412 resultados para Historia och arkeologi
em Helda - Digital Repository of University of Helsinki
Resumo:
In the eighteenth century, the birth of scientific societies in Europe created a new framework for scientific cooperation. Through a new contextualist study of the contacts between the first scientific societies in Sweden and the most important science academy in Europe at the time, l Académie des Sciences in Paris, this dissertation aims to shed light on the role taken by the Swedish learned men in the new networks. It seeks to show that the academy model was related to a new idea of specialisation in science. In the course of the eighteenth century, it is argued, the study of the northern phenomena and regions offered the Swedes an important field of speciality with regard to their foreign colleagues. Although historical studies have often underlined the economic, practical undertone of eighteenth-century Swedish science, participation in fashionable scientific pursuits had also become an important scene for representation. However, the views prevailing in Europe tied civilisation and learning closely to the sunnier, southern climates, which had lead to the difficulty of portraying Sweden as a learned country. The image of the scientific North, as well as the Swedish strategies to polish the image of the North as a place for science, are analysed as seen from France. While sixteenth-century historians had preferred to put down the effects of the cold and claim a similarity of northern conditions to the others, the scientific exchange between Swedish and French researchers shows a new tendency to underline the difference of the North and its harsh climate. An explanation is sought by analysing how information about northern phenomena was used in France. In the European academies, new empirical methods had lead to a need for direct observations on different phenomena and circumstances. Rather than curiosities or objects for exoticism, the eighteenth-century depictions of the northern periphery tell about an emerging interest in the most extreme, and often most telling, examples of the workings of the invariable laws of nature. Whereas the idea of accumulating knowledge through cooperation was most manifest in joint astronomical projects, the idea of gathering and comparing data from differing places of observation appears also in other fields, from experimental philosophy to natural studies or medicine. The effects of these developments are studied and explained in connection to the Montesquieuan climate theories and the emerging pre-romantic ideas of man and society.
Resumo:
The Collected Works of J. L. Runeberg from the Viewpoint of Textual Scholarship The theoretical framework of this dissertation builds on textual scholarship. The dissertation explores the history of Runeberg’s publications and his relations with his publishers, from his debut and the first editions, through the editions of collected works published during the course of his life, to the later commercial editions, including the critical edition, published in 1933–2005 by the Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet (The Swedish Society for Belles Lettres) and The Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland (The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland). The various editions of Runeberg’s collected works are situated in their respective critical traditions, from the 19th century German Ausgabe letzter Hand, to the influence of Anglo-American bibliography on Swedish textual criticism in the late 20th century. By making use of primary material previously not used for research purposes, the author is able to present a new view on Runebergian publishing history, including Runeberg’s fees and his relations with the censor authorities. There are indications that his Finnish publishers could not bear the cost of his sizable fees, that were in proportion neither with the book market in Finland nor with the numbers of copies sold. Apart from a certain body of editions the primary material is comprised of correspondences, publishing contracts, printing house invoices, as well as censor authority records. One of the conclusions drawn is that the early and detailed biography, Biografiska anteckningar om Johan Ludvig Runeberg (Biographical Notes on …) by J. E. Strömborg is not reliable in matters concerning publishing history, and that this work has been used far too uncritically. The history of the critical edition gets a chapter of its own, based on primary material in Swedish and Finnish archives. Finally, the author analyses the critical choices, made primarily in the critical edition, and uses examples from the commercial editions to study the editors’ interventions over time, from the 1850s to the 1920s. The changes to the text are usually small and subtle, but cumulative – and in some cases, crucial for the interpretation of the work. One objective of textual scholarship should be to examine the publishing history of a single work or of an author’s œuvre, and another to pay attention both to changes in a work as such and to the shifts of meaning they might entail.
