Opin vísindi

Contested households : lodgers, labour, and the law in rural Iceland in the early 19th century

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dc.contributor University of Iceland
dc.contributor.author Vilhelmsson, Vilhelm
dc.date.accessioned 2024-12-13T01:02:48Z
dc.date.available 2024-12-13T01:02:48Z
dc.date.issued 2023-04-05
dc.identifier.citation Vilhelmsson , V 2023 , ' Contested households : lodgers, labour, and the law in rural Iceland in the early 19th century ' , Scandinavian Journal of History , vol. 48 , no. 5 , pp. 572-592 . https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2023.2197916
dc.identifier.issn 0346-8755
dc.identifier.other 136772438
dc.identifier.other ce716c6e-bdd5-4717-92b8-db9ffaea176c
dc.identifier.other 85151923467
dc.identifier.other ORCID: /0000-0001-6220-7849/work/132560664
dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/5177
dc.description Publisher Copyright: © 2023 the Historical Associations of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
dc.description.abstract The historiography of labour in pre-industrial Iceland has commonly portrayed it first and foremost as life-cycle service in rural households and has suggested that, in a European context, the Icelandic system of compulsory service–or vistarband–was exceptionally harsh due to its broad scope and inflexibility. This approach has been built primarily on demographics and a normative analysis of legal sources. Less attention has been paid to the everyday practices of workers and their employers (or the state) as they manoeuvred within and around the labour legislation to establish working relationships to make ends meet. Similarly, ambiguities within the legislation and discrepancies between law and practice have rarely been explored, nor has people’s understanding of the principal concepts of the labour laws, concepts such as ‘household’, ‘farm’ and ‘servant’, been scrutinized. This article invokes such questions and provides a microhistorical analysis of two court cases which illustrate the nuances and ambiguities of putting such a broad-reaching set of regulations into practice in a pre-industrial rural setting.
dc.format.extent 21
dc.format.extent 1222096
dc.format.extent 572-592
dc.language.iso en
dc.relation.ispartofseries Scandinavian Journal of History; 48(5)
dc.rights info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
dc.subject coercion
dc.subject household
dc.subject labour relations
dc.subject rural history
dc.subject Servants
dc.subject History
dc.title Contested households : lodgers, labour, and the law in rural Iceland in the early 19th century
dc.type /dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/researchoutputtypes/contributiontojournal/article
dc.description.version Peer reviewed
dc.identifier.doi 10.1080/03468755.2023.2197916
dc.relation.url http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85151923467&partnerID=8YFLogxK
dc.relation.url https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2023.2197916


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