In 1780, Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien, or The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, received a competition entry for their annual historical essay prize. The piece was written by the Finnish priest Cristfried Ganander, and was an anthropological study of the Roma people in the Swedish Kingdom, with the title “Investigation into the so called TATTARE or Zigueners, Cinqari, Bohemians. Their Origins, way of Life, language, etc. Also about, when and where they’ve settled in Sweden”.
While the title suggests that it would concern the Roma people in Sweden as a whole, all of Ganander’s first-hand case studies discuss Roma people living in Finland, which until 1809 was part of the Swedish Empire. For example, he described how Romani groups caused disruption at marketplaces in Loviisa and Turku, and how there were often Roma people in Ilmajoki and Osterbotnia. While this may sound quite benign, these descriptions played into a hostile, racist narrative, which depicted Roma people as inherently criminal. Ganander was writing about them not just out of curiosity, but to “solve” the problem that their presence posed.
Roma people have occupied an uncertain place in traditional narratives of European history. While there has been a Romani presence in Europe for centuries, they are rarely considered “European”, and despite being the victims of many colonial and imperial policies, such as the Habsburg monarchy’s attempts at forced settlement and prohibiting inter-community marriage in the mid-eighteenth century, their relationship to European empires has been under-examined. Therefore, it is important to consider Ganander’s work as a regional expression which ties into a broader European colonial hostility towards the Roma, and to consider the history and treatment of Roma people in Sweden as a distinct part of the history of the Swedish Empire.
This is not as straightforward as it sounds, as the history of Roma people in Sweden is hard to trace. For one, they were, and to a large part remain, a closed community, meaning that Swedish- or Finnish-speaking contemporaries had limited direct contact with Romani culture. Many of the Roma people in Sweden at the time were illiterate, meaning that there are no known written sources from the Romani community itself. The existence of Roma people in Sweden was criminalised by King Gustav Vasa in 1550, which means that most of the Swedish Romani historiography which predates the twentieth century is based on legal documents.
Working against this lack of evidence is central to what I discuss in my podcast Hierarchies of Otherness in 18th Century Sweden: A Romani Case Study, recorded for the Centre for Minorities Research at the University of St Andrews. In this episode, I am attempting to contribute to the sparse history of Roma people in eighteenth-century Sweden, using Ganander’s competition entry. I am not the first person to discover this document, but it has mainly appeared in general write-ups on the academy it was submitted to. It has not been used to feed into any broader discussions on Romani history in the anglophone scholarship, and it has never been translated into English. I use this source to contextualise this issue within a broader discussion about Sweden as an empire, and the treatment of its racial and ethnic minorities. I also draw comparisons between this text and an excerpt from a similar account written in Transylvania in 1783, to help situate this text in the broader European Romani history.
To give the reader (and potential listener) a sense of what to expect, the podcast starts by introducing Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien, and the role it had in building early modern Swedish identity. Then, I discuss what this royally prized document can tell us about the place of Roma people in Sweden, before moving on to explain how the document compares the Roma people to the Sámi, a group of people indigenous to Northern Fenno-Scandia and parts of Russia. Starting in the 1500s, the Swedish state took part in a colonial process against the Sámi which included aggressive evangelising and assimilation efforts. By looking at Ganander’s comparisons, which include drinking culture and religion, we can see that while the Roma and Sámi were both seen as different from ‘true’ Swedes, the Sámi were perceived as having the right to exist within the region, while the Roma were not.
You can listen to the episode here.
Sources:
Riksantikvarieämbetet: Kungliga Vitterhetsakademiens Arkiv, SE/ATA/ARK2_1-1F2:4, “Tävlingsskrifter MM 1779-1782.