Masters writing the rules: how peasant farmer MPs in the Swedish Estate Diet understood servants’ labour and the labour laws, 1823–1863
Peasant farmers made up one of the four estates in the Swedish parliament, the Diet of the four estates, from late medieval times up until the introduction of the two-chamber parliament in 1867. Affiliation to the estate of the peasant farmers was based on landholding. Landholding also entitled peasant farmers to employ servants. Peasant farmers thus played a double role: as masters of servants an