| Summary: | This doctoral dissertation analyses the social and ecological changes in nineteenth-century northern Finland in the context of capitalist world-system. The object of the study is the ‘socio-ecological turmoil in Kainuu’, or the transformation in the assembly of sources of livelihood, social relations and conceptions of nature in the region known as Kainuu. The study researches why and how a historically specific formation of social power, tar capitalism, expanded and took root in Kainuu’s socio-ecological environment, and what kind of power strategies were exercised in appropriating the human labour and extra-human natures of this northern periphery. The study uses the findings from historical research on Kainuu to reinterpret the theoretical discussions on the origins and development of capitalism. The dissertation stimulates a new research perspective called an environmental history of capitalism. It combines elements from historical sociology, economic and social history, environmental history and environmental social science. The study consists of five research articles and a theoretically orientated summarising chapter; two of the articles are theoretical and three of them empirical, situated in the historical context of Kainuu. The study examines the how and why as well as what kinds of socio-ecological consequences allowed for the expansion of tar capitalist social relations in Kainuu. The answers provided by the research setting were obtained by reviewing the findings from previous historical and other social scientific research and studying different types of primary sources. The dissertation argues that tar capitalism was imposed on Kainuu in a specific world-historical moment that was influenced by the combination of world-systemic, national and local political and economic pressures and power struggles. The key power strategy of tar capitalism was rural indebtedness, a power relation between the coastal town of Oulu’s merchant houses, ‘the tar bourgeoisie’, and Kainuu’s tar peasants. As a consequence ...
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