Resumo:
The dissertation "From Conceptual to Corporeal, from Quotation to Site: Painting and History of Contemporary Art" explores the state of painting in contemporary art and art theory since the 1960s. The purpose of the study is to re-consider the dominant "end of painting" -narrative in contemporary art history, which goes back to the modernist ideology of painting as a reductive, medium-specific form of art. Drawing on Michel Foucault´s concepts of discursive formation and archive, as well as Jean-Luc Nancy´s post-phenomenological philosophy on corporeality, I suggest that contemporary painting can be redefined as a discursive-sensuous practice. Instead of seeing painting as obsolete or over as an avantgarde art genre, I show that there have been alternative, neo-avantgardist ways of defining painting since the end of the 1960s, such as French artist Daniel Buren´s early writings on painting as "theoretical practice". Consequently, the tendency of the canonical Anglo-American contemporary art narratives to underestimate the historical and institutional codes of art can be questioned. This tendency can be seen, for example, in Rosalind Krauss´s influential theory on index. The study also reflects the relations between conceptual art and painting since the 1960s and maps recent theories of painting, which re-examine the genre´s possibilities after the modernist rhetoric. Concepts of "flatbed", "painting in the extended field", "as painting" and so on are compared critically with the idea of painting as discursive practice. It is also shown that the issues in painting arise from the contemporary critical art debate while the dematerialisation paradigm of conceptual art has dissolved. The study focuses on the corporeal-material-sensuous -cluster of meanings attached to painting and searches for its avantgardist possibilities as redefined by postfeminist and post-phenomenological discourse. The ideas of hierarchy of the senses and synesthesia are developed within the framework of Jean-Luc Nancy´s and Luce Irigaray´s thought. The parameters for the study have been Finnish painting from 1990 to 2002. On the Finnish art scene there has been no "end of painting" ideology, strictly speaking. The mythology and medium-specificity of modernism have been deconstructed since the mid-1980s, but "the archive" of painting, like themes of abstraction, formalism and synesthesia have been re-worked by the discursive practice of painting, for example, in the works of Nina Roos, Tarja Pitkänen-Walter and Jussi Niva.
Resumo:
This thesis examines the ruins of the medieval Bridgettine (Birgittan) monastery of Naantali (Vallis Gratiae, f. 1443) in Finland and the transformation of the site into a national heritage and a memory landscape. It was archaeologically surveyed in the 19th century by Professor Sven Gabriel Elmgren (1817 1897). His work was followed by Dr. Reinhold Hausen (1850 1942), who excavated the site in the 1870s. During this time the memories of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) in Sweden were also invented as heritage. Hausen published his results in 1922 thus forming the connection with the next generation of actors involved with the Naantali site: the magnate Amos Anderson (1878 1961), the teacher Julius Finnberg (1877 1955) and the archaeologist Juhani Rinne (1872 1950). They erected commemorative monuments etc. on the Naantali site, thus creating a memory landscape there. For them, the site represented the good homeland in connection with a western-oriented view of the history of Finland. The network of actors was connected to the Swedish researchers and so-called Birgitta Friends, such as state antiquarian Sigurd Curman (1879 1966), but also to the members of the Societas Sanctae Birgittae and the Society for the Embellishment of Pirita, among others. Historical jubilees as manifestations of the use of history were also arranged in Naantali in 1943, 1993 and 2003. It seems as if Naantali is needed in Finnish history from time to time after a period of crisis, i.e. after the Crimean War in the 1850s, the civil war of 1918, during World War II and also after the economic crisis of the early 1990s. In 2003, there was a stronger focus on the international Saint Bridget Jubilee in Sweden and all over Europe. Methodologically, the thesis belongs to the history of ideas, but also to research on the use of history, invented traditions and lieux de mémoire. The material for the work consists of public articles and scholarly texts in books or newspapers and letters produced by the actors and kept in archives in Finland, Sweden and Estonia, in addition to pictures and erected commemorative monuments in situ in the Western Finnish region. Keywords: Nådendal, Naantali monastery, Bridgettines, St. Bridget, use of history, lieux de mémoire, invented traditions, commemorative anatomy, memory landscape, Saint Bridget jubilees , S. G. Elmgren, R. Hausen, A. Anderson, J. Finnberg, J. Rinne, S. Curman, High Church Movement, Pirita, Vadstena.
