‘In the Finland of 1809 the Russians ran into a country without a centre’.1 Before 1809, rather than the various regions being oriented to each other through the regional division of labour, giving Finland the status of a separate economic unit, they were oriented mainly to the core of the Swedish state. Only in the nineteenth century was there an economic reorientation: first, partially, to St. Petersburg; and then, definitely, to a core within the grand duchy, with the concomitant integration of the separate regions into a national whole. The capitalist transformation strengthened the ties among the regions and simultaneously accentuated their differences.
In other words, during the Swedish period the Finnish-speaking regions interacted with an external core. Later on, however, an internal core emerged. Both core-periphery processes influenced the consolidation of regionally differentiated class structures at the end of the nineteenth century.
1 Finnish Regions up to 1809
In the seventeenth century, Sweden was a great power in Europe. It had, according to Eli F. Heckscher, ‘a strong state power and presumably the most effective administrative organisation among all countries of that time’; despite economic backwardness, ‘politically [it was] an exceptionally solidly-built society, where there was no room for particularism’.2 The relatively high degree of centralisation may be seen in the relation of the Finnish regions to the state centre. The basic structure remained the same up to the end of the period.
The political and economic centre of Sweden was Stockholm, which developed into a metropolis during the seventeenth century.3
All over the kingdom, the peasantry was taxed effectively, especially after the ‘reductions’ of 1680 had brought back to royal jurisdiction lands previously granted to the nobles. Finland was not a separate fiscal unit. Like the rest of Sweden, it was divided into counties whose administration was reformed during the seventeenth century to better serve the needs of the monarchy.4 In heraldic contexts, the ‘Swedish’ and ‘Finnish’ provinces were not presented separately, but in an order starting from the regions around the core and arriving at the more peripheral regions at various corners of the state.5 Thus, although staple, tariff, and industrial policies did prevent various Finnish regions from developing in the same way as certain ‘Swedish’ peripheries,6 Finland was not, as a whole, in a colonial position.
Economic centralisation, based on the principles of mercantilism, was ensured by the rigid regulation of domestic trade and by the concentration of export trade in Stockholm and the so-called staple towns. In connecting the hinterlands to the capital (and to foreign countries), the coastal cities obviously played a central part. In the Finnish territories the city network was located on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia and on the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland (see Map 1, p. 21).
Commerce with Stockholm and abroad was along three main routes. The principal way station was Turku, in the south-west of what later became Finland. Because this city was the centre of the region with the longest history of Swedish rule, Turku and its hinterland had, besides exports, other close economic connections with nearby Stockholm. The second centre was Viipuri, farther to the east. Only these two Finnish cities, Turku and Viipuri, had full and effective rights to trade overseas; their position reflected the basic twofold division in the Finnish town system.7 Another staple town, Helsinki, was located on the southern coast, but its exports remained insignificant. The third trade centre was on the Ostrobothnian coast, Oulu being the most important city. No Ostrobothnian city was a staple town, though, and their goods had to pass through Stockholm or Turku.8
Although the volume of trade remained limited and the regional division of labour generally weak, the three trade routes still illustrate the separation of the Finnish regions. What mattered were connections with the various centres of trade, not between the regions themselves. Moreover, Finland had no common front in economic policy. On the contrary, in many conflicts Turku and Viipuri opposed Ostrobothnian demands, and in other cases they followed different courses in alliance with certain ‘Swedish’ cities.9 In the eighteenth century, the decline of Sweden complicated the situation, leading to increased Russian influence and partial domination in the east (see Map 1).
The tripartite division applied not only to trade but also to productive and social structures. The three regions, their origins going back to the Middle Ages, developed as a result of varying natural conditions and differing degrees of penetration by the Swedish state.10 In fact, the different trade orientations only complete the picture. There were even differences in the ideological sphere: the mobile members of the clergy, for instance, seldom crossed regional borders.11
Map 2 shows the three main regions, plus eastern Finland, which was an economic hinterland of Viipuri, and the very sparsely populated northern Finland. This basic division is commonly used in accounts dealing with socioeconomic conditions up to the late nineteenth century.12 It corresponds roughly with the historical division of the provinces13 and (rather well) with the early twentieth-century apportionment by county or groups of counties (Map 3), the only major exception being Ostrobothnia. To south-western Finland belong the counties of Uusimaa, Turku and Pori, and Häme, and to eastern Finland the main areas of the counties of Kuopio and Mikkeli. Ostrobothnia is composed of the western parts of the county of Vaasa and of the adjacent coastal areas of the county of Oulu. Northern Finland is coterminous with the bulk of the county of Oulu. The regional statistics used in the subsequent pages exist in most cases only for the counties.
