4. Trade, Taxation, and Population

In Chapter 2 we discussed how the early modern period saw the Nordic states’ colonial ambition gaining pace and the ambition for both Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland was to tie the northern part of Fennoscandia closer to their respective countries and determine who had the right to what area. The colonization process had many parts, and one important feature was how the Swedish state integrated Sami trade into its economic networks.

Trade has been an important part of Sami livelihood since prehistoric time when hunting was the backbone in trade. Hunting has even been regarded as an important factor behind the formation of Sami ethnicity.¹ Scholars have argued that Sami ethnicity in northern Fennoscandia emerged as a result of the interaction between hunting populations and surrounding agrarian societies.² An elaborate trade system developed between hunters in the north and traders and producers in the east and south. Hunting was an economic specialization that made the Sami dependent on trade.³

Until the seventeenth century, furs from wild game were the main commodity in Lule lappmark, and trade was managed through birkarlar who traveled around the inland in winter to trade with groups of six to nine Sami households at different sites.⁴ Sami exchanged furs for a great variety of commodities, such as flour , butter, and frieze, but also silver jewelry and coins. Sami also traded and bartered with residents and merchants along the Norwegian coast in summer. There was a great demand for furs on the European market in the sixteenth century, but problems in interior north Scandinavia and changes in the international fur market led to a diminished fur trade in the early seventeenth century.⁵ New trade patterns had emerged that increased the fur import to Europe, first from Russia and later from North America.⁶ This was also a time for fundamental changes in how the organization of trade in interior northern Scandinavia was organized, as the government decided that all trade had to be centralized to official marketplaces in each lappmark.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century a total overhaul of the Swedish state’s governance system of the lappmark took place.⁷ A chosen place functioned like a hub in each lappmark, where four essential activities took place: church services, tax collection, judiciary, and trade. During the sixteenth century, the church lacked an organization in lappmarken, and the few church activities that took place in the area were organized from the parishes along the coast.⁸ In the beginning of the seventeenth century, permanent church buildings belonging to the Christian Lutheran state church were being erected near the marketplaces, and local courts (häradsrätter) with state-appointed judges were established. At market time, Sami could thus do business, attend church services, and take part in court sessions, during the course of a few days or weeks. Henceforth, the marketplace was also where the government collected the yearly tax from Sami. There was little risk that one activity would interfere with another. During church service no other activities were allowed, and when the court convened, the market was closed. Hence, it was possible for people to attend both church services and court sessions and for the state to use the two arenas to reach people with information. The church and the state were two sides of the same coin. The clergies kept records of people, which facilitated tax collection, and they could even interrogate people before court sessions. Vicars read out loud state information in church and judges or clerks did the same in court before the trials began. At the end of the court session, that year’s tax record was read out loud and verified by the court, and tax collection could begin.⁹

The introduction of all these new institutional elements constituted a vital part of the Swedish government’s ambition to gain control over interior northern Fennoscandia and its inhabitants.¹⁰ These institutional arrangements existed throughout the early modern period. In Lule lappmark, Jokkmokk was the chosen place, and the new organization was instituted between 1605 and 1607.¹¹ Markets were held twice per year, winter and spring, and the most important was the winter market when the court convened and tax collection took place. The day for the winter market in Lule lappmark to start was Paul the Apostle’s day, January 25. The date was moved to February around 1725.¹² Summer and fall markets were held in Norway, and the Norwegian and Swedish seasons for markets complemented each other and created opportunities to visit markets throughout the year.¹³

The Swedish state’s institutional arrangements regarding Sami trade did not stop with changes within the lappmark. To facilitate trade, according to the feudal ideological principle in Sweden that people in the countryside were obliged to deliver their products to burghers in towns,¹⁴ new towns were established along the Gulf of Bothnia. In 1621 and 1622, four towns were founded: Umeå, Piteå , Luleå, and Torneå (Fi. Tornio). Each of them corresponded with a lappmark. Torneå served both Torne and Kemi lappmark, and the burghers in Luleå had the right to trade in Lule lappmark; the burghers visited their respective areas during market days.¹⁵ In court records from the eighteenth century, the mayor of Luleå and burghers from the town frequently appear in the proceedings. However, it was hard for the state to contain trade only to the markets and the burghers of the towns because it lacked means to control the trade in the countryside. The Sami often had the ability and the will to take care of their own trade.¹⁶ Hence, trade and barter also took place outside official market days.

