Search results for "61"

Bourgeois Women and the Question of Divorce in Finland in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

2017

This article explores perceptions and actions of Finnish upper-middle-class women with regard to divorce in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Divorce was discussed in the periodicals of bourgeois women’s associations and later in Finnish Parliament, in which several leading figures of the bourgeois women’s associations were elected as members from 1907 onwards. Compared to other issues related to marriage and its legislation, divorce was not an especially important question for bourgeois women, but a tool to promote other issues. Women writers demanded drunkenness and violence as new grounds for divorce, and proposed that loveless marriages should be made possible to dissolve. M…

Normative Imperatives and Communal Influences : The Consistory's Role in Proposing Lutheran Clergy in the 18th-Century Russian Border Area

2017

Merit was strongly emphasized in the Privileges of the Clergy (in 1723) and legislative reforms, as well as in the formalization of election practices in connection with clerical appointments in the Kingdom of Sweden in the early 18th century. According to existing research, this resulted in a deepening difference between the standpoints of the laity and the ecclesiastical authorities. However, in studying the appointments of clergy in the Lutheran parishes in Russia’s western border area in the mid- and late 18th century, this article argues that the boundary between the opinions of the diocesan board (in this case the Consistory of Fredrikshamn) and those of the parishioners with regard t…

Defending dissertations on economic history

2016

In most disciplines, the number, quality and topics of doctoral dissertations afford useful information on the state of affairs in research and formal graduate education. Moreover, dissertations ma...

Towards debate and open conversation

2016

The Warm Water in my Heart - The Meanings of Love among the Finnish Country Population in the Second Half of the 17th Century

2011

This article examines the meanings and contents given to the emotion called love in early modern Finnish culture. The study takes as its starting point three distinct love affairs found in the district court records. These cases violated the boundaries between the estates, for the women were of noble birth and the men came from peasant backgrounds. Historical love is here approached using the theories of Catherine A. Lutz, Carol & Peter Stearns and Barbara Rosenwein. Following these scholars, love is seen as a cultural and social phenomenon, bound up with the culture and mentalities of the era. In early modern times marriage was the basis of society and promoted by both the state and the ch…

On Forced Migrations: Transnational Realities and National Narratives in Post-1945 (West) Germany

2014

This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argues that a nationally oriented, highly selective public narrative of the forced migrations soon emerged in the Federal Republic, a narrative that stressed German suffering, relativized German crimes, and, crucially, elided differences among the forced…

The business elite in Finland: a prosopographical study of family firm executives 1762–2010

2015

This study presents a prosopographical analysis of the Finnish business elite. The longitudinal panel dataset includes 456 members of family firms from 1762–2010 who have received the honorary title of counsellor in Finland. Counsellor biographies have been written by an economic history association network of 130 historians. Most family firms are no longer elite after the third generation of the family business or the second counsellor generation; therefore, the same core families rarely remain part of the economic elite for more than 100 years.

Tackling Market Failure or Building a Cartel? Creation of an Investment Regulation System in Finnish Forest Industries

2015

Government intervention in the economy is often justified by the need to correct market failures. This study analyzes one case, the investments of Finnish forest industries, in which, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both policy makers and the trade association representing the sector reasoned that intervention was particularly necessary because otherwise, the only substantial natural resource in the small country would be overexploited. In the long run, however, the growth of forest resources turned out to be higher, and the demand for wood lower, than expected. Furthermore, the most influential industrialists managed to “capture” the regulatory system and make it a component of their ne…

Navigation Acts and the integration of North Baltic shipping in the early nineteenth century

2017

This article discusses how Navigation Acts affected shipping and commodity trade from and to the Northern Baltic during the early nineteenth century. We use Finnish shipping and foreign trade as an example of trade integration at the time. Finland can be used as a ‘laboratory case’ to study the importance of the Navigation Acts, as the eastern part of the area followed Russian legislation without the Navigation Act to restrict shipping to domestic vessels, while the western part followed Swedish legislation with strict protection through the Swedish version of the Act ( Produktplakat). The article argues that the role played by foreign vessels in shipments of Finnish export goods was far m…

Marriage Guidance, Women and the Problem(s) of Returning Soldiers in Finland, 1944-1946

2017

When former military chaplains began to give marital guidance to troubled couples after the end of hostilities with the Soviet Union (1941–1944) in Finland, new information about the causes and experiences of marital problems and divorces emerged during guidance sessions. Even lengthy marriages were seen to be burdened due to the stress of reunion and men’s wartime infidelity, increased inclination to drinking and aggressive behaviour. The article discusses the meaning and construction of marital expectations with respect to the development of post-war marital dissolution, and argues that wives in particular tried to adjust their marital expectations in accordance with the general developme…