The present dissertation deals with the factors influencing the professional careers of merchants and craftsmen working in the Swedish town of Sundsvall between 1850 and 1900. The most important hypotheses are: To what degree did social origins influence an entrepreneur's opportunities for running his business? How many of the children of these businessmen assumed and maintained their parents' social status upon attaining adulthood? What significance did the entrepreneur's spouse have for his business activities? To what degree were his economic activities influenced by joining local voluntary associations? By combining data culled from the parish registers of the Swedish Lutheran Church, the poll tax registers and the primary source material for national trade statistics, the author has been able to identify the individuals who worked as entrepreneurs in Sundsvall during the period under investigation, what they paid in business income tax each year, the professional titles they possessed and the places in which they and their relatives resided during their lifetimes. The results show that the majority of the most successful younger entrepreneurs active in the town before the introduction of freedom of trade in Sweden in the year 1864 were mostly immigrants from other parts of the country, who had furthermore come from relatively modest backgrounds. However, the social and geographic origins of these entrepreneur's wives has prpven to be of central significance to the success of the business, in instances where she had been raised in a business family from Sundsvall. The professional skill of the entrepreneur together with his wife's familiarity with the town, in all likelihood also combined with her inherited cultural capital, contributed to creating a demand from the local populace for the goods or services sold by the company. / digitalisering@umu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-61870 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Svanberg, Mikael |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Historiska studier, Umeå : Umeå universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Forskningsrapporter från Institutionen för historiska studier vid Umeå universitet, 1404-4153 ; 13 |
Page generated in 0.0025 seconds