Trade requires at least a buyer and a seller. Sami were well situated as sellers and buyers and were good business partners for several reasons. They had a mobile lifestyle and Sami in Lule lappmark traveled from the Norwegian coast in the west to the Gulf of Bothnia in Sweden in the east.¹⁷ The Lule Sami area thus covered a larger area than Lule lappmark. Hence, they could carry goods from one coast to the other. They also traveled to markets in other districts.

Mobility also gave them other benefits. From northern Norway it is known that Sami living along the coast were connected to the Swedish trading system. They also traded with Russian merchants. Copper they acquired in trade in the Norwegian town of Bergen was sold for a higher price in Russia, and they could use the difference in price between areas to their advantage. Sami knew that the Russians paid higher prices for most goods than Swedish traders would.¹⁸ Similarly, Sami could exploit the difference in exchange rates between Norwegian merchants and Swedish tax collectors to their advantage. Sami in Sweden could sell stock fish to Norwegians and use items obtained in return to pay Swedish taxes.¹⁹

The Sami’s mobility also facilitated transportation. The means of transportation was the reindeer, and without knowing how to handle and care for reindeer, transportation in inland circumpolar areas would have been almost impossible. The Sami not only had reindeer for transportation of their own goods, they also provided transport for others and boarded reindeer belonging to burghers in the coastal towns.²⁰ In the seventeenth century, Sami, especially those living in the mountains, played an important role as middlemen in the transit trade between the Norwegian coast and the Gulf of Bothnia in Sweden, as well as in transporting goods to and from markets in interior northern Fennoscandia. Sami trade provided great value to the Swedish government, because it both contributed to the state’s stretched economy and helped to sustain the burghers in the towns that had been established along the coast.

Mobility was not the only advantage Sami had in trade. They also were able to provide goods that were in demand. Until the end of the sixteenth century, their most valuable goods were furs. Sami trade in reindeer products grew in importance in the seventeenth century. By this time, many Sami had enlarged their reindeer herds and thereby had increased surpluses, for example, of cheese, meat, and furs. These products could either be sold at market or bartered with neighboring groups.²¹ The Sami where not self-sufficient, and the revenues were often used to buy a wide range of products, such as tobacco , alcohol , copper , steel , iron, fishing gear , needles , wool blankets, clay tobacco pipes , tar , hides from cows and oxen, and silver objects. What goods they exchanged and how they changed through time, and using reindeer for transportation, are discussed in more detail in later chapters, particularly Chapter 8.

Marklund analyzed Sami subsistence and trade in the forest area in Ume lappmark from the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.²² He presents a model of trade and subsistence that illuminates the high level of connectedness between Sami in the mountains, Sami in the forest, and peasants along the Gulf of Bothnia. Moreover, Nielssen studied Sami economic adaption around 1700, focusing on coastal Sami in northern Norway. He concludes that economic adaptation varied between regions where sets of subsistence activities played important roles.²³ Historical Sami trade has been studied in detail by Hansen and put in a wider historical Sami context by Hansen and Olsen.²⁴ The latter see a connection between the changes in trade made by the Swedish government and the introduction of reindeer pastoralism in the area.²⁵ In these works, the Sami’s active and dynamic role in trade systems in early modern northern Fennoscandia is emphasized. Most recent archaeological and historical analysis portrays the Sami mainly as their own historical agents with varying subsistence practices and many contacts with neighboring groups, not least with regard to trade. We agree with this research and interpret the changing trade patterns in interior northern Scandinavia in the seventeenth century as the most important attribute for explaining the development of reindeer pastoralism, a development that spurred changes in property regimes.

