Funded by Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius foundation and Tore Browaldhs foundation.
Project period: 2021-2025
Project team: Martin Dackling (Lund University, PI), Matteo Pompermaier (Lund University/University of Brescia), Bonnie Clementsson (Lund University), and Marcus Falk (Lund University).
This project examines inheritance strategies among the Swedish nobility during the nineteenth century, a period of profound social and political transformation. While the dissolution of the estate society and the 1865 parliamentary reform marked the end of the nobility’s formal privileges, the aristocracy nevertheless retained its position as an economic elite well into the twentieth century. The project seeks to explain this paradox by analysing how noble families managed, preserved, and transferred property across generations between 1810 and 1914. Drawing on wills, probate inventories, and estate divisions from the archives of Sweden’s appellate courts, the study investigates both the composition of noble wealth and the gendered distribution of inheritance. By combining social, economic, and gender perspectives, the project illuminates how an embattled elite adapted to a new legal and social order, and how inheritance practices contributed to the persistence of economic inequality and elite continuity in modern Sweden.
Publications from the project so far:
Dackling & Pompermaier, “Mapping Family, Wealth, and Inheritance: A Genealogical Approach (Sweden, 18th-20th centuries)”, accepted for publication in Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Clementsson & Dackling, “Deras sista vilja. Adliga arvsstrategier och testamentespraxis i 1800-talets Sverige”, Historisk tidskrift 145:4 (2025)