This may be one way that Norwegians constantly feed the notion that much had to have been wrong — and is still wrong.
Does it matter if the myth of Norway as a poor country a hundred years ago is constantly being recycled? Labour Party supports or supporters of a capitalist market economy are two possible groups that might like to take credit for this shift. They both had a great deal to do with promoting literacy, he said.
Compared to other European countries, 19th century Norway was also a relatively egalitarian society, where women were given the right to be a part of the democracy very early on. More than a hundred years ago, a large number of groups and associations had already been organized, independent of the government. These included professional associations, farmer associations, religious associations, trade associations and other interest groups.
Myhre thinks this development was so powerful by the late s that he makes a bold statement: He believes Norway may have built the best organized civil society in the world at that time. How, more than a hundred years ago, did Norway become part of an exclusive club with rich and developed countries in northwestern Europe, including the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand?
Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning. Following the rapid productivity growth in agriculture, food processing and dairy production industries showed high growth in this period.
During this great boom, capital was imported mainly from Britain, but also from Sweden, Denmark and Germany, the four most important Norwegian trading partners at the time. In the King of Denmark and Norway chose the Lutheran faith as the state religion.
In consequence of the Reformation, reading became compulsory; consequently Norway acquired a generally skilled and independent labor force. The constitution from also cleared the way for liberalism and democracy. The puritan revivals during the nineteenth century created a business environment, which raised entrepreneurship, domestic capital and a productive labor force. In the western and southern parts of the country these puritan movements are still strong, both in daily life and within business.
GDP stagnated, particular during the s, and prices fell until This stagnation is mirrored in the large-scale emigration from Norway to North America in the s. At its peak in as many as 28, persons, 1. All in all, , emigrated in the period , equal to 60 percent of the birth surplus. Only Ireland had higher emigration rates than Norway between and , when , Norwegians left the country.
As a result of the international slowdown, Norwegian exports contracted in several years, but expanded in others. A second reason for the slowdown in Norway was the introduction of the international gold standard. Norway adopted gold in January , and due to the trade deficit, lack of gold and lack of capital, the country experienced a huge contraction in gold reserves and in the money stock.
The deflationary effect strangled the economy. Going onto the gold standard caused the appreciation of the Norwegian currency, the krone, as gold became relatively more expensive compared to silver.
Norway had by the fourth biggest merchant fleet in the world. However, due to lack of capital and technological skills, the transformation from sail to steam was slow. Norwegian ship owners found a niche in cheap second-hand sailing vessels.
However, their market was diminishing, and finally, when the Norwegian steam fleet passed the size of the sailing fleet in , Norway was no longer a major maritime power. A short boom occurred from the early s to Then, a crash in the Norwegian building industry led to a major financial crash and stagnation in GDP per capita from to Thus from the middle of the s until Norway performed relatively bad.
Measured in GDP per capita, Norway, like Britain, experienced a significant stagnation relative to most western economies. After , when Norway gained full independence from Sweden, a heavy wave of industrialization took place.
In the s the fish preserving and cellulose and paper industries started to grow rapidly. From , when Norsk Hydro was established, manufacturing industry connected to hydroelectrical power took off. It is argued, quite convincingly, that if there was an industrial breakthrough in Norway, it must have taken place during the years However, the primary sector, with its labor-intensive agriculture and increasingly more capital-intensive fisheries, was still the biggest sector.
Officially Norway was neutral during World War I. However, in terms of the economy, the government clearly took the side of the British and their allies. Through several treaties Norway gave privileges to the allied powers, which protected the Norwegian merchant fleet.
From , when Germany declared war against non-friendly vessels, Norway took heavy losses. A recession replaced the boom. Norway suspended gold redemption in August , and due to inflationary monetary policy during the war and in the first couple of years afterward, demand was very high.
When the war came to an end this excess demand was met by a positive shift in supply. Thus, Norway, like other Western countries experienced a significant boom in the economy from the spring of to the early autumn The boom was followed by high inflation, trade deficits, currency depreciation and an overheated economy.
The international postwar recession beginning in autumn , hit Norway more severely than most other countries. There are two major reasons for the devastating effect of the post-war recession.
In the first place, as a small open economy, Norway was more sensitive to international recessions than most other countries. Secondly, the combination of strong and mostly pro-cyclical inflationary monetary policy from to and thereafter a hard deflationary policy made the crisis worse Figure 3.
Source: Klovland a. In fact, Norway pursued a long, but non-persistent deflationary monetary policy aimed at restoring the par value of the krone NOK up to May In consequence, another recession hit the economy during the middle of the s. Hence, Norway was one of the worst performers in the western world in the s. This can best be seen in the number of bankruptcies, a huge financial crisis and mass unemployment.
