Piia Einonen, Ph.D
Researcher
Department of History and Ethnology
University of Jyväskylä
E-mail: piia.einonen@campus.jyu.fi
Research interests
Exercise of Power and Urban Political Culture during the Swedish Great Power Period (c. 1650 – 1700)
The project “Exercise of Power and Urban Political Culture during the Swedish Great Power Period (c. 1650 – 1700)” will produce nationally and internationally relevant new knowledge about the mechanisms and meanings of urban political culture during the early modern period: interaction between the conventions, values, norms and world views on the one hand, and actions on the other. Both urban history and political culture have been widely studied, but the theoretical starting points – in particular conceptual history – have rarely been combined with strong empirical evidence from the local level. Wide-ranging source material and a long time frame when combined with a theoretical and comparative approach will reveal changes and continuities in long-lasting cultural processes, which were slow to transform.
This project will examine towns, political actors and politically-charged action and debate from “below”: from the perspective of the towns’ burghers. It will deepen our understanding about urban political culture in the seventeenth century and contributes significantly to our knowledge of political aspects of early modern Finnish and Swedish societies in general. At the same time, it will develop new perspectives into research of local political culture in even wider temporal, regional and thematic frames by researching political concepts. Empirically this post-doctoral research will focus on two important trade and tar towns in the Finnish part of the Swedish realm, namely Vaasa and Viipuri. The source material will be gathered from these towns but, when they are compared with other towns of the Swedish realm, it will be possible to generalize from these results. Systematic research of uniquely extensive source material is a necessity when researching political culture.