Reformations, European Expansion and Revolutions (1500-1850)

This course focuses on the period from the reformations and religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries up until the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on European expansion and its consequences, including slavery, for the rest of the world.

The course examines the main political, economic, social and cultural developments in Norway, Europe and the rest of the world. Teaching starts with the transformations that are considered to have heralded the transition from the medieval to the early modern period in Europe: European expansion, the advent of printing with moveable type, the Reformation and state formation.

Concerning Norway, the course focuses on the effects of the incorporation into the Danish-Norwegian state. For the whole of Europe, the advent of absolutism will be considered, as will the Enlightenment. The Sami ways of life were threatened by the social and religious control of the state, and by the carving up of the Northern Europe into distinct nations.

The social and political revolutions that swept across various parts of the world form the closing chapters of this course. A key development is the fall of absolutism and the triumph of the principle of the sovereignty of the people in many countries in Europe and the Americas. In Norway, the constitution of 1814 established that only the Storting could pass laws and impose taxes, as well as ensuring basic human and civil rights.