Kinship and Sociability: Urban Shopkeepers in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

Abstract

Recent studies in the history of the European petty bourgeoisie, that is, shop keepers, master artisans, and other small tradesmen, have shown the close social relations that existed between the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. Because the two classes occupied the same geographical space, historians have concluded that they were also socially close. In this study an examination of the social structure of witnesses appearing at baptisms of urban shop keepers in four Swedish towns it is possible to see that Swedish shopkeepers mingled within their own stratum and above themselves, while social relations to other classes hardly existed at all.