The extent of farm desertion in central Sweden during the late medieval agrarian crisis: landscape as a source

The effects of medieval agrarian crisis on settlement and population were considered in a major interdisciplinary research project in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s. Within this project, there were significant differences in methods used to calculate the extent of farm desertion between historians in the participating countries. The reliance on written source material within the Swedish team reflected the dominant approach amongst historians who made less use of map and landscape evidence than others. In this renewed investigation of the magnitude of farm desertion in the Late Middle Ages, focussing on the province of Jämtland in central Sweden, field survey of the physical landscape and some three thousand historical maps are used as evidence, alongside conventional written sources, such as official letters and taxation documents. The results indicate that the extent of farm desertion in medieval Sweden has been underestimated because Swedish scholars generally eschewed the use of the retrogressive method, which their Norwegian counterparts had been using since the 1940s. There is therefore good reason to reassess the desertion rates of medieval farms in other parts of Sweden as well, using traditional geographical source materials together with the documentary sources usually favoured by historians This may also hold for other parts of Europe as well. The rate of desertion is discussed in a wider context of settlement contraction and expansion in central and peripheral areas of Sweden, including the long drawn-out process of reclamation of the deserted farms (ödesbölen).     

The Most Desperate Scoundrels Unhung: Bounty Jumpers and Recruitment Fraud in the Civil War North

This article explores public attitudes toward wartime recruitment brokers and bounty jumpers. Those who enlisted merely to reap the financial rewards of doing so and then deserted, and often repeated the process, proved a striking example of the prevalence of corruption in northern society. The exposure of this practice touched on deep‐seated public fears. Bounty jumpers displayed greed, cowardice, and a lack of patriotism, all alarming manifestations of corruption and unmanliness. Many northerners were also convinced that bounty jumpers represented either disloyal and inassimilable immigrants or a professional criminal underclass, reflecting intense fears and doubts related to the region’s explosive urbanization and modernization.     

Acts of Desertion: Abandonment and Renouncement at the Sonoran Borderzone

What are ‘acts of desertion’, how do they feature in contemporary border struggles, and what might an emphasis on such acts bring to the analysis of the politics of mobility? This article seeks to address these questions in the context of the Sonoran borderzone, which crosses Mexico and the US. It develops an analysis that sheds light on contemporary border struggles in terms that acknowledge both the intensity of security practices as well as the significance of migratory acts, without pre‐fixing the relation between the two. The analysis shows how ‘acts of desertion’ involve differentiated dynamics of abandonment and renouncement, which demand appreciation of the ambiguities of contemporary border struggles. As acts that variously involve a dynamics of refusal, the article argues that acts of desertion challenge the limits of liberal citizenship, without wholly transcending its limitations.