Resumo:
In 1952 Helsinki hosted the Summer Olympic Games and Armi Kuusela, the current “Maiden of Finland”, was at the same time crowned Miss Universe. In popular history writing, these events have been designated as a crucial turning point – the end of an era marked by war and deprivation and the beginning of a modern, Western nation. Symptomatically, both events were marked by Finnish women’s sexual relationships with foreign men. The Olympics were shadowed by a concern over Finnish women’s “undue friendliness” with the Olympic guests, and Armi Kuusela's world tour was cut short by her surprise marriage in Tokyo and subsequent emigration to the Philippines. This study is an inquiry into the Helsinki Olympics and the public persona of Armi Kuusela from the point of view of transnational heterosexuality and the constitution of Finnish national identity. Methodologically the two main components of the study are intersectionality, defined here as a focus on the mutual histories and effects of discourses of gender, sexuality, race and nation; and transnational history as a way of exploring the ways that both nations and sexual subjects are embedded in global relations of power. The analysis proceeds by way of contextual and intertextual readings of various sources. Part one, centering on the Olympics, involves a campaign mounted by certain women’s organizations before the Games in order to educate young women about the potential dangers of the forthcoming international event as well as magazine and newspaper articles published during and after the Games concerning the encounter between young Finnish women and foreign, especially “Southern,” men. It places the debates during the Olympics within the framework of wartime understandings of women’s sexuality; the history of the concept of decency (siveellisyys); post-war population policy; the intersectional histories of conceptions pertaining to race and sexuality; and finally, the post-war concerns over women’s migration from rural areas to the capital city and their potential emigration abroad. Part two deals with the persona of Armi Kuusela and the public reception of her world tour and marriage, based on material from both Finland and the Philippines (newspapers, magazines, advertisements, books and films). It examines the persona of Armi Kuusela as a figure of national import in terms of the East/West divide; the racialized images of different geographic climates and Oriental “Others;” the meaning of whiteness in the Philippines; the significance of class and colonial history for the domestication of sexual and racial transgressions implied by an unconventional transnational marriage; as well as the cultural logics of transnational desire and its possible meanings for women in 1950s Finland. The study develops two arguments. First, it suggests that instead of being purely oppositional to national discourses, transnational desire may also be viewed as a product of these very discourses. Second, it claims that the national significance of both the Olympics and the persona of Armi Kuusela was due to the new points of comparison they both offered for national identity construction. In comparison with the sexualized Southern men at the Olympics and the racialized Orient in the representations of Armi Kuusela’s travels and marriage, Finland emerged as part of the civilized North, placed firmly within the perimeters of Western Europe. As such, both events mark a “whitening” of the Finnish people as well as a distancing from their previous designations in racial hierarchies. At the same time, however, the process of becoming a white nation inevitably meant complying with and reproducing racial hierarchies, rather than simply abolishing them.
Resumo:
The study analyses the prevention or endorsing of the crime of infanticide in Finland 1702 1807, rather than the result. Also the impacts of the female body, biology of childbirth and experiences of pregnancy are examined, together with insights from modern medical research. Circumstances are reconstructed by a critical reading of judicial records on all levels of the judicial system. In all 269 cases of infanticide and 142 accessory crimes within the jurisdiction of the Turku court of appeal are studied, with particular focus on exceptionally well recorded cases of 83 accused women and 41 women and men accused of being party to the crime. Secondary sources are medical and jurisprudential writings, the public debate on infanticide, broadsheets and letters asking the King for pardon. Infanticide was considered murder by law. Unmarried women were predetermined as the main culprits. Nevertheless, deliberate infanticides were rare and committed mostly in accomplice. The majority of the infanticides studied were cases where inexperienced and unmarried women accidentally had given birth alone and usually to a dead child. Unaware that the pain they were experiencing was in fact a labour, the accused women instinctively sought solitude to push out the child. Some misunderstood the birth as an urgent need to defecate. The unexpected delivery ended in hiding the baby without remorse. This crime was promoted by several factors in Finnish rural culture, amongst others that also married women hid their pregnancy. The immediate household members did not necessarily know about the childbirth and failed to help the woman. This typical pattern in most cases of infanticide in 18th century Finland is also recorded in modern cases of unknown pregnancies. Fear of accountability prevented witnesses testifying to the actual course of events. The truth remained elusive. With only a few exceptions, the women were sentenced to death or imprisonment. The majority of those accused of accomplice were acquitted. However, too harsh sentences for accidents affected the reporting of the crime. Criminal politics failed to curtail infanticide as the crime was unsatisfactorily addressed by law, society and the judicial system.