The second attribute to consider is taxation, which is important for many reasons. What inhabitants paid in tax can tell us about production and how those who imposed the tax viewed production. Hence, changes in taxation might tell us how the state’s attitude changed toward production. Tax also tells us about the relation between two parties and how it changed through time. Tax was not only a means for the state to gain income, it was also a means to control goods and people. In a society where much tax was in-kind, tax could benefit the state’s needs and give us information about what different groups added to the total revenue from tax. Hence, discussion about new tax codes could unearth ideas the state had about the taxed subjects as well as the tax objects.

Since medieval times, birkarlar had the privilege to trade with Sami, sanctioned by the Swedish state. This privilege also included a right to tax them, for which they paid a fee to the crown.²⁶ From the mid-sixteenth century, the Swedish state wanted a firmer grip on taxation and gradually replaced birkarlar with the state’s own bailiffs. The use of bailiffs increased control, and the first preserved tax records were recorded in 1553. Almost consecutive numbers of tax records from Lule lappmark are preserved through 1620.²⁷ These tax records contain what Sami paid in tax and a list of taxpayers (mantalslängd). An additional reason for the state to increase control of taxation of Sami was to get more involved in the lucrative fur market in Europe. In the tax records, there is also a list of furs that were purchased by the Swedish state. With the large interest in fur trade, it is not surprising to find that the most frequent tax commodity was furs in Lule lappmark. But dried fish , mainly pike (Esox lucius), perch (Perca fluviatilis), and whitefish (Coregonus sp.) were also common. Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus), a species that mainly lived in alpine lakes, was a taxed good only for Sami living in the mountains. According to the tax records, reindeer was an unusual taxed good for members of villages in both the forest and mountain region during the sixteenth century; they appeared for the first time in tax records in the 1570s but in low numbers.²⁸ All Sami men seventeen years and older were registered to pay tax on an individual basis. It is likely that each of them represented a Sami household.

Tax was not only just a means to get revenue to the early modern state and access to valuable goods like furs. The right to tax people was meant to tie people to a country and had geopolitical consequences for Sami; it was part of the struggle to control the Arctic region. A taxpayer was a citizen in the country where he or she paid tax. Since Sami had a mobile lifestyle, there was a risk that they would pledge their allegiance to another country and pay tax there. To keep Sami within Swedish territory, the state could not tax them too much or they would pack up and leave. From the Swedish government’s point of view, these countries were Denmark-Norway and Russia, and some Sami in the borderlands between the countries had to pay tax to more than one state.²⁹ In the decades around 1600, a struggle involving warfare among the three countries took place to define each country’s territory.³⁰

In early seventeenth century, the Swedish government reformed the tax code for Sami, making live reindeer and dried fish the primary tax commodities instead of furs. This alteration of the tax base has usually been interpreted as an answer to the government’s increased demand for food supplies for soldiers in military campaigns. To be successful in warfare, the Swedish army needed to bring their own food, because it was impossible to buy provisions in a war zone.³¹ A contributing factor to the change in tax code might have been that Western Europe’s fur market was changing. The taxes were still paid in kind, and from the time of the new tax code, the Swedish government made two attempts to count the number of reindeer that people in Lule lappmark had. Two records are preserved, from 1605 to 1609, and we return to them in Chapter 7. Here we only want to point out that the differences in economies between users in the mountains and the forest were still rather small in the first decade of the seventeenth century, according to the tax records. Users from the two regions paid tax in dried fish and the same number of reindeer per taxpayer, although users in the mountains on the whole had more reindeer than users in the forest. Differences between economies of the two subgroups increased during the seventeenth century, and from the 1670s users in the mountains (with a few insignificant exceptions) ceased to pay their tax in dried fish, while users in the boreal forest continued to do so. Sami had options of how to pay tax, and the development of tax items reflects the orientation of the economy for households.³² In the mountains, users started to pay tax in cash and in boots made of reindeer fur.