Both geographically and socially, the south-west was closest to the core of the Swedish state, being the region first colonised and subjugated by the Swedes. Thus the term Finland referred initially to this area specifically. A considerable Swedish-speaking agrarian and fishing population lived along the coast, and not only the largest trading centre, Turku, but also the majority of the manors in Finland were located in this region. Besides the gentry, the wealthier peasants also began to penetrate the agrarian upper class after enclosures and other reforms in the late 1700s. In the early nineteenth century crofters, and especially landless labourers, increased rapidly in number.
Map 2
Main Finnish regions and the line between the Reds and the Whites in the revolution of 1918
Map 3
The counties of Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century
The other region with close links to the state core, Ostrobothnia, also had a Swedish-speaking coastal population. An integral part of a larger whole consisting of the lands surrounding the upper end of the Gulf of Bothnia, geographically it displayed ‘strong ecological independence’,14 with a ridge separating it from the other Finnish regions, particularly in the south and southeast. Up to the mid-eighteenth century its trade was dominated by Stockholm, with coastal cities serving as way stations between Stockholm and the Ostrobothnian hinterland. The main products traded were tar and ships.
Tar was the second Swedish staple product after iron, and in the seventeenth century the Finnish regions, particularly Ostrobothnia, had become the most important tar-producing area in Europe. Because the Ostrobothnian countryside was dominated by well-to-do independent peasants, the tar-selling peasants evidently had considerable bargaining power in their relations with the merchants in the cities. The villages were compact peasant communities with no manors, and, in contrast with the south-west, the wealth of the peasant upper class was not primarily dependent on the exploitation of crofters’ labour power. Rather, the crofters were in a kind of partnership with the landowners, who needed labour for tar production.
Presumably more important still for increasing peasant wealth, however, was the flourishing ship-building industry, which was also based on Ostrobothnian forest reserves. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ship-building was probably the most important branch of the modest industry located in the Finnish regions, and the Ostrobothnian peasants were its main beneficiaries.15 Moreover, production for the provisioning of Stockholm was quite advanced among Ostrobothnian peasants, who, together with the south-western peasants, enjoyed greater wealth than in the other regions. Wealth was also more evenly divided than in the south-west.16 This group was capable of acting collectively, as powerfully indicated by the so-called Club War against state encroachments at the end of the sixteenth century. It was the most forcible peasant rebellion ever seen in Finland, and southern Ostrobothnia was its core area.
Developments in the early eighteenth century, when Sweden lost its position as a great power and was forced to surrender the area surrounding the city of Viipuri to Russia, definitely separated and differentiated this region from the south-west. Russian nobles soon dominated large tracts of land, and feudal relations were introduced in the countryside. At the same time, the proximity of St. Petersburg linked small peasants directly to the market. The small landholding peasants transported their own products to St. Petersburg and performed other transport jobs year-round. In 1800 the Russian capital, with 220,000 inhabitants, was one of the largest cities in Europe, and the number of Finns living there was exceeded only by two Finnish towns.17
In the east, or the so-called Savo-Karelian slash-and-burn region, the link with the dominant external centres was tenuous. Until the eighteenth century it remained an economic hinterland of Viipuri. The people were mobile and lived in dispersed settlements; there were no strong exploitative relations within the peasant population and, therefore, no strong peasant upper class. The small local gentry played only a minor role in agricultural production. Up to the eighteenth century the main export product was tar. In contrast to Ostrobothnia, merchant-peasant relations in Savo-Karelia seem to have been exploitative in nature: the merchants were able to squeeze the peasants for their own advantage.18 After the annexation of Viipuri and its surroundings by Russia in 1721 and 1743, peasant trade with the southern centres declined. Traditional local trade over the Russian border in the east continued, however, now stimulated by the growth of the new centre of St. Petersburg.19 But the scant grain and tar trade of this area was forced to turn to the Gulf of Bothnia, benefiting the Ostrobothnian economy.
The extremely sparsely populated north of Finland (including Lapland) corresponds roughly to the geographer’s ‘backwoods Finland’ (Luonnon-Suomi). During the Swedish period and even later, the north was an area of colonisation. There were also old market connections, based on salmon, furs, and meat, along the rivers running to the upper end of the Gulf of Bothnia. The north-east was involved in the market through Russian centres, across borders that long remained poorly defined.
In 1809, then, the regions of the newly founded Grand Duchy of Finland had a tradition of linkages to several outside centres. The south-west and Ostrobothnia had the closest connections with the core of Sweden; the future county of Viipuri had established close links with St. Petersburg; and in the east the ties with Viipuri had been partly replaced by connections with Ostrobothnia. The weakest links were between the east and the south-west: even by the mid-nineteenth century, the commercial ties of these areas were ‘quite negligible’.20 Agrarian class relations were most exploitative in the south-west, where the wealthy peasantry and other agrarian upper classes had long been involved in the market through cities and maritime trade. In Ostrobothnia, the traditional peasant society was not severely undermined, and market involvement made the landowning peasants prosper but did not create exploitative relationships comparable to those in the south-west. For the small landholding peasants in the Viipuri region, the St. Petersburg market was growing in importance. And in the east, the independent peasantry, less consolidated than in the south-west or Ostrobothnia, was less involved in the market than elsewhere.