Resumo:
Idyll or Reality? Albert Edelfelt, Gunnar Berndtson and the ambivalent breakthrough of modernity Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) and Gunnar Berndtson (1854-1895) have much in common. In this dissertation, I study their paintings of local peasants and fishermen and of the gentry’s summer in the county of Uusimaa in southern Finland, in the context of Nordic history of ideas. The breakthrough of modernity, with its attention on debating social problems, provides a novel angle into the oeuvres of the two artists. My focus is on the paintings which emerge in the collision of the public discussion of social matters and the values of the artists’ manorial milieu. The artists’ relation to the public discussion is scrutinized through two of the main topics: the question of the common people and democracy, and the question of equality between men and women. My dissertation is a contextual study which is based on the analysis of the artworks of Edelfelt and Berndtson, on their letters, and on the study of drama and fiction of their time. The notion “liberté, egalité, fraternité” is linked to the breakthrough of modernity. Both artists were aware of the ideal of equality. They used the means and the themes of contemporary art in their presentations, but their pictures contain the ideal of an earlier epoch: the hardworking, but still complacent common people. This conception of the common people is also reflected in the poems of J. L. Runeberg. Women of the late 19th century challenged woman’s primary role as wife and mother. In Edelfelt’s and Berndtson’s depictions of the gentry enjoying summer, women and children have the main role. Notwithstanding the debate of the breakthrough of modernity they depicted women almost without exception as good mothers. Their paintings often depict lazy days in the sunshine, which were, in reality, rare moments for the mistress of the house. Edelfelt’s and Berndtson’s subjects from the Uusimaa countryside coincide with the topics of the breakthrough of modernity, but both the pictures of the common people and the depictions of the gentry enjoying summer, are a retouched picture of reality, often an idyll, in which the public discussion of social matters is evident only materially or not at all.
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The dissertation analyses the political culture of Sweden during the reign of King Gustav III (1771-1792). This period commonly referred to as the Gustavian era followed the so-called Age of Liberty ending half a century of strong parliamentary rule in Sweden. The question at the heart of this study engages with the practice of monarchical rule under Gustav III, its ideological origins and power-political objectives as well as its symbolic expression. The study thereby addresses the very nature of kingship. In concrete terms, why did Gustav III, his court, and his civil service vigorously pursue projects that contemporaneous political opponents and, in particular, subsequent historiography have variously pictured as irrelevant, superficial, or as products of pure vanity? The answer, the study argues, is to be found in patterns of political practice as developed and exercised by Gustav III and his administration, which formed a significant part of the political culture of Gustavian Sweden. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first traces the use and development of royal graces chivalric orders, medals, titles, privileges, and other gifts issued by the king. The practice of royal reward is illustrated through two case studies: the 1772 coup d état that established Gustav III s rule, and the birth and baptism of the crown prince, Gustav Adolf, in 1778. The second part deals with the establishment of the Court of Appeal in Vasa in 1776. The formation of the Appeals Court was accompanied by a host of ceremonial, rhetorical, emblematic, and architectural features solidifying its importance as one of Gustav III s most symbolic administrative reform projects and hence portraying the king as an enlightened monarch par excellence. The third and final part of the thesis engages with war as a cultural phenomenon and focuses on the Russo-Swedish War of 1788-1790. In this study, the war against Russia is primarily seen as an arena for the king and other players to stage, create and re-create as well as articulate