The Swedish government found it hard to understand Sami economy and how to best tax them. With the government’s increased interest in interior northern Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth century and the ambition to attract non-Sami farmers to settle in the Swedish lappmark, it issued Royal Ordinances in 1673 and 1695 that offered non-Sami exemptions from taxes and military service for fifteen years if they settled there. It is apparent that the government did not know much about the resources that made up the foundation for Sami livelihood. The government had a list of Sami who paid taxes but did not have records of the land and water they used.³³ Hence, the governor of Västerbotten County, Johan Graan, decided that Ume lappmark should be delineated and resources described. He appointed surveyor Jonas Gedda to make a map and clerk Anders Holm to write descriptions of the resources.³⁴ The map would make it possible to determine resources used by Sami and determine places where settlers could put up homesteads and farm and keep cattle. Graan’s purpose was to create a cadastral book. However, there were no continuations of the survey of Ume lappmark in other districts. The lack of knowledge by representatives from the state of early modern Sami natural resource management gives further argument to why a self-governance perspective is a fruitful way to analyze early modern Sami land-use strategies.

As we have seen, during most of the seventeenth century, the taxation of Sami was a complicated task for the Swedish government, especially since the tax consisted of no less than five parts, not including corvée (unpaid labor in lieu of paying tax). In the 1680s, the government again launched the idea of a tax reform. A problem was not only that the tax consisted of many parts, the government also knew that there could be large differences in fortunes among Sami, but that they were taxed almost the same. In 1689, Governor Strijk in Västerbotten County pointed out that the number of reindeer a person owned did not reflect the tax level. In the extreme case, an owner with 1,000 reindeer paid the same in tax as one with ten reindeer.³⁵ Moreover, a government-initiated investigation in 1695 showed a lack of basic data concerning Sami taxation, which made it hard for the state to know if they had received the right amount of tax.³⁶ Strijk proposed a progressive tax that was supposed to be based on the number of reindeer per Sami.³⁷ There were, however, numerous problems connected with this proposal. Governor Douglas , who succeeded Strijk , and Judge Buhre conducted an investigation and pointed out that the number of reindeer often fluctuated greatly between years; a rich Sami one year could be poor the next year, which would make reindeer far too uncertain as a base for taxation.³⁸ In addition, it would have been very hard for the government to keep track of the number of reindeer. In 1692, officials had already expressed that “ingen stadig ränta kan läggas på det som i sig självt är ostadigt” (no steady tax can be imposed on what is in itself volatile),³⁹ which they repeated after the 1695 investigation. To reach this conclusion, Governor Douglas and Judge Buhre had traveled around in the lappmark and talked to Sami about the tax proposition; they dismissed the idea about a tax on reindeer. The worry that Sami living close to the Swedish borders would pay tax to Norway or Russia was again brought up, but as a minor argument against the proposal.

In the end, after 1695, the previous five-part tax was reduced to one tax which from then on was based on the resource territory that each Sami household used for reindeer herding, hunting, and fishing.⁴⁰ The tax rate for these territories was supposed to be fixed “for all eternity” and correspond to the territories listed in a cadastral book.⁴¹ This was the first time a cadastral book of land in the lappmark was created, and former Governor Graan’s idea of 1671 was realized.⁴² However, some Sami in the mountain area were assessed fixed taxes although they were not assigned to specific territories.⁴³ Since land henceforth was the basis for taxation, the new tax code for Sami had similarities with how peasants in Sweden were taxed during that time. In contrast to peasants’ lands, though, the exact ranges for Sami lands were never measured. Douglas and Buhres’ investigation from 1695 concluded that these kinds of measurements would have been impossible, particularly for the Sami in the mountains since the borders of their mountain territories were so diffuse.⁴⁴

The new tax code from 1695 was a break from the old tax code in another important aspect. From then on, the taxpaying unit was the Sami village, not the household. The tax thus became collective for the members of the village, and the village became a means for tax collection.⁴⁵ Each household’s share of the total tax was defined in the cadastral book, but it was the Sami villages’ responsibility to deliver the right amount of tax to the state. This made it possible for them to adjust the tax levels in view of the households’ incomes, but they could also make some households pay more if others did not contribute sufficiently, or if some households moved out of the Sami village. Another big change was that the tax was no longer paid in kind, but in money. All in all, the reforms in 1695 made the tax more predictable and lower, and corvée had been restricted. This tax relief surely had a positive effect on Sami households’ standard of living, which probably contributed to the increase in Sami population from the late seventeenth century to circa 1780.

