I was just re-reading Willem Moberg’s classic novel “The Immigrants”. It is a very good novel, centered on the lives of Swedish immigrants to the USA, in 1850.
Moberg’s description of life in Sweden, ca. 1850, was pretty grim.
I gather that at that time, Sweden was a rather poor, backward country, sitting on the periphery of Europe. Swedish peasants were poor, and prospects for life were grim. In Moberg’s words (describing Sweden): “time stood still in their ancient villages”.
Supposedly something like 25% of the population LEFT Sweden in those years!
Yet, Sweden modernized, and is now a very high tech nation, with an excellent standard of living, and they make a lot of stuff themselves (jet fighter planes, computers, and automobiles).
So what happened that made the society so dynamic, after being poor nad backward for so long?
With nothing to back it up I think that the advent of railways is a contributing factor.
I have no data on Sweden, but it’s easterly, similarly forested, similarly backwards neighbor found a huge asset upon the adoption of wood pulp as a raw material in paper manufacturing from the late 1800’s onwards, converting the vast Fennoscandian tracts of little-used coniferous forests into “Green Gold”. Norway spruce makes for top-quality paper pulp, and it is a dominant species here.
Much as elsewhere in Europe, industrialization happened. Sawmills were built in a great number of places as the many rivers offered cheap transportation of lumber through log driving, and the long coastline meant it could be shipped out from virtually anywhere.
Also, the invention of dynamite, which in itself was a large export industry, allowed iron and gold to be mined in regions that were known to be rich in ore but had previously been too difficult to work at a large scale, and several new mining companies and steelmills were formed.
Politically, the Bernadotte kings can only be said to have been more liberal than their predecessors, and they also took more personal interest in economic and scientific growth, so while it may be debatable how much of a factor that would have been it certainly couldn’t hurt. Even so, it was inevitable that the country would be in a slump following the loss of Finland, which was almost half of the area of the kingdom proper, back then including part of Karelia and Ingria, and providing fully one third of the tax income. Norway at that time was if anything even more backwards and provincial than Sweden, so it wasn’t such a good trade.
Yes, industrial revolution happened. First as commercial waves demanding materials like wood and tar and butter and then actual start of industrial production.
The emigration is actually part of the solution: when the population increases, people need to work worse and worse land . If some pressure is vented out, those who stay have it easier and can invest more in bettering life instead of just survival.
Later on it probably helped that Sweden abstained from both world wars, but the European countries in the wars still needed to import stuff.
Though there have been guesses here so far in IMHO, I’m moving this to General Questions since there is likely a factual answer.
I’m posting to subscribe because Great-Granddad emigrated from Sweden around 1870 or so. His brother left a few years earlier, so I’m guessing times were pretty tough.