Uudisraivaajien maa

Overview & Synopsis

This edited volume looks at the spread of settlements and the development of living conditions favorable to permanent peasant habitation in Finland during the pre-industrial period. The case to study in this volume is the relatively late settled northernmost part of Savo, now known as the Upper Savo (Ylä-Savo in Finnish) region, which was a border region between Sweden and Russia until the first half of the 17th century. The aim of the volume is to deepen conceptual and empirical knowledge of what kind of living conditions the late-populated frontier offered to settlers and their descendants from the beginning of settlement to the early industrialization. At the end of the 19th century Upper Savo was known as an example of misery, poverty and backwardness in Finland. This volume, however, shows that this perception of exceptional poverty and backwardness is not unambiguous, let alone self-imposed by the people living in the area. Despite its land resources, Upper Savo has been in a position to catch up with the core areas of settlement throughout its history, such as the later settled peripheries and border regions in general. In this work, we show that the development of the conditions for living in Upper Savo has been strongly path-dependent: the region can do nothing about its history and location. The photographs of Ahti Rytkönen (1899–1989) are at the core of the rich artwork of this volume. Rytkönen’s black-and-white photographs of the northern Savo countryside with its inhabitants and slash-and-burn fields from the 1920s and 1930s are unique depictions of the life of Upper Savo rural society.