Closely connected to the question about how to tax Sami is the question about the division of land into skatteland, introduced in Chapter 2, that has been intensively debated since the 1980s.⁴⁶ Skatteland was for the first time made “visible” through Geddas’s map from 1671, and the tax reform in 1695 listed them as a way to connect user with land. However, as we have seen, even these attempts were insufficient for the government to understand Sami land use. A reading of the tax reform of 1695 shows that the Swedish state did not understand Sami economy or how it was organized. Constructing a tax system that reflected the economy in each household would have required an organization and investigations impossible to carry out. The best way to solve the problem was to ask each village to deliver a fixed sum of money. It was then up to the members of the village, who actually knew the nuts and bolts of the economy, to collect the money from each household.

The third, and last, attribute we consider in this chapter is population size. The size of the population is an important factor since it is possible to see available resources in relation to the number of people. However, it is difficult to estimate population in the early modern period. The most reliable estimates for the Swedish lappmark are based on the number of Sami listed in tax records (skattelappar), where each person represented a household. One problem is that the number of people in the records fluctuated between years partly because almost all Sami were non-sedentary and could move either between villages or across national borders, making them hard to keep track of.

Between 1553 and 1570, there were on average 105 people registered in the tax records in Lule lappmark. However, after 1570, the number started to increase, and around the turn of the century there were on average 169. The numbers peaked in the 1610s with an average of 186 in the tax records.⁴⁷ Between 1621 and 1660 relatively few tax records were preserved from Lule lappmark, but fragmentary records have shown that the number of Sami was similar to the number in the preceding decades. In the 1660s, the state initiated mining activities in several places in Lule lappmark and tried to force Sami to do corvée in these mines, mostly in transport. To avoid forced labor, many Sami moved away, and when the government’s tax collector came to Kaitum in 1667, he wrote that “all had escaped,” and that there was no tax to collect.⁴⁸ At the same time, in neighboring Sirkas, there were only nine taxpayers left. As a comparison, in 1643 Sirkas and Kaitum, which by that time were treated as one unit in the tax records, had had about seventy registered taxpayers.⁴⁹

In 1667, the Sami population in the whole of Lule lappmark had decreased drastically and by then only fifty-five people were registered in the tax record.⁵⁰ According to Hultblad it was almost 200 taxpayers a decade earlier.⁵¹ The stress that the mines evidently brought on the Sami population was not in line with the government’s intention for interior northern Sweden, and policies had to be revised.⁵² From 1670, the number of people registered in the tax records slowly and steadily increased again, but it was not until after the tax reform in 1695 that the increase gathered real momentum. In 1750, there were 295 Sami registered as taxpayers in Lule Lappmark, and the number peaked in the 1780s with more than 360.⁵³

At the same time mining was promoted, the government tried to attract non-Sami farmers to settle in the lappmark. Despite royal ordinances in 1673 and 1695, the result was disappointing for the state. At the end of the seventeenth century, less than ten farms had been established in Jokkmokk parish (Turpon, Sirkas, Jokkmokk, and the southern part of Sjokksjokk) of Lule lappmark, and colonization continued to be a slow process until the end of the eighteenth century. In 1760, there were still only thirteen settler households in Jokkmokk Parish, and in 1780 they had increased to a mere twenty-two.⁵⁴ Seventy years later, in 1850, there were 150 farms. The Sami population dominated in numbers in this region until the nineteenth century.⁵⁵