“Miltä mielestä tuntui, ei arvaa kukkaan”. Sodan kuormittavuus ja kriisinkestävyys Iisalmen pitäjän kotitalouksissa 1800-luvun ensimmäisinä vuosikymmeninä

Abstract

This dissertation examines the effects of war on civilians in an early modern local community, during and after the Finnish War between Sweden and Russia in 1808– 1809. The research focus is on how the crisis evolved and what the circumstances of war were like locally, how the war burdened civilians and the local community economically and socially, and what kind of resilience they had against the crisis. The Finnish War was a tiny part of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, but in Finland the war was one of the most severe demographic crises. This war was also the period of Finnish transition from Swedish rule to becoming a Duchy of the Russian Empire; the war has even had a mythical role in the national narrative in Finland. This study offers a different perspective, that of New Military History, taking an interest in social and economic aspects of wars from the civilian’s point of view. The key theoretical concepts are crisis, resilience, local community, and household. The theoretical framework is inspired especially by Myron P. Gutmann (1980) and Daniel R. Curtis (2014). The Russian pacification policy created a new source for studying households: civilians’ applications for compensation for war damage caused by Russians. The other main primary sources are estate inventory deeds, the property tax records for 1800, census records, church records, administrative documents, and even oral local history collected from the 1850s to the 1930s. The focus of scrutiny is on a Finnish parish and especially on four of its villages, near the Koljonvirta battlefield. Iisalmi was a large, but sparsely populated parish in Eastern Finland. When the war broke out, the parish was a peripheral part of Eastern Sweden, far from Stockholm and the Baltic Sea. During the war, Iisalmi was controlled by the Swedish or Russian army; during the truce in autumn 1808, the parish area was divided between both armies. I have analyzed the situation of families from about 1800 to 1815 by critically reading and closely comparing the sources. I have systematically gathered information about individual households, written their life stories during and in the years after the war, and combined information from individual households to provide both village and parish level statistics. Iisalmi had a series of severe harvests in the years before war. The war deepened the crisis, made livelihood and everyday life more difficult, increased the economic and social vulnerability of families, and polarized the local community for years. Resilience was forged in a harsh context of deepening poverty, but individuals, households, and the local community responded with different kinds of coping strategies. Key words: wartime, crisis, war stressors, burden of war, resilience, household, local community.