Accounts of the rise of social democracy in Sweden often focus on the country’s exceptional features. Its civic culture, limited state repression, and even racial homogeneity are commonly invoked. But on the whole, the country’s Left faced similar challenges to its counterparts elsewhere; it just managed to find ways to overcome them. One relevant difference was that the nation underwent industrialization relatively late, in the 1870s. It was another decade later before the first trade unions were formed, meaning that advocates of industrial unionism who would go on to form the Swedish Trade
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