2 Reorientation from Stockholm to St. Petersburg
In the first decades of the autonomous grand duchy, Stockholm was replaced by St. Petersburg in economic importance, although many economic and other connections with Sweden were maintained. With 524,000 inhabitants in 1863, St. Petersburg, the largest city in northern Europe, was a huge centre of consumption.21 In eastern Finland, peasant trade with the southern coast and with the Russian capital soon recovered, increasing the transportation of goods in the county of Viipuri. Butter became the main export from the east to St. Petersburg, along with timber and some iron from ironworks owned mainly by merchants and industrialists in St. Petersburg. There was considerable seasonal and permanent migration from both Viipuri and eastern Finland to St. Petersburg (Map 4).22 A significant connection between eastern Finland and the south, and at the same time between eastern Finland and St. Petersburg, was created when the Saimaa Canal from the eastern watercourse to Viipuri was completed in 1856 (Map 5). The railway linking the Finnish centres to St. Petersburg was completed in 1870.
Map 4
Regional distribution of passport-holding Finns living in Russia in 1881, by domicile in Finland (per thousand of the rural population recorded in the census)
Source: Engman 1978, 169
In other words, both regions in the east had close economic connections to the St. Petersburg area. To some extent the same development occurred in other regions as, over the whole country, trade turned increasingly toward Russia. (An important partial exception was Ostrobothnia, which continuously maintained active trade connections with Sweden).23 As a target for migration, St. Petersburg totally replaced the other traditional destination, Stockholm: in 1840, the number of St. Petersburg Finns (11,300) nearly equalled the population of Helsinki or Turku (13,300 and 13,200, respectively).24
An early indication of efforts on the part of the imperial authorities to weaken the orientation toward Sweden was the establishment, in 1812, of the grand ducal capital in Helsinki and the subsequent consolidation of a Helsinki-oriented town system.25 Thus Turku, during the Swedish period the most important Finnish centre, where the university, the archbishop’s seat, and the court of appeals were situated, and now a border city with both economic and cultural ties to Sweden, was relegated to secondary status, and Helsinki, a small city situated nearer St. Petersburg on the southern coast, was deliberately built up as a prestigious administrative centre for the country. For several decades it was a ‘parade capital’,26 with huge and continuous construction works for the central administration, the church, and the university.27
3 Territorial Integration in the Late Nineteenth Century
After the middle of the century a development gained momentum which united Finland economically around a domestic core. Capitalist transformation, dealt with above, created a regional division of labour that tied the various regions to one another in a more fundamental sense than ever before and accentuated many regional inequalities. Territorial integration was affected by Finland’s dependent position; but above all it was affected by the varying internal characteristics of the regions that had been consolidated earlier. This pattern holds for Western Europe in general: industrial growth in the rise of the capitalist mode of production concentrated in those regions that were initially the more advanced.
The primacy of endogenous over exogenous factors is discernible in the construction of the infrastructure, especially the railways. In the 1850s two plans were conceived for Finland’s railways. In one, the key idea was the effective unification of the inland centres with the coasts: a railway system that would spread radially from an inland hub to the coasts. In this plan the railways were supposed to serve internal Finnish trade and traffic specifically. In the competing plan, St. Petersburg was the centre of the railway system, with the main axis running from the south-east to the north-west. At first the former plan held sway (the Russians did not interfere), and the first railway, running from Helsinki to Hämeenlinna, was completed in 1862 (Map 5).28
In the long run, however, this plan was modified as a result of the capitalist development that transformed Finland in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this process, ‘Finland’s economic face turned from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Gulf of Finland’29 as the south became the core of the Finnish state: the capital was there, and, being closer to the export markets, it also became the gravitational centre of industrialisation (Maps 6 and 7). By 1894 three parallel south-north railway lines had been constructed, and a connecting east-west railway, running as far as St. Petersburg, went along the southern coast. This infrastructural development not only indicates the consolidation of the south as the core, but it also reflects the division between the two eastern and the two western regions; lines connecting the east and the west were constructed only later.