themselves through scenes and roles adhering to a particular cultural idiom. Its codes and symbolic forms, then, were communicated by means of theatre, literature, art, history, and classical mythology. The dissertation makes use of a host of sources: protocols, speeches, letters, diaries, newspapers, poetry, art, medals, architecture, inscriptions and registers. Traditional political source material and literary and art sources are studied as totalities, not as separate entities. Also it is argued that political and non-fictional sources cannot be understood properly without acknowledging the context of genre, literary conventions, and artistic modes. The study critically views the futile, but nonetheless almost habitual juxtaposition of the reality of images, ideas, and metaphors, and the reality of supposedly factual historical events. Significantly, the thesis presumes the symbolic dimension to be a constitutive element of reality, not its cooked up misrepresentation. This presumption is reflected in a discussion of the concept of role , which should not be anachronistically understood as roles in which the king cast himself at different times and in different situations. Neither Gustav III nor other European sovereigns of this period played the roles as rulers or majesties. Rather, they were monarchs both in their own eyes and in the eyes of their contemporaries as well as in all relations and contexts. Key words: Eighteenth-Century, Gustav III, Cultural History, Monarchs, Royal Graces, the Vasa Court of Appeal, the Russo-Swedish War 1788–1790.
Resumo:
The dissertation examines the power mechanisms and institutional power hierarchies of the 1940s-1950s era arts elite in Helsinki and their influence on issues of taste in the visual arts. For the purposes of this study, the elite is understood to consist mainly of the board members of the principal elected bodies in the field of the arts. The theoretical framework employed is based on Pierre Bourdieu s field theory and the network perspective. The author has examined what the key, pervasive valuations were that governed the exercising of power by the arts elite in issues of taste, involving determination of who was an acknowledged artist and what was good art. The dissertation demonstrates that this exercising of power was governed by certain collective practices which maintained the illusion that the exercising of power was democratic and based on artistic quality. These practices were the corporate system, using artistic arguments in issues of taste, and using networks in the exercising of power. The struggle in the field of the arts was about who ultimately was entitled to define the value of contemporary art; the issue did not arise regarding historical art. Artists managed to gain a leading position as gatekeepers in issues regarding contemporary art. The author discusses a number of conflicts in the field of the arts that highlight the institutional hierarchies and the capital held by the various players. The structural changes that occurred in administration in the field of cultural production in the 1950s led to the separation of bureaucratic competence on the one hand and aesthetic competence on the other. There was a hierarchy in the field of the arts between institutions, between instruments of legitimisation, and between the symbolic and social capital of players in the field. The hierarchy in the arts ultimately depended on how well the elite could influence tastes through the instruments at their disposal. The various instruments of legitimisation grants, purchases, etc. were ranked differently in the evaluation of acknowledged artists and good art. The dissertation discusses what values, in the form of types of symbolic capital, the arts elite embraced and what role these played in the elite s exercising of power, with particular focus on gender, language, region and economic capital. The aesthetic capital of an artist was of only minor importance in the exercising of power by the arts elite. The dissertation further discusses the points of contact between the arts elite and players in other fields, such as the economic, media and consumer fields. When the arts elite, through the Academy of Fine Arts, became an active player in the art market, this led to a hierarchy where the division between acknowledged and not-acknowledged galleries became sharper.
