The Swedish Manufacturing Census - Digitization and Public Access

Since the middle of the 18th century, the Swedish state has aimed to collect annual data on all Swedish industrial companies from a wide range of sectors, including data on the size of the workforce, the capital stock, and revenue. The continuous recording and almost universal coverage mean that the Swedish industry data is an internationally unique data source on the process of industrialization, and the data could shed new light on central historical and economic questions. Since 2016, there is an ongoing project to digitize the data for the years 1863 to 1914, which was previously only available in handwritten books stored in archives. The RJ infrastructure project will allow for an additional digitization of the data between 1740 and 1863, which means that there will be a complete digital version of the Swedish manufacturing census. The project will also enable the creation of the infrastructure needed for us to make the dataset publicly available, with documentation, guidelines on all important decisions taken during the data construction, and a web-based interface through which the data can be easily accessed by other researchers and the interested public. The aim is to create a state-of-the art dataset with the potential of becoming a central resource for studying industrialization and development from the 18th Century and onwards, both for researchers in Sweden and abroad.