Territorial integration can be seen in industrialisation as well, as a number of big firms developed into national enterprises. In the sawmill industry, for example, the largest companies soon became ‘all-Finnish’. Active in various regions, above all they progressively acquired their raw materials from everywhere in the country, and not only from the local markets as before.30
Moreover, in the 1880s migration to St. Petersburg began to stagnate. This situation was partly a result of the city’s changing occupational structure, which reduced the relative advantages the Finnish migrants had enjoyed there. But it was also a result of internal Finnish development, as migration became increasingly oriented to southern Finland – another indication of its establishment as the core of the country.31
Map 5
The Finnish railway network by 1918, with the Saimaa Canal
Sources: Jutikkala 1968, 172; Suomen valtionrautatiet 1862–1912 1916, vol. 2
Map 6
Urban industrial workers, 1884–1885 and 1938
Source: Jutikkala 1959, 61
Map 7
Rural industrial workers, 1884–1885 and 1938
Source: Jutikkala 1959, p. 61
4 Core-Periphery Interaction – the County of Viipuri and Eastern Finland
Perhaps the most striking indication of the transformation of regional interconnections was the new linkage between the county of Viipuri, the coastal area of which quickly developed into a part of the core, and eastern Finland, which became a periphery of the emerging Finnish economic entity. In the mid-nineteenth century the sawmill industry was, apart from a modest iron-producing sector, the only industry in the east, which accounted in the 1850s for about two-thirds of Finland’s sawn goods. These goods were transported to the coast, where the commercial houses of Viipuri, the least-developed sawmill region in the country, dominated the trade. Simultaneously with the rapid expansion of forestry, however, the location of the sawmill concentration changed completely. By the end of the century, those in the eastern region produced only 12 percent of total output, whereas the county of Viipuri became the main focus of sawmill activity, accounting for about 25 percent of the country’s production of sawn goods (Table 5).
The introduction of large steam-operated sawmills played a central role in the redefinition of the regional division of labour. These mills were built at the mouths of rivers on the southern coast, by new domestic and foreign – notably Norwegian – entrepreneurs and by commercial houses in Viipuri and other centres. Most of the timber they required was transported from the eastern region, where the new steam-operated sawmills remained small and the old water-powered sawmills served local needs to a greater extent than before. ‘The small firms fell into the hands of the big firms, and the concentration of production in the coastal areas made the former inland centres of industry into mere sites for delivery of raw material’.32
Table 5
Production of sawn goods by county, 1860 and 1900
|
1860 |
1900 |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
County |
Standards |
Percentage |
Standards |
Percentage |
|
(thousands) |
(thousands) |
|||
|
Uusimaa |
1.6 |
4 |
55.2 |
9 |
|
Turku and Pori |
2.1 |
6 |
131.0 |
22 |
|
Häme |
1.9 |
5 |
69.8 |
12 |
|
Viipuri |
1.3 |
3 |
151.4 |
25 |
|
Kuopio |
12.0 |
31 |
44.9 |
8 |
|
Mikkeli |
13.7 |
35 |
24.2 |
4 |
|
Vaasa |
1.6 |
4 |
50.8 |
9 |
|
Oulu |
4.8 |
12 |
65.3 |
11 |
|
All counties |
39.0 |
100 |
592.6 |
100 |
In other words, industry in the eastern region stagnated in relation to the south. Not only did the proportion of the industrial labour force living in this region decline at the turn of the century, but its numerical strength also fell temporarily in large areas.33 The prevalence of agrarian occupations was actually accentuated at this time, as was the lack of an urban population (Table 6).
Perhaps the main indicator of the eastern region’s peripheral position, however, is the fact that, beginning in the 1890s, the timber companies purchased large tracts of peasant land almost exclusively in eastern Finland and adjacent areas to the north. By 1915 the companies had, in large areas of the east, purchased 20 percent or more of the land not owned by the state.34 In other regions, particularly in the south-west where the timber boom greatly affected the peasants, timber was sold, but not land.
Finally, an important indicator of the intensity and quality of the new interconnection was mass migration to the south (see Map 8). As stated above, whereas St. Petersburg had previously been the main target for migration, toward the end of the 1800s the county of Viipuri took its place. At the same time, the volume of migration greatly increased, apparently accelerated by the completion of railway links in 1889 and 1894.35 The migrants moved largely to new centres in the county of Viipuri located outside the established towns. Hence the prevalence of the rural in-migration over the rural out-migration for this county (Table 6).
Table 6
Population and migration in Finland by county, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
|
County |
Population |
Percentage |
Percentage |
Percentage |
Migrants from |
|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
growth in |
of population |
of total |
rural communes |
|||||
|
population, |
engaged in |
population |
1891–1900 as |
|||||
|
1865–1910 |
agriculturea |
who lived in |
percentage of |
|||||
|
urban areas |
1891 rural |
|||||||
|
population |
||||||||
|
1865 |
1910 |
1865 |
1910 |
1865 |
1910 |
|||
|
(thousands) |
(thousands) |
|||||||
|
Uusimaa |
172.2 |
362.9 |
111 |
64 |
43 |
19 |
42 |
3.5 |
|
Turku and Pori |
327.0 |
477.1 |
46 |
73 |
63 |
12 |
15 |
4.6 |
|
Häme |
172.1 |
334.7 |
94 |
80 |
61 |
2 |
16 |
5.5 |
|
Viipuri |
279.4 |
494.1 |
77 |
85 |
65 |
5 |
9 |
–5.1b |
|
Mikkeli |
163.3 |
191.9 |
18 |
85 |
82 |
2 |
4 |
5.7 |
|
Kuopio |
225.9 |
325.4 |
44 |
85 |
79 |
3 |
6 |
6.4 |
|
Vaasa |
314.4 |
439.2 |
40 |
84 |
74 |
4 |
8 |
3.0 |
|
Oulu |
188.7 |
296.0 |
57 |
78 |
71 |
6 |
8 |
0.8 |
|
All counties |
1,843.2 |
2,921.2 |
59 |
79 |
66 |
7 |
14 |
|
a The percentages are systematically too low (cf. Table 1); however, this has little effect on the relative differences between counties.
b I.e., more in-migration than out-migration.