Bank losses amounted to seven percent of GDP in Total unemployment rose from about one percent in to more than eight percent in and In manufacturing it reached more than 18 percent the same years. Despite a rapid boom and success within the whaling industry and shipping services, the country never saw a convincing recovery before the Great Depression hit Europe in late summer The worst year for Norway was , when GDP per capita fell by 8.
This, however, was not only due to the international crisis, but also to a massive and violent labor conflict that year. According to the implicit GDP deflator prices fell more than 63 percent from to Norway is the country with the greatest potential for water power in Europe. Between and the first eleven water power stations were built, today there are more than Soon, industries making use of the cheap, mass produced energy were introduced, including new industries such as electrochemistry and electrometallurgy.
They produced energy consuming products such as carbide, zinc, tin, steel, ferrosilicon and fertiliser. New industrial cities like Rjukan, Notodden, Tyssedal and Eydehavn developed around the power stations and factories. Vikings proceeded to raid a monastery at Jarrow in Northumbria. Over a thousand Old Norse words influenced modern English along with more than 1, place names in northeast England and the Scottish islands.
Vikings were well trained with good weapons and chain-mail armor, and their belief that being killed in battle resulted in them going to Valhalla gave them a psychological advantage in battle for many years. Misconceptions about the Vikings remain today. For example, the myth that Vikings wore horned helmets was actually an invention of 19th-century Romanticism.
Although many women stayed to look after the household during Viking raids, some women and even children traveled with the men. One of the most fearsome Viking commanders was a woman, known as the Red Maiden. Read more : Think you know about the Vikings?
The raids produced riches and slaves, which the Vikings brought back to Scandinavia to work the farms. As farmland grew scarce and resistance against the invasions grew in England, the Vikings began to look at targets further afield, such as Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland.
During the 9th-century, the largest chieftains began a long period of civil war until King Harald Fairhair was able to unite the country and create the first Norwegian state. Early Vikings saw Christianity as a heretical threat to their own pagan beliefs.
But in fact, Christian monks and missionaries were active in Scandinavia throughout the Viking Age. It took until the era of Olav Tryggvason for the tide to begin to change. As many chieftains feared that Christianization would rob them of power, it took centuries for Christianity to be fully accepted.
After almost a century of peace, civil war broke out in because on ambiguous rules of succession. The newly-created Archdiocese of Nidaros attempted to control the appointment of kings, which led to the church taking sides in the various battles.
Through the 11th and 12th centuries, population increased drastically and farms began to be subdivided, with many landowners turning over parts of their land to the king or the church in challenging times.
Throughout the 13th century a tithe of around twenty percent of a farmer's yield went to the landowners. Norway's Golden Age at least until the much more recent discovery of oil is widely accepted to be the late 13th and early 14th-century, a time of peace and growing international trade with Britain and Germany, most notably the Hanseatic League who took control of trade through Bergen.
However, this time of prosperity came to an abrupt end in as the Black Death arrived in Norway and killed a third of the population within a year. Many communities were entirely wiped out and the subsequent reduction in tax income weakened the king's position and the church became increasingly powerful.
In Olaf Haakonsson inherited the thrones of both Norway and Denmark and created a union, the start of a long period of political alliances and wars between the Scandinavian countries. Norway continued to play a minor role in the Union until Sweden declared independence in the s. This created a Denmark-Norway nation ruled from Copenhagen. Frederick I of Denmark favored Martin Luther's Reformation and initially agreed not to introduce Protestantism to Norway but in he proceeded to begin the process.
Read more : Defining Scandinavia and Northern Europe. The Catholic resistance within Norway was led by Olav Engelbrektsson, but found little support. Christian III formerly introduced Lutheranism, demoted Norway to the status of a Danish province and introduced the Danish written language, although Norwegian dialects remained in place. The population also grew, from around , in to around , in Many Norwegians earned a living as sailors in foreign ships, especially the Dutch ships which came for the timber.
To avoid deforestation, a royal decree closed a large number of sawmills in ; because this mostly affected farmers with small mills, by the mid 18th century only a handful of merchants controlled the entire lumber industry.
Throughout the period, Bergen was the largest town in the country, twice the size of Christiania now Oslo and Trondheim combined. A national assembly was called at Eidsvoll, but rather than elect Frederik as an absolute monarch the members instead chose to form a constitution. It was written over the course of five weeks and adopted on May 17, , the date which is celebrated today as Norwegian Constitution Day.
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