The Fordell Family: A Struggle for Trade After Three Generations in Power

Abstract

Ostrobothnia (Österbotten/Pohjanmaa) was a province on the Finnish side of the Realm of Sweden that stood out from other provinces in sixteenth-century Finland. Unlike the southern provinces, there was no nobility, and the social structure had developed in different ways.¹ But the lack of nobility did not mean that Bothnia (i.e., Österbotten, Norrbotten, and Västerbotten) had an exactly democratic peasant freeholder society. It meant, however, that there was some room for agency, with the administration being located so far away in Stockholm. In the Swedish-speaking northern part of Ostrobothnia was an elite of wealthy peasant freeholders, called birkarls in Swedish, who dominated the fur trade and were in charge of taxation from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.