Because migration was more intensive in eastern Finland than in any other region, population increased more slowly there than elsewhere (Table 6). This situation demonstrates the increasing permeability of regional boundaries and also reflects the redefinition of the division of labour between regions. Nearly half the sawmill workers in the county of Viipuri were born elsewhere, mainly in eastern Finland.36
The development of the eastern region displays significant parallels with the so-called dependent industrialisation depicted by Michael Hechter.37 Yet the change may also be portrayed as a move from the dominance of merchant capital to that of industrial capital. During the Swedish period the merchants had dominated the tar-based linkage: they controlled the export of tar, while actual production remained in the hands of the peasants. The same held true for the butter trade. From the late nineteenth century on, however, the owners of capital (still largely merchants from Viipuri) dominated the linkage. Capital was required to construct modern sawmills and buy land; the peasant population was required mainly as wage labour in felling and floating timber and in the coastal sawmills. In this way the territorial division of labour was redefined, accentuating regional inequalities.
Despite the fact that the capitalist transformation seized the region, it did not enable the growing rural proletariat to move to the towns and industrial centres in the region, as industrialisation in the core had done. It seems that even the intense migration of the late nineteenth century did not reduce the proportion of landless laborers in the east compared to other regions. More important, the structure of the landless population in eastern Finland differed greatly from that elsewhere, for in the east rural poverty was much greater and was presumably on the increase, in relative terms, in the last decades of the 1800s.38
It is also significant that in this region the timber boom did not contribute to the creation of a strong peasant upper class. True, the landowning peasants gained by selling timber, but there is no doubt that they were unable to reap the benefits of the boom to the extent that the established peasant upper class in the south-west did. The purchases of peasant land are an eloquent indication of this difference. A crisis in slash-and-burn cultivation in the middle of the century had posed great difficulties for the eastern peasants, and although the butter trade with St. Petersburg eased the situation, paradoxically it also prolonged the crisis, because it was based on pastures created by slash-and-burn practices.39 By the late nineteenth century many peasants, especially those living in the east and in neighbouring areas to the north, had fallen deeply into debt to merchants, and they were often forced to sell their farms and forests.40
5 South-Western Finland as a Core Region
Figure 1
Finnish cities, 1815 and 1910, ranked by population
Source: The figure is based on Annuaire Statistique de Finlande 1922, Table 11
In the transformation, the south-west, along with the southern coast of the county of Viipuri, developed into the core area of Finland.41 The position of south-western Finland is indicated in Table 6, which gives information on population and urbanisation both before and after industrial take-off. In both 1865 and 1910, Uusimaa had the smallest percentage of population engaged in agriculture, and the greatest percentage living in the cities. (The figures are somewhat distorted by the fact that, particularly in the county of Viipuri, the new centres were not classified as cities.) But the higher degree of urbanisation in the whole of south-western Finland is much more discernible in 1910 than forty-five years earlier. It was precisely in the three south-western counties (and Viipuri) that urban growth and the decline in the proportion of the agricultural population were greatest. The concentration of industry tells the same story (Maps 6 and 7).
The figures for Uusimaa are highly influenced by the growth of Helsinki. Only in this period did Helsinki become the capital of Finland, not merely administratively and culturally but also economically. During the last third of the nineteenth century Helsinki grew rapidly, and by 1920 it was the dominant city, as may be seen from the ranking of cities by size in the figure on page 67.42
This change was initiated and given momentum largely by the construction of the railways. The first two railways, one from Helsinki to Hämeenlinna (1862) and the other from Riihimäki to Lahti (1870), tied two great inland watercourses with Helsinki (Map 5). After the opening of the railways, then, Helsinki became the leading port for imports, the merchant fleet concentrated there, and various industries developed. Turku lost its former hinterland of Häme, and eastern Finland became connected with the capital. In the process, the inland cities developed at the expense of the coastal cities.43
It is indicative that the migration from the east, oriented in the 1800s mainly to St. Petersburg and the county of Viipuri, was oriented increasingly toward Helsinki after the turn of the century. Nevertheless, the majority of the nineteenth-century migrants to Helsinki came from western Finland (Map 8).
