RB 64

he almost ignored the increasing number of labour contracts that did not fit into the established categories of servants or skilled craftsmen.222 Olof Johan Hultgren (b.1827, Ph.D., district court judge) expressed a similar view, when in 1878 he “explained” the parts of the Book of Commerce that belonged to the private law.According to Hultgren, the master-servant relationship was founded upon a contract, which for the worker implied a far-reaching duty of obedience. Excluded from the category of servants were contractors for specified results, private teachers, inspectors, clerks, shop assistants and manual day workers, if they only stayed in the paying party’s house for a shorter period. Hultgren even excluded manual labourers who worked for another person for a long time, but did not live together with him.223Thus, like Olivecrona, he limited the master-servant relationship to domestic and agrarian working tasks of a long-term and personal character. Still, Hultgren as well as Olivecrona classified the institution in question as part of the law of obligations. The same contractual approach to labour relations is found among legal historians of the 19th century, for example Carl Evert Ekelund (1791-1843), Jacob Lundell and C J Wahlberg.224 19th century authors or legal actors who expressly categorised the master-servant relationship as belonging to family law must be considered as departures from a mainstream.The eclectic scholar Ebbe Samuel Bring (1785-1855) wrote in 1817 in general terms and without mentioning labour relations, that the family relationship ought to be understood as one human being’s dependence upon another.225 In 1833, the same year as Swedish lawmakers tried to set the clock backward by enacting the Statutes on Hired Servants and onVagrancy, the jurist and economist Pehr Erik Bergfalk (1798-1890) characterised the rules for compulsory p a r t 1 i i , c h a p t e r 3 104 222 Peterson, C1984, pp. 61-62. 223 Hultgren 1878, pp. 80-95. 224 Ekelund 1850-51, III, pp. 176-180; Lundell 1842, p. 4;Wahlberg 1870. 225 Bring 1817, p. 118.

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