Abstract
The article studies how a sudden disaster, the Great Fire of Turku in 1827, affected the life trajectory of a Finnish merchant, Henric Lindberg, who suffered great economic losses in the fire. Despite his attempts to provide for and rehouse his large family, Lindberg, who lost his creditworthiness in the eyes of his former trading partners, was finally forced in 1830 to petition the sovereign for financial help in his distress. Lindberg's petition was highly unusual as primarily the poorest elements of society petitioned for loans or donations for personal purposes—merchants (i.e., members of the bourgeoisie engaged in urban trade), rarely approached the highest decision-makers with such requests. As such, Lindberg's petition provides an example of the deep trust the subjects had in the sovereign's benevolence and, indeed, in the whole petitioning institution. The case exemplifies how diverse and heterogeneous the merchants actually were in the largest city in Finland in the early nineteenth century, and how differently the merchants reacted and recovered in the case of a major disaster. The study provides insights into the underlying mechanisms of the estate society and demonstrates that not even in a hierarchical society was poverty necessarily transmitted to the following generation, but there were indeed opportunities for upward social mobility.