I know part of the answer to this from reading among other things *Why They Kill* by Richard Rhodes. Swedish agrarian society in the 1800s was the most violent society in Europe, and maybe the world. Murders per capita, assaults per capita, alcohol related rampages where everybody got murdered with an axe -- all of these happened more here than anywhere else. (The book is back at the library so I cannot paste in the statistics). Women and children were particularly at risk. This meant that among the leaders who were trying to create the new Swedish society were a significant number of women who wanted protection and independence from absusive husbands and fathers more than anything else in the world.
Aha. Having been to the library, I see that I misremembered what Robert Rhodes wrote.
He was writing about the murder rate in **15th** century Sweden, and in Stockholm in particular, where the homicide rate was 42.5 per 100,000 people. And his reference for such figures is
The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country Since the Middle Ages -- a collection of
essays edited by E A Johnson and E H Monkkonen and published in 1996. I read those essays, or at least the one on Sweden in the library at Stockholm where I was at the time. It's not available here, though I suppose I could get it via LIBRIS.
So I have badly misremembered the timeline, and it won't be that Swedes had the living memory of living under an extremely high level of general violence as they set out to create the state we know and live within. But certainly some of the founders had direct personal experience of such violence in their own families, and wrote about that -- so that was part of the answer, as I said -- just not the way I remembered it. Sorry about that.
Interesting! If Sweden was more violent than other places in the 15th century, that could maybe be a reason why the centralizing efforts from the 16th century onward were particularly successful in Sweden.
Wow. What a cool paper. I suppose "The large majority of the Finnish statistics prior to 1891 are previously unpublished in international criminological literature." is the reason that Finland did not stick out when Richard Rhodes was looking at the data.
That paper had some interesting passages, like this one:
"Veli Verkko and Heikki Ylikangas have presented the argument that the Finnish violence problem is caused by a distinctive national character. According to Ylikangas, the historical realities of the settlement of Finland have encouraged a national sensitivity to honour. Finland has always been sparsely populated and during the medieval times the inhabitants rarely interacted with each other, and the Finns never developed their communicative skills. When such individuals got into situations where their honour was challenged by, for example, a verbal insult, they had to resort to violence to remedy the violation. Ylikangas dubs the phenomenon “forest foolishness.” "
So, the Finns kill each other more than other peoples because they talk so little... That ticks every prejudice box. But, more to the point: In this study, the homicide curve for Sweden is almost flat since 1754. It hovers around 3 per 100 000 all the time. So that study contradicts Rhodes' idea that Swedes were unusually violent in the 19th century.
I know part of the answer to this from reading among other things *Why They Kill* by Richard Rhodes. Swedish agrarian society in the 1800s was the most violent society in Europe, and maybe the world. Murders per capita, assaults per capita, alcohol related rampages where everybody got murdered with an axe -- all of these happened more here than anywhere else. (The book is back at the library so I cannot paste in the statistics). Women and children were particularly at risk. This meant that among the leaders who were trying to create the new Swedish society were a significant number of women who wanted protection and independence from absusive husbands and fathers more than anything else in the world.
>The book is back at the library so I cannot paste in the statistics
https://annas-archive.org/
Oh cool! I never knew about this before. Thank you very much!
You're welcome!
It sources mainly from Library Genesis (libgen).
Aha. Having been to the library, I see that I misremembered what Robert Rhodes wrote.
He was writing about the murder rate in **15th** century Sweden, and in Stockholm in particular, where the homicide rate was 42.5 per 100,000 people. And his reference for such figures is
The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country Since the Middle Ages -- a collection of
essays edited by E A Johnson and E H Monkkonen and published in 1996. I read those essays, or at least the one on Sweden in the library at Stockholm where I was at the time. It's not available here, though I suppose I could get it via LIBRIS.
So I have badly misremembered the timeline, and it won't be that Swedes had the living memory of living under an extremely high level of general violence as they set out to create the state we know and live within. But certainly some of the founders had direct personal experience of such violence in their own families, and wrote about that -- so that was part of the answer, as I said -- just not the way I remembered it. Sorry about that.
Interesting! If Sweden was more violent than other places in the 15th century, that could maybe be a reason why the centralizing efforts from the 16th century onward were particularly successful in Sweden.
That's interesting, I never heard of it before. Like "Sweden in the 19th century: Worse than Papua New Guinea!"
Surprised me too. But I went to the library, and he wasn't making this stuff up.
And Finland was even worse than Sweden!
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01924036.2017.1295395
But those statistics show a rather even murder rate from 1754 until present time.
Wow. What a cool paper. I suppose "The large majority of the Finnish statistics prior to 1891 are previously unpublished in international criminological literature." is the reason that Finland did not stick out when Richard Rhodes was looking at the data.
That paper had some interesting passages, like this one:
"Veli Verkko and Heikki Ylikangas have presented the argument that the Finnish violence problem is caused by a distinctive national character. According to Ylikangas, the historical realities of the settlement of Finland have encouraged a national sensitivity to honour. Finland has always been sparsely populated and during the medieval times the inhabitants rarely interacted with each other, and the Finns never developed their communicative skills. When such individuals got into situations where their honour was challenged by, for example, a verbal insult, they had to resort to violence to remedy the violation. Ylikangas dubs the phenomenon “forest foolishness.” "
So, the Finns kill each other more than other peoples because they talk so little... That ticks every prejudice box. But, more to the point: In this study, the homicide curve for Sweden is almost flat since 1754. It hovers around 3 per 100 000 all the time. So that study contradicts Rhodes' idea that Swedes were unusually violent in the 19th century.
I think he was looking at all sorts of violence, not just homicides- I'll have to go to the library and look up what he found.