History of Norway
The union was formally established after the extraordinary Storting adopted the necessary amendments to the Constitution and elected Charles XIII of Sweden as king of Norway on 4 November 1814.
[8] The Bronze Age began around 1800 BC and involved innovations such as ploughing fields with ards, permanent farms with houses and yards, especially in the fertile areas around the Oslofjord, Trondheimsfjord, Mjøsa and Jæren.
[7] According to Ante Aikio[10] the formation of the Sámi language was completed in its southernmost area of usage (central Scandinavia, South Sápmi) by 500 AD.
They would offer protection from other clans; if conflicts arose, the issue would be decided at a thing, a sacred place where all free men from the surrounding area would assemble and could settle disputes and determine sanctions for crimes, such as paying fines in food.
[13] In February 2020, Secrets of the Ice Program researchers discovered a 1,500-year-old Viking arrowhead dating back to the Germanic Iron Age and locked in a glacier in southern Norway caused by the climate change in the Jotunheimen Mountains.
[19] The lack of suitable farming land in Western Norway caused Norwegians to travel to and colonize sparsely populated areas of Shetland, Orkney, the Faroe Islands and the Hebrides, the latter of which became the Kingdom of the Isles.
[22] Håkon the Good – the son of Harald Fairhair, raised in England – assumed the crown in 930 and established two large things, assemblies in which the king met with the free men to make decisions: Gulating for Western Norway and Frostating for Trøndelag.
[25][26][27][28] Christianization and the abolition of the traditional Asatru reflected in Norse mythology was first attempted by Håkon the Good, and later by Olav Tryggvason, but he was killed in the Battle of Svolder in 1000.
However, tenants always remained free men and the large distances and often scattered ownership meant that Norwegian farmers enjoyed much more freedom than continental serfs.
[41] Margaret also granted trade privileges to the Hanseatic merchants of Lübeck in Bergen in return for recognition of her right to rule, and these hurt the Norwegian economy.
King Frederick I favoured Martin Luther's Reformation, but it was not popular in Norway, where the Church was the sole remaining national institution and the country was too poor for the clergy to be very corrupt.
With the Danish participation in the Thirty Years' War in 1618–48, a new conscription system was created in which the country was subdivided into 6,000 legd, each required to support one soldier.
The period under absolutism increased the ratio of self-owning farmers from twenty to fifty percent, largely through sales of crown land to finance the lost wars.
[56] The entire period saw mercantilism as the basis for commerce, which involved import regulations and tariffs, monopolies and privileges throughout the county granted to burghers.
[57] To avoid deforestation, a royal decree closed a large number of sawmills in 1688; because this mostly affected farmers with small mills, by the mid 18th century only a handful of merchants controlled the entire lumber industry.
[62] In the last decades of the century, Hans Nielsen Hauge started the Haugean movement, which demanded the right to preach the word of God freely.
He traveled to Trondheim to gain support for his person, and then assembled twenty-one prominent citizens at Eidsvoll Manor on 16 February 1814 to discuss his plans.
Constitution Day on 17 May became an important political rally every year;[72] in 1829 the Swedish governor-general Baltzar von Platen resigned after he used force against demonstrators in the Battle of the Square.
[77] An economic crisis hit the country from 1848, resulting in Marcus Thrane establishing the first trade unions and demanding that equality before the law be independent of social class.
[85] In 1884, King Oscar II appointed majority leader Johan Sverdrup as prime minister, thus establishing parliamentarism as the first European country.
[90] The following ten years, Parliament passed a series of social reforms, such as sick pay, factory inspection, a ten-hour working day and worker protection laws.
A short-lived Labor Government reigned in 1928,[104] but did not establish a sound parliamentary support until the 1935 Nygaardsvold's Cabinet, based on an alliance with the Agrarian Party.
The German goal was to use Norway to control access to the North Sea and the Atlantic, and to station air and naval forces to stop convoys from Britain to the USSR.
Politics were suspended and the government coordinated action with the Allies, retained control of a worldwide diplomatic and consular service, and operated the huge Norwegian merchant marine.
[84] Reconstruction after the war gave Norway the highest economic growth in Europe until 1950, partly created through rationing private consumption allowing for higher industrial investments.
[128] Anti-communism grew with a Soviet proposal for joint control over Svalbard and especially after the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état, after which the Communist Party lost all influence.
[126] Norway started negotiations for the creation of a Scandinavian defense union, but instead opted to become a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
[139] The 1960s saw an increased focus on environmentalism, especially through activism, based on ever-more conversion of waterfalls to hydro stations, pollution and the dilapidation of herring stocks.
[142] Prospecting in the North Sea started in 1966 and in 1969 Phillips Petroleum found oil in the Ekofisk field—which proved to be among the ten largest fields in the world.
Ekofisk experienced a major blowout in 1977 and 123 people were killed when the Alexander Kielland accommodation rig capsized in 1980;[143] these incidents led to a strengthening of petroleum safety regulations.
