist not the foreign reader and, as a result, it is assumed unnecessary to sketch in the characteristic features of the physical environment that affect agricultural activities – the interplay between land and water on a glaciated peneplain, the coniferous woodland, the mosslands that cover about a third of the country, cold clays and sandy heaths, the high-latitude climate where winter prevails over summer, the seasonal rhythm of daylight and darkness, the risk of summer frosts. Within this setting agricultural activity has always been a combination of farming and forestry, of farming and fishing or a combination of all three. Down to 1870 subsistence farming prevailed with the practices those of the Raubwirtschaft. Additionally, throughout its history, Finland’s farming community has been scourged by intermittent wars and famines, the last at the very time that the volume concludes.

The text falls into five parts: from the prehistoric period through early colonization to the middle ages; the response to the organization of Sweden’s Vasa dynasty; the years of the Enlightenment, and the first half of the nineteenth century. A final section identifies trends and developments. An appendix lists old systems of weights, measures and currencies. Among the three editors, special mention must be made of Eino Jutikkala, the most senior Finnish academician and Nordic historian. His contributions on Finland’s entailed estates, population change and famine recall his major publications in these fields.

As the eastern half of the Swedish realm, Finland’s records are similar to those of Sweden itself and they continued in their established form after Finland became a Russian Grand Duchy in 1809. From the sixteenth century, land registers enable the settlement of Finland to be mapped in fair detail. From the 1630s, with the extension of the cadastral surveys of the Swedish Land Survey Office to Finland, it is possible to identify the character of representative farms, with different types of land use recorded and taxed at different rates. Subsequent legislation covering the consolidation of land holdings (Sw. Storskifte; F. Isojako) since the eighteenth century has resulted in a major source of evidence for detailed studies in Finnish agricultural history. Half page illustrations exemplify the character of these documents.

Complementing the use of the land is the history of the farmers themselves. The traditional Finnish farmer still rejoices in the name of talonpoika (Sw. bonde). Perhaps owner-farmer – even yeoman farmer – is the best translation, not ‘peasant’ as it may still appear in some dictionaries. There are illustrations of the complexes of farm buildings each with its special function. Sometimes there have been extended families, members of which have often colonized the outlying woodlandseters. Below the talonpoika in the rural hierarchy was the day labourer or crofter (F. torppari), already a near proletariat by the 1870s. The role of women in the farming community is given special treatment.

At the upper end of the social structure were the crown estates, born in the late fifteenth century and numbering 44 a century later. Other landed estates were generally acquired through service to the crown, not least by way of the army. The extremes of the agricultural scene by the 1870s are illustrated on the dust cover with its photograph of swidden (F. kaski poltto) or rotational burning of woodland for cropping, and on a double page elsewhere in the book by a romantic painting of a Finnish estate with its classical corps de logis and surrounding park (the ‘English park’ for some estate owners).

The text is enlivened with scores of illustrations, the smaller of them on the margins of the printed page. The earliest are reproduced from the wall paintings of Finland’s medieval churches, those at the end of the volume from photographs that were taken while old practices and features still remained. So many of the lesser illustrations record the importance of wood for the production of farm equipment – carts and boats, ploughs and harrows, wheels and runners, yokes and harnesses, grain and hay pikes, buckets and churns. Supple birch bark was the raw material for other products from backpacks to shoes. Farm markets are remembered, not least through a graphic painting of Porvoo horse market, the Finnish horse being a distinctive breed capable of coping with winter circumstance. There are sections on reindeer husbandry and the emerging interest among Finnish artists in the agrarian landscape.

Most Finns still have their roots in the land. This impressive volume tells how deep those roots have been for Finland’s society and economy.