All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Tullbergs Contention and the New Liberals: Forgotten Struggles
| The subject matter of this presentation is “Tullbergs contention” (named after it’s leader), one of the largest and most drawn out conflicts in Swedish 19th century history, which saw a rather unlikely alliance between two groups of outsiders, one representing a tradition of popular protest, the other a radical political tradition. Tullbergs contention was, or started as, a struggle over landownership between tenant farmers and landed proprietors, and took place in the province of Skåne in 1867-69. The tenant farmers claimed that there was no such a thing as noble land or manors, that there never had been such a thing and that the landed proprietors had stolen their forefathers’ farms in the past. This struggle primarily took place in the legal arena, but also through refusal to do day-work, pay rents and other forms of everyday resistance. Now, tenant farmers and landed proprietors in Skåne had clashed before over the social and economic circumstances on the manors (notably in 1772-1776 and 1811), and in that sense Tullbergs contention can be seen as a continuation of a tradition of popular protest. The tenant farmers struck an alliance with the “new liberal” party, a group of middle-class radical members of parliament and newspaper editors, whose political program included demands for a people in arms (the sharpshooter association), democracy and republic. The new liberals introduced several bills and launched an impressive press campaign in support of the tenant farmers, at the same time using the contention to further their own agenda, and adding a political dimension to it. All this, however, came to nothing; the tenant farmers didn’t win a single farm and Tullbergs contention was over in 1869; the “new liberal” party fell to pieces in 1871, having failed to realize their grandiose political program. Both groups were, in different ways, to marginalised to win their struggles with the establishment. Tullbergs contention and the new liberals have been ignored in Swedish historiography. Arguably, this is because it doesn’t tally with the standard narrative of modern Sweden, which focuses on the roles of the labour movement and the social democratic party, and the alleged peaceful historical roots of the “Swedish model”, which is sometimes stretched back into early modern times. Contentious tenants and radical liberals have no room in such a teleological narrative, yet, they were, as I hope to show, an important part of popular and radical struggles for a different Sweden before the birth of the modern labour movement.
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