IX. A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF SWEDEN

Transcription

1 IX. A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF SWEDEN 86

2 87 A SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF SWEDEN. The Stone Age The Viking Age: For about 9000 years ago the Stone age took place in Sweden. About 5000 years ago agriculture was introduced into Sweden and a great change came about in the lives of the inhabitants. About 2000 BC a new race, so called Battle Axe folk, appear to have immigrated to Sweden and to have conquered the country. About 1500 BC objects of bronze began to be manufactured in addition to "arbicks" of flint and wood. Gold too, began to play an increasingly important part. A new age had dawned - the Bronze age. The Bronze age was the age of magnates Another revolution in human life occurred about 500 BC, when iron was first extracted from the bog or formed at the bottom of the lakes. Iron became a useful metal. It was about the year 800 that the long and bold Viking voyages east and west began. The sword was their basic weapon. We also know that the Vikings went to Spain year 844, and attacked the Austrian coast. And they went to Spain every following year. The Viking-age lasted until the Mid-Eleventh Century. After the time of the Vikings and Stockholm's bloodbath : In the end of the time of the Vikings, Scandinavia was divided into three kingdoms: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Sweden was, back then, divided into different landscapes, with different laws in each landscape. The king of Sweden did not have big influence in Sweden. King Erik is the one, according to the legend, who led the conquering of parts of Finland. In 1143, monks from north east France came to Sweden. They came here to build an abbey, which became the oldest abbey in our country. The abbey had a school in it and a hospital too. When the monks came and the abbeys were built, Sweden became in the s a part of Europe and a European civilization. About 1260 the taxes came. To organize the tax incomes they built castles around the country so they could have power over the whole kingdom. In the middle of the 1300 s Scandinavia had a big crisis in the farming. The plague came to Scandinavia 1349 with a ship from England. 1/3 of the whole population of Scandinavia died of the disease. In November 1520, Stockholm s Bloodbath started. A man called Gustav Trolle hated the King, Sture and one day started to kill his supporters. Totally 82 people got murdered. Many people lost their homes and were later on killed. Many people say that the King of Denmark, Kristian II, was the leading man of the murdering.

3 88 The time of Gustav Vasa and his sons: Gustav Vasa was able to conquer the crown with economic help from Germany. Because of that he got big economic problems with huge debts. This lead to Vasa having to take money from the people. What he also saw to is that the church got less power and the king more. The Swedish church became Lutheran and the taxes rose. The people were unhappy and in the middle of the 16:th century some farmers with their leader Nils Dacke rebelled against the government. Gustav made a big effort to stop the rebels and it all ended when Vasa had Nils and some of his partners executed. When the famous king died he bequeathed the crown to his sons. His eldest son became king Erik XIV. He wanted a lot of power just like his father, which didn t satisfy the people. A conflict between the king and the nobility was the consequence. Erik feared that the nobility would take the power from him, which they also did. His brother Johan took the power and he was to be the king for the following 20 years. When he died, his son Sigismund took over. This period wasn t as strong as the years when Vasa ruled the country. More conflicts arose and this brought Duke Carl to the power. Sweden had got a strong leader again, Karl IX. These years were characterized by conflicts and unhappy people, but it also began to form our country to what it s like today The Age of Greatness: This period of time is from the second half of the Spanish Golden Age to the time when Spain lost a lot of territory in Europe. The Swedish Age of Greatness started when the king Gustav II Adolf intervened in the Thirty Years War that went on in Europe during the 1620 s. The Swedish army first attacked Poland. After ten years of fighting there, they made peace. Instead, the Swedish army attacked the German empire. The reason was among other things that the Germans were Catholics and the Swedes were Protestants. In 1632 the king was killed in Lützen. After that the Swedish army concentrated on conquering land. Between 1617 and 1658 Sweden expanded a lot. In 1660 Sweden made peace with Denmark and Poland. The 15-year old Karl XII took over the throne at the turn of the century and Sweden s neighbouring countries saw that as a good opportunity to take Swedish territories. In the year 1700 Sweden was attacked by Denmark, Poland and Russia at the same time. But to everybody s surprise, the young king defeated the three countries. When Karl XII attacked Russia a few years later (1708) he suffered a great lost. Thousands of people died in action and a lot of soldiers froze or starved to death. The remaining bits of the army hade to flee from Russia and ended up in Turkey, where they stayed for a few years. After 15 years of fighting in Europe, Karl XII and his army returned to Sweden. Three years later, they attacked Norway, but Karl XII was killed in Norway and the Swedish army had to retire. After the death of the king, Sweden made peace with all the countries and they had to give up a lot of land.

4 89 The Age of Greatness led to increased trading with other countries, a fast development in some industries and much influence from Germany and France. The Swedish Age of Greatness was also the Age of Greatness of the nobility but it was a very hard time for the pesants in Sweden during these 100 years. The Age of Freedom and the Gustavian Autocracy The Age of Freedom began in 1718, at the death of Karl XII. The freedom during this age was only for those political active in Sweden - so the Government was not democratic. The power of the king became very limited, but the Swedish Parliament got more power. The Parliament consisted of four groups; the nobility, the clergy, the representatives of the middle classes, and the peasants. The Gