NEW ARTICLE. With Felix Kersting (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): "The Social Origins of Democracy and Authoritarianism Reconsidered: Prussia and Sweden in Comparison". Forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, published online June 2025. Read here (open access). Replication package available here. Blog post at Broad Street here.

NEW ARTICLE. Jakob Molinder (Uppsala University) and I have an article in the Journal of Economic History, July 2025 issue: “What Happened to the Incomes of the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-level Data, 1909–1950”. Read here (open access). Replication package available here.

NEW BOOK CHAPTER. “Economic Inequality in the Nordics in Times of Neoliberalism”, in Nordic Neoliberalisms: Perspectives on Economic, Social and Cultural Change in the Nordics after 1970, edited by Jenny Andersson and Chris Howell. Routledge, 2025. Open Access, available here. (April 2025)

NEW ARTICLE. With Marcus Falk and Mats Olsson (both Lund): “Wealth, work, and industriousness, 1670–1860: evidence from rural Swedish probates”, Rural History, published online 10 February 2025. Read here. (February 2025)

NEW ARTICLE. With Diego Castañeda Garza (Uppsala University): “Income inequality in Mexico, 1895-1940: industrialisation, revolution, institutions”, Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, published online 27 January 2025. Read here. (January 2025)

NEW ARTICLE. With Christian Lyhne Ibsen (University of Copenhagen), Kristin Alsos (FAFO, Oslo), Søren Kaj Andersen (University of Copenhagen), and Kristine Nergaard (FAFO, Oslo): “The politics of inflation and revitalisation of wage solidarity in Scandinavia”, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, published online 19 December 2024. Read here. (December 2024)

Hello, welcome to my web site. 

My name is Erik Bengtsson. I am an economic historian, working at Lund University. (My work website is here). My job title is senior lecturer (universitetslektor) and my degree is docent.

My research interests are especially in two broad fields. The first is historical living standards, material culture, wealth and inequality, especially in Europe since the seventeenth century. I have done a lot of research with probate inventories (Swedish and Finnish), with income tax data, and also some with wealth tax data, wages, and historical national accounts. See for example published articles on incomes and inequality in Stockholm 1870-1970, or the political economy of wealth inequality in Stockholm in the 1600s and 1700s.

The second field is historical and comparative political economy, including political history, focusing on the period c. 1790-1950 but also on politico-economic changes since the 1970s. I am especially interested in social relations as mediated by politics, agrarian politics, and democratization and pre-democratic political systems. See for example my article on political meetings in nineteenth-century southern Sweden, or the edited volume (with Anton Jansson and Josefin Hägglund) on political actors in Sweden c. 1880-1930.

The two fields also inter-relate, of course, as in my paper with Diego Castañeda Garza which discusses the implication of the Mexican Revolution for economic inequality, and my paper with Felix Kersting on the political economy of rural inequality in Prussia and Sweden c. 1870-1940. 

As of the summer of 2025, I do research in two projects.

• 2020 to 2026 I work within a large research program led by Jenny Andersson of Uppsala University and financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, "Neoliberalism in the Nordics". Within the program, I am working on wage bargaining and economic policy in Sweden and Norway since the 1960s.

• From 2025 through 2027 I work within a project led by Magnus Wennerhag of Södertörn University College and financed by the Swedish Research Council. The project is about popular politics and Swedish democratization, late 1800s and early 1900s. Within the project, I am working especially on the growth of democratic movements in Sweden c. 1870-1920, and on the incumbent political-economic elites' reaction to those movements.

I teach introductory economic history, global economic history in the spring semester and Swedish economic and social history in the autumn semester. I also teach tutorials for masters' students on the history of  economic inequality and on the history of economic thought. In 2025 and 2026 my teaching is reduced because I serve as deputy head of department (biträdande prefekt).

I am the the secondary or third supervisor for two doctoral students in the department: Johanne Arnfred and Dominic Mealy. Johanne is working on artisans in nineteenth century Sweden, and Dominic on marketisation since the 1970s. I am also assistant supervisor for a doctoral student in Intellectual History, Sarah Vorminder. Sarah is working on eighteenth and nineteenth century enclosures and agrarian systems. A few doctoral students that I have worked with have recently defended their dissertations: Marcus Falk on material culture and living standards in Sweden c. 1680-1860, and Markus Hansen on the transition to agrarian capitalism in eighteenth century Denmark. 

I am (since 2023) the book reviews editor of Scandinavian Economic History Review.

I got my PhD in Economic History in Gothenburg in 2013 and moved to Lund as a postdoc in 2015. I've been a visiting scholar at UCLA (2011), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne (2013), Kingston University (2017, 2018), the Paris School of Economics (2019, 2022) and University of Oxford (Trinity Term 2024).

Jag är sedan november 2020 invald som arbetande ledamot i Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund.

I have a Swedish-language blog, Bengtzzon, and I am on Twitter as @bengtssonz.