Equal in life and death? Living standard, inequality and mortality in Sweden 1600-1800.

Life expectancy is a basic and widely accepted measure of living standards.

Since the industrial revolution, thanks to increasing prosperity and investments in health, the life expectancy of the world’s population has steadily increased. Much less is known about life expectancy and its relation to living standards before 1800. The main hurdle has been the lack of data covering extended periods of time.

The earliest comprehensive measures of life expectancy which exist are from Sweden, beginning in the 1750s as a result of the foundation of Statistics Sweden’s predecessor Tabellverket. Before this date, evidence is scattered, and reliant on limited samples or inconsistent sources.

Based on digitalized burial records from Swedish church books, we build a new dataset consisting of more than 1 million deceased in Sweden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We complement this data with measures of material living standards collected from probates and wage records.

With this massive new dataset it is possible to analyze the development of life expectancy both in general and in relation to contextual variables such as region, social status, and material living standards.