For the peasants, and above all for the wealthy peasants, industrialisation and urbanisation created opportunities to participate more fully in the market, especially as sellers of dairy products. Both low-priced imported grain and a definite crisis in traditional grain production had led to great difficulties in farming by the 1870s. In this situation the booming sawmill industry was instrumental in the changeover to commercial stock-raising, allowing landowners to finance the transition in part by selling timber from their forests. Thus the south-west went through the process more rapidly and easily than did the east.
Map 8
Net internal migration to 1920, by county of birth
Source: Lento 1951, map 8 (appendix)
In the south-west an established agrarian upper class had existed before the capitalist transformation. Now the changes in production and in market conditions greatly promoted the commercialisation of the agrarian upper class and the penetration of capitalist exchange relations into the countryside. Class conflict intensified both between the landowners and the crofters and between the landowners and the growing number of agricultural laborers.44
6 Declining Ostrobothnia
Perhaps the most important characteristic of the course of events in Ostrobothnia in the nineteenth century is the absence of a sudden capitalist upsurge comparable to that in the south and east, the only exceptions being the region’s more northerly towns, which developed into sawmill centres. Relative to the south, this wealthy region declined economically. Moreover, the problems caused by the decline seem to have been distributed more evenly among agrarian groups than was the case in the south with the problems resulting from increasing market involvement.45 The decline was a result, first, of the cutting off of ties with Sweden. The central areas of Sweden had been the main market for Ostrobothnian grain and butter, which had increasingly replaced tar and ships as the main products of the region after the late 1700s. Sweden remained a central trading partner during the next century, but now sales were crippled by Swedish tariffs. Second, the timber boom, which affected the south-west and the east, failed to affect Ostrobothnia, because the earlier tar-burning and ship-building industries had severely reduced the supply of timber.46 The Ostrobothnian peasants simply did not have the forest incomes of the wealthy south-western peasants.
Map 9
Overseas emigration from Finland, 1870–1914, by commune
Source: Kero 1974, 51
The economic decline resulted in the preservation of many traditional traits in the agrarian community, such that its structure did not change drastically during the nineteenth century. Even the very rapid increase in population throughout the century affected the social structure less than might be expected. Part of the increase was channelled into the prevailing structure: in contrast to developments elsewhere, the number of landowning peasants in Ostrobothnia increased, because it was a common practice to divide farms among the heirs of an owner. It was also more common than elsewhere for some of the children to remain on the home farm as crofters paying nominal rent. The increase in population was also channelled outside the region. Emigration from Finland to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century was greatest from Ostrobothnia (Map 9), accounting for nearly two-thirds of total emigration in 1870–1914 and leading to a decline in Ostrobothnia’s share of total Finnish population.47
In addition to the economic decline and the persistence of the agrarian community, the region remained isolated economically. In a sense, in the nineteenth century Ostrobothnia still ‘did not belong to Finland’.48 Characteristically, whereas the population increase in other regions during the late nineteenth century led to internal migration, in Ostrobothnia it resulted in increased emigration. Actually, this was not a new phenomenon. In the previous period emigration to Sweden and later to St. Petersburg had made the Ostrobothnian emigration the most extensive in Finland.49 Emigration to the United States only serves to emphasise the lasting importance of this region’s external orientation.
The isolation was, of course, relative. Ostrobothnia was linked to the south by the railways in the 1880s, and many Ostrobothnians migrated to Helsinki in the last decades of the century. But this connection came about very late, given the wealthy past of the province. Moreover, the construction of the railways had considerable adverse effects. The lines’ south-north orientation broke old ties that reached from the coast to the inland areas, and it harmed business and industry in the coastal cities. At the same time, the once-thriving ship-building industry declined and ultimately was largely transferred to south-western cities.50 Apart from Vaasa, the largest Ostrobothnian towns (Oulu, Kokkola, and Raahe) lost their former position in the ranking of Finnish cities by size (see figure, page 67).
The Ostrobothnian experience is in some respects reminiscent of the industrialisation of the periphery portrayed by Sidney Tarrow in his assessment of the theories of ‘peripheral marginality’. In the earliest stage of industrialisation, isolated factories and mines grew up wherever there were sources of raw materials. In the second stage, emphasis was on seeking out agglomerations of consumers and services; the industrial core developed in other regions, leaving the periphery in relative isolation and decline. In the third stage, industrialisation occurred again in the isolated region, but this time as a dependent phenomenon.51
In Ostrobothnia early prosperity was based on the exploitation of forests – on tar-burning and ship-building. These activities later declined just when the Finnish core was consolidated in the south. In the third phase, during the 1900s, Ostrobothnia industrialised, but its industrialisation was secondary to that in the south (and, after World War II, in Sweden). The relative decline of Ostrobothnia and its subsequent linkage to the core of Finland are crucial factors in the analysis of the nature of the religious and political mobilisation in the region (Chapter 7).
