Jesper Larsson

Jesper’s research is focused on governance of common-pool resources and collective action during early modern period (16th century to 19th century). Jesper conducts research in Sami land-use governance and animal husbandry, especially transhumance systems and the evolution of agriculture systems. Jesper is Affiliated Faculty to The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Jesper's latest major grant is an ERC consolidator grant (ERC-2023-COG) for the project TransRein, which studies the transition to reindeer pastoralism in northern Eurasia. The project starts on January 1, 2025.

Course leader for Summer course in Agrarian History, LB0094 10 credits

Course leader for Landscape history, garden history and plant knowledge, LK0365, 15 credits.

Course leader for Landscape history and plant knowledge 1, LK0294, 15 credits.

Jesper's research addresses landscape use and settlement development in Northern Scandinavia during the seventeenth century. The starting point is the leap in the use of common-pool resources and collective action that appeared during the seventeenth century in Northern Scandinavia; large scale reindeer pastoral-nomadism, large scale tar distillation, a sharp increase in firewood and charcoal production, and the development of a new agricultural system based on a transhumance system. Important questions for a better understanding of landscape use and settlement development are; how institutions changed; what type of organizations users developed; implications for property rights; labor division; relations between users and the state; and changes’ in agriculture practice and reindeer breeding.

Member of Nordiska museets research school 2002-2009.

Ph.D. Agrarian History, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, October 2009.

Postdoctoral fellowship at The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, October 2010 – October 2012.

Assistant Professor in Agrarian History at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), fall 2012 to June 30, 2015

Associate Senior Lecturer in Agrarian History, July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2019

Visiting scholar, Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University August 2016 to July 2017

Docent (Associate Professor) in Agrarian History, 2017

Research fellow at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2021 

Books

Larsson, Jesper and Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja. 2022. Self-Governance and Sami Communities. Transitions in Early Modern Natural Resource Management. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. xvi + 248.

Read reviews in the journals Pastoralism, Comparative Legal History and Transnational Environmental Law

Panjek, Aleksander, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli, eds. 2017. Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective: Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond, University of Primorska Press, pp. 446.

Larsson, Jesper. 2009. Fäbodväsendet 1550 - 1920. Ett centralt element i Nordsveriges jordbrukssystem, Acta Universitatis agriculturae Sueciae 2009:51, Uppsala/Östersund, (English summary: Summer Farms in Sweden 1550 to 1920. An important Element in North Swedens’s Agriculural System), pp. 432. Dissertation.

Articles

Larsson, Jesper & Sjaunja, Eva-Lotta Päiviö. 2021. Hunting by Early Modern Lule Sami Households. Arctic 74(3):323–338. https://doi.org/10.14430/arctic73281

Larsson, Jesper & Sjaunja, Eva-Lotta Päiviö. 2020. Freshwater Fishing Strategies in Early Modern Sami Households. Arctic Anthropology 57(2):197-211; http://dx.doi.org/10.3368/aa.57.2.197 (published May 2021)

Larsson, Jesper, & Sjaunja, Eva-Lotta Päiviö. 2020. Early Modern Reindeer Husbandry, Sami Economy, and Grazing Rights. International Journal of the Commons, 14(1), pp. 91–107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.965

Lennartsson, Tommy, Ove Eriksson, Anamaria Iuga, Jesper Larsson, Jon Moen, Michael D. Scholl, Anna Westin and Carole L. Crumley. 2018, Diversity in Ecological and Social Contexts, In Carole L. Crumley, Tommy Lennartsson and Anna Westin, eds., Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology, The past and Future of Landscapes and Regions, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 182-239. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108355780.007

Larsson, Jesper. 2017, The Importance of Commons in an Integrated Peasant Economy in Early Modern Northern Scandinavia. In Panjek, Aleksander, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli, eds. 2017. Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective: Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond, University of Primorska Press, pp. 117–136.

Larsson, Jesper. 2016. Conflict-resolution mechanisms maintaining an agricultural system. Early modern local courts as an arena for solving collective-action problems within Scandinavian Civil Law, International Journal of the Commons 10(2):1100-1118.

Larsson, Jesper. 2016. Crises, commons and collective action: The changing use of woodlands and mountains in seventeenth-century upland Scandinavia, Rural History Yearbook 12 (2015):205-215 .

Larsson, Jesper. 2014. Labor division in an upland economy: workforce in a seventeenth-century transhumance system, The History of the Family 19(3):393-410.

Larsson, Jesper. 2014. Boundaries and Property Rights: The Transformation of a Common-Pool Resource, The Agricultural History Review, 62(1):20-40.

Blomkvist, Pär and Jesper Larsson. 2013. An analytical framework for common-pool resource–large technical system (CPR-LTS) constellations, International Journal of the Commons 7(1):113-139.

Larsson, Jesper. 2012. The Expansion and Decline of a Transhumance System in Sweden, 1550-1920, Historia Agraria 56:11-39.

Larsson, Jesper. 2011. “The transformation of the summer farm: from backbone of North Swedish animal husbandry to experience tourism and branded products” In: H. Antonsson & U Jansson (Eds) Agriculture and forestry in Sweden since 1900 – geographical and historical studies, SOLMED 54, pp. 233-250. Stockholm, The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry.

Miscellaneous

Anna Rosling Larsson and Jesper Larsson. 2019. (Movie) Reunited in Bishop Hill – with Hans Rosling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgmBQMhEsI

Larsson, Jesper, 2016, History, Students, and Education, a survey about students’ perspectives on history education at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and implications for future teaching. Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, Agrarhistoria 4, Uppsala, pp. 83.

» CV