Resumo:
One history in a multicomplex world The quintessence of history and grand historical narratives in the historical consciousness of class teacher students The study analyses the conception of history amongst class teacher students at the University of Helsinki. It also explores the expectations about the future that the students have on the basis of their views on history. The conceptions of the students are analysed against the background of the notion of one history which has been part of Western thought in the modern era and which is at the centre of the theoretical framework of this study. The Enlightenment project and the erosion of the role of the Church paved the way for the notion that history is an linear narrative of the progress of humankind and in which, implicitly, the Western countries are endowed with a special role as the vanguards of progress. In recent times these assumptions have been criticised by postmodernists and proponents of New History. The material of the study consists of interviews of twenty-two 19 26 years old class teacher students at the University of Helsinki. The topics in the interviews were the developments of the past and the future trajectories. The students conceived history as a field of knowledge that provides a unifying view on the world and helps to make today s world intelligible. Finnish history and global history were invested with features of a grand narrative of progress. In global history, progress and development were seen as characteristic of the Western world primarily. The students regarded the post-war Finnish history as a qualified success story in that they deplored the erosion of collectivist values and the rise of selfishness in recent decades. History was not conceived as a process of progress that would self-evidently continue in the future, but rather more as a field of contingency and cyclical change.The students regarded the increasing predominance of the market forces over democratically elected agencies, the antagonism between the West and the other parts of the world, and environmental risks as the major threats. Notwithstanding this general.pessimism about the future, the students had a very positive view of their own personal prospects. Keywords: historical consciouness, one history, future expectations
Resumo:
Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on historiantutkimuksen menetelmiä käyttäen selvittää metsänhoidon teorian sekä käytännön metsänhoidon kehitysvaiheet ja näihin vaikuttaneet tekijät, keskiajalta lähtien 1870-luvulla tapahtuneeseen metsäteollisuuden läpimurtoon saakka. Tutkimus tarkastelee Suomen metsiä, niiden käyttöä ja metsänhoidon alkuvaiheita Ruotsin ja Venäjän vallan aikoina. Vastauksia haetaan erityisesti seuraaviin pääkysymyksiin: - miten eri metsänkäyttömuodot ja -käyttäjät vaikuttivat metsiin ja metsänhoidon edistymiseen? - millä tavoin maanomistuksen kehitys vaikutti metsien käyttöön ja hoitoon? - millaisiin päämääriin ja yhteiskunnallisiin taustatekijöihin metsien käytön julkinen ohjaus perustui? - mitä käytännön vaikutuksia valtion metsäpolitiikalla ja ohjauksella oli metsänhoidon kehitykseen? - missä ja miten kehittyivät Suomessa sovellettu metsänhoidon teoria ja käytännön menetelmät? - mitkä tekijät säätelivät metsänhoidon teorioiden soveltamista käytäntöön? - mikä oli naapurimaiden metsänhoidon sekä kansainvälisten yhteyksien merkitys metsänhoidon kehitykselle Suomessa? - miten vuosisatainen pelko metsien ja puun loppumisesta vaikutti metsänhoidon kehitykseen? - millainen merkitys puun arvon kehityksellä oli metsänhoidon alkuun saattamiselle ja edistymiselle? Suomessa harjoitettiin 1870-luvulle saakka pääasiassa talonpoikaista metsänkäyttöä. Maaseudun väestö hankki toimeentulonsa metsistä eränkäynnin, kaskiviljelyn, laiduntamisen, rakennushirsien valmistamisen, tervantuotannon ja paikoin myös potaskan tai sysien valmistamisen avulla. Erityisesti rannikkoseuduilla tuotettiin "isorakennuksen puita", lehtereitä, mastopuita ja muuta erikoispuutavaraa. Lautojen ja lankkujen sahaus laajeni vähitellen, saavuttaen 1800-luvun lopulla hallitsevan aseman myyntiin tarkoitettujen metsäntuotteiden tuotannossa. Polttopuun sekä muun kotitarvepuun kulutus säilyi suurimpana puunkäytön ryhmänä pitkälle 1900-luvulle saakka. Mainituista metsänkäyttömuodoista erityisesti kaskeaminen ja sitä seuraava laiduntamisvaihe sekä tervaspuiden koloaminen "autioittivat" laajoja metsäalueita. Tiheimmin asutuilla seuduilla esiintyi pulaa poltto- ja rakennuspuusta myöhäiskeskiajalta alkaen. Nämä ongelmat sekä laivanrakennuksen ja vuoriteollisuuden puunsaannin turvaamisen tarve johtivat 1600-luvun puolivälissä pysyvään metsänkäytön julkiseen ohjaukseen. Tuolloin Ruotsin valtakunnan metsälainsäädännön kivijalaksi tuli kestävyyden periaate, josta kruunu kylläkin joutui tinkimään moneen otteeseen. Valtion jatkuva rahantarve oli käytännössä metsäpolitiikan tärkein taustavoima sekä Ruotsin vallan että autonomian aikana. Jo 1600-luvulla ruvettiin vaatimaan talonpoikien yhteismaiden jakamista omistajilleen vastuullisemman metsänkäytön nimissä. Isoajakoa saatiin Suomessa odottaa 1770-luvulle saakka. Etelä-Suomessa se valmistui melko nopeasti, 1800-luvun puoliväliin mennessä. Sillä olikin myönteinen, metsien säästävämpään käsittelyyn johtava vaikutus. Valtiosta tuli isonjaon myötä erityisesti Pohjois-Suomessa merkittävä metsänomistaja 1800-luvun jälkipuoliskolla. Valtion metsähallinto, jota maaherrat ja sivistyneistö vaativat perustettavaksi jo 1700-luvun puolivälissä, aloitti toimintansa maanlaajuisesti 1860-luvulla. Se oli ensimmäinen merkittävä metsänhoidon organisaatio, ja vasta sen myötä metsänkäyttöä ohjaavilla säädöksillä ja ohjeilla alkoi olla käytännön merkitystä. Yksityismetsiä varten ei tällaista organisaatiota vielä perustettu, niitä rasittivat pahoin nousevan sahateollisuuden määrämittahakkuut pitkälle 1900-luvun puolelle. Turun Akatemiassa tehtiin mittavaa metsänhoidon menetelmiä koskevaa sekä myös metsäpoliittista tutkimustyötä 1700-luvun jälkipuoliskolla. Tulokset eivät vielä sanottavasti siirtyneet käytäntöön, lähinnä puun alhaisen arvon ja tarvittavien organisaatioiden puuttumisen takia. Kun valtion metsähallintoa ja Suomen omaa metsäopetusta ryhdyttiin perustamaan 1800-luvun puolivälissä, haettiin metsänhoidon mallia alan johtavaksi maaksi kehittyneestä Saksasta. Tultaessa 1870-luvulle, oli Evolla jo käynnissä voimakas kehitystyö maamme olosuhteisiin soveltuvien menetelmien luomiseksi saksalaisen teorian pohjalta. Metsänhoidon tiedot ja taidot olisivat jo tässä vaiheessa riittäneet kestävän metsätalouden harjoittamiseen kaikkien omistajaryhmien metsissä, jos tarvittavat organisaatiot olisi kyetty perustamaan ja metsäammattilaisia olisi koulutettu tarpeeksi. Metsänhoidon kehitystä hidastivat 1800-luvun lopulla lähinnä valtion heikko talous ja poliittiset näkemyserot. Metsäteollisuuden 1870-luvulta alkanut voimakas kasvu ja lisääntyvä puuntarve pakottivat kuitenkin valtiovallan pitämään huolta puuntuotannon jatkuvuudesta. Metsäteollisuuden kasvavan viennin kautta lisääntyvät verotulot ja kan-santalouden myönteinen kehitys antoivat vähitellen mahdollisuuden metsänhoidon edistämiseen ammattilaisten koulutuksen, kansalaisten neuvonnan, lainsäädännön ja viranomaisten toiminnan kautta. Tämä tutkimus lähestyy aihettaan metsähistorian, taloushistorian, yhteiskuntahistorian ja ympäristöhistorian näkökulmista. Ajankohtaista merkitystä sillä on kehitysmaiden sekä Itä-Euroopan siirtymätalouksien metsänhoidon edistämiselle, missä suomalaiset metsäammattilaiset ovat mukana lukuisten kehityshankkeiden asiantuntijoina. Kymmenissä maissa metsätalous kamppailee samanlaisten ongelmien kanssa kuin Suomessa ja naapurimaissa 100 - 300 vuotta sitten. Meidän kokemuksistamme on näille kansantalouksille hyötyä valtion- ja yksityismetsätalouden metsänhoito-organisaatioita sekä metsälainsäädäntöä kehitettäessä.