7 Division of Labour and State Penetration in Northern Finland
In the north the connection with the Ostrobothnian cities was redefined and strengthened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the region became more closely tied to the integrating state. Yet long distances and sparse population remained of lasting importance. At the beginning of the twentieth century the region accounted for 42 percent of Finland’s total area but only five percent of its population. Landholding was rather evenly distributed, and small farms predominated. A regional division of labour arose which resembled that between Viipuri and eastern Finland. The northern Ostrobothnian cities, especially Oulu, developed into centres for the sawmill industry, with the richly forested inland areas in northern Finland serving as sources of raw materials, particularly along the two rivers flowing west to the towns of Oulu and Kemi. Timber companies obtained more forest land here than in any region except eastern Finland.52
Before the timber boom the peasants in the Kainuu region, surrounding the town of Kajaani (Map 5), were exploited by the merchants and tar producers of Oulu,53 as the peasants in eastern Finland had once been exploited by the merchants of Viipuri. Similarly, after the growth of the sawmill industry, a large number of indebted peasants in Kainuu were also forced to sell their lands to the merchants and ultimately to the timber companies; thus – again as in eastern Finland – was created a landless population which then migrated to the coastal centres to work in the sawmill industry.54
The sawmill industry, then, tied the northern inland to the coast; but at the same time connections with the south of Finland were also improved. The railway reached Oulu in 1886, and it was extended farther north after 1900; another railway line was extended to Kajaani from the south-east in 1904. The railway broke the monopoly of the Oulu merchants in that area55 and somewhat eased the miserable conditions of the agrarian population. Another factor connecting the north with other regions was the importance of seasonal logging and floating. After 1900 logging provided work for as many as 10,000 men every winter, with the workforce recruited not only from the north but also from other regions, especially eastern Finland.
There is one further indicator of integration with the south. The enclosures, which elsewhere had been carried out mainly in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, were postponed to the late nineteenth and even to the present century. Unlike elsewhere, the boundary between state and private peasant-owned land became a matter of major controversy, only to be aggravated by the rise of forestry. The local peasants considered the reform a violation by the state of the peasants’ rights. This was especially the attitude in the eastern areas, where ‘people for a longer time than elsewhere had been allowed to live free from societal “bonds” ’.56 In northern Finland the state was widely regarded as an intruder in local life, particularly as it became (again, unlike other regions) the principal forest owner: here both the state and private companies owned large tracts of land.57 Only in the northernmost areas did the Lapps and others continue to raise reindeer and to trade with centres along the Gulf of Bothnia, although to be sure, their traditional sources of livelihood were disturbed by continuing colonisation.58
8 Summary
In the nineteenth century, then, economic integration and state consolidation caused the class structure to develop in regionally different ways (Table 7). South-western Finland, with two-fifths of the total population in 1910, developed into the core, and there the class conflict was heightened both between the prospering landowners and the crofters and between the landowners and the growing number of agricultural laborers. The industrial working class, moreover, was more numerous there than elsewhere. The coastal area of Viipuri was another area that developed into the core. Outside the industrial centres, the majority of the population consisted of smallholding peasants who were dependent on the market both as producers and as workers. Eastern Finland and large areas of the north were forced to accept the role of the periphery. There the conflict between the wealthier landowning peasants and the landless was accompanied and partly confounded by conflicts between the landless and private companies, and between the small landholders (both owners and crofters) and these companies. Ostrobothnia stagnated and remained relatively isolated from the other regions. Many traditional traits of the homogeneous agrarian community persisted in Ostrobothnia throughout the nineteenth century.
Table 7
Finnish regions in terms of core-periphery position and class relations
|
Region |
Core-periphery position at beginning of twentieth century |
Community structure in early nineteenth century |
Class relations at beginning of twentieth century |
|---|---|---|---|
|
South-western Finland |
Core |
Well-established hierarchical structure; stable involvement in the market through manors and wealthy peasant farms |
Traditional community structure undermined by commercial farming and the rise of forestry: sharp class division between an established freeholding class and growing nonlandowning groups; formation of an industrial working class |
|
County of Viipuri |
(Core)a |
Peasant involvement in the market as smallholders and seasonal workers |
Peasant involvement in the market as smallholders and seasonal workers; formation of an industrial working class in the coastal zone |
|
Ostrobothnia |
Separate region |
Well-integrated compact peasant communities with a wealthy upper layer involved in the market through cities |
Traditional community structure not severely undermined |
|
Eastern Finland |
Periphery |
Dispersed settlements with tenuous ties to the market |
A rapid market penetration through forestry at the end of the nineteenth century: a weakly established freeholding class and a very poor landless population |
|
Northern Finland |
Periphery |
Dispersed settlements with tenuous ties to the market; area of colonisation |
Penetration by the market (largely through forestry) and by the state: a recently settled and poor landholding class and a poor landless population |
a Only the southern area of the county of Viipuri developed into a part of the core.
Whereas regional variation was exhibited in the agrarian class structure, in industry the situation was somewhat different. Despite marked concentration in the south, industrialisation was creating a modern class of wageworkers all over the country,59 and by the 1890s the industrial working class had taken shape on a national scale, yet another indication of the advance of territorial integration.
