Dr Anna Knutsson
Dr Anna Knutsson is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and Uppsala University, and an affiliated scholar at the Cambridge based Centre for History and Economics.
After defending a PhD thesis about smuggling in Sweden during the eighteenth century at the European University Institute in 2019, later published with Routledge as Shadow Economies in the Globalising World (2023), she pursued an international postdoctoral fellowship at Uppsala University in collaboration with Cambridge University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In 2024 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 2025 became a Research Fellow at Clare Hall. Following her postdoctoral fellowship she secured two independent research grants from the Swedish Research Council and the Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse samt Tore Browaldhs Stiftelse to pursue work on a new project about illegal trade in the North Atlantic during the Age of Revolutions.
Select publications
Monographs
- Anna Knutsson, Shadow Economies in the Globalising World: Smuggling in Scandinavia, 1766-1806, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- Anna Knutsson & Hanna Hodacs, When coffee was banned: strategies of labour and leisure among Stockholm’s poor women, 1794–1796 and 1799–1802, Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol 71, No 2, 2023, 176-198.
- Anna Knutsson, ‘Free Trade for Protectionists: A Customs Officer’s Struggle to Establish Adam Smith’s Economic Thought in Sweden’, Intellectual History Review, Vol 32, No 2, 2022, 281-297.
- Anna Knutsson, ‘Clandestine commerce: retailing contraband textiles in late eighteenth-century Sweden’, History of Retailing and Consumption, Vol 5, No 3, 2019, 261-275.
- Anna Knutsson & Charlotte Bellamy, ‘From valet to smuggler: A microhistorical study of a French intermediary in Stockholm, 1775–1832’, Revue d’histoire nordique, Vol 27, No 2, 2018, 115-140.
- Anna Knutsson, ‘Out of the Darkness into the Market, The Role of Smuggling in creating a Global Market of Textiles in Late Eighteenth Century Sweden’, The Journal of Dress History, Vol 1, No 1, Spring 2017, 66-73.
- Anna Knutsson, ‘Seasonality and the Practices of Illegal Trade in the Faroe Islands and the Northern and Western Isles, 1775–1785.’ The Historical Journal. Vol 69, No. 1, 2026, 85-103.
Chapters
- Anna Knutsson, ‘Försäljning av utländska modevaror under protektionismens ok’, in My Hellsing & Johanna Illmakunnas eds. Shopping i 1700-talets Stockholm, (Stockholmia, September 2023).