Links between the agrarian and industrial proletariat were naturally closest where logging and floating played an important role. But more significant for the eventual linkage of the two groups is the fact that the growth of the industrial proletariat so closely paralleled the change in agrarian class relations, with the great majority of industrial workers coming from agriculture.
Klinge 1975, p. 28.
Heckscher 1936, p. 367 (cited in Åström 1980a, pp. 295–6).
Mead 1981, pp. 86–92.
Åström 1980a, pp. 302, 310–11.
Klinge 1975, p. 26.
Åström 1980b.
A. Peltonen 1982, p. 97.
See Åström 1977a, pp. 145–60.
Ranta and Åström 1980, pp. 258, 259, 262.
See Kaukiainen 1980, p. 89.
Wirilander 1974, pp. 293–8.
E.g., Jutikkala 1963, pp. 371–405; Soininen 1974, p. 19; Sarmela 1969, pp. 251–63.
Ostrobothnia is one of the historical provinces. South-western Finland is coterminous with Uusimaa, Finland Proper, Satakunta, and the southern areas of Häme; eastern Finland corresponds roughly to Savo and North Karelia; and northern Finland corresponds roughly to Lapland (see Sømme 1968, pp. 6–7).
Sarmela 1969, p. 253.
Aunola 1967, pp. 336–42, 372, 376; Åström 1977b, p. 103; Virrankoski 1980, p. 244.
Jutikkala 1980, p. 228.
About 3,000 Finns lived in St. Petersburg at that time – as many, incidentally, as lived in Stockholm. The populations of Turku, Oulu, and Helsinki rose to 9,400, 3,500, and 3,000, respectively. The corresponding figure for Viipuri, which then belonged to Russia, was 3,100 (Engman 1983, p. 389).
Åström 1977b, pp. 93–5.
Engman 1983, pp. 114–16.
Wirilander 1960, pp. 753, 754.
Engman 1983, pp. 97–101, 315.
For a large number of smallholding peasants, seasonal migration and transport jobs became the primary source of earnings, displacing farming proper (ibid., pp. 138–9, pp. 150–8).
Joustela 1963, pp. 304, 342–3.
Engman 1983, p. 389; Engman 1984, pp. 130–1.
A. Peltonen 1982, p. 97.
Klinge 1975, p. 29.
Klinge 1980b, pp. 18–20. Although the university was moved to Helsinki only after a fire devastated Turku in 1827, the decision had presumably been made prior to the destruction.
Jutikkala 1968, pp. 169–73; Tommila 1978, p. 17.
Jutikkala 1950, p. 164.
Ahvenainen 1984, pp. 274–5, 299.
Engman 1983, pp. 289, 334–7, 360, 390–1.
Ahvenainen 1984, pp. 212, 218–30, 250–62, 283–5; Lakio 1975, p. 105 (quotation).
Oksa 1978, pp. 72–3.
Harve 1947, pp. 41–8.
Lento 1951, pp. 168–9.
Snellman 1914, Appendix of tables, p. 35.
Hechter 1975, p. 33.
Haatanen 1968, pp. 142–3.
M. Peltonen 1986; Soininen 1974, pp. 384–5.
See Hjelt 1893, pp. 15–17.
A. Peltonen 1982, pp. 187–9.
The sizes are plotted by rank, after George Kingsley Zipf’s (1941, p. 11) log-normal model for descending population size.
Jutikkala 1968, p. 171; Jutikkala 1977, pp. 96, 100.
See Alapuro 1978, pp. 126–8.
See Soininen 1974, p. 402.
Joustela 1963, pp. 244–9, 304, 342–3; Soininen 1974, pp. 401–2.
Kero 1974, pp. 50–2; Valkonen 1980, p. 184. The proportion calculated by Kero covers an area slightly larger than Ostrobothnia ‘proper’.
Kaila 1931, p. 360.
De Geer and Wester 1976, pp. 30–44.
Tommila 1978, p. 26; Rasila 1982c, pp. 114–18.
Tarrow 1977, pp. 23–4.
Ahvenainen 1984, pp. 236–40, 270–3; Isohookana-Asunmaa 1980, pp. 32–3.
See Hautala 1956, pp. 228–39.
Kyllönen 1975, pp. 122–3, 131. Kainuu was adjacent to eastern Finland, but because of the direction of the waterways its historical connections were with the Gulf of Bothnia, not with the south.
Hautala 1956, pp. 247–9.
Kyllönen 1975, p. 279.
Isohookana-Asunmaa 1980, pp. 32–3.
See Massa 1983, pp. 28–32, 71.
Regional differences in the wage levels of the agrarian workers decreased in the late 1800s as well, and at the turn of the century a national market for the agrarian labor force began to take shape (Heikkinen et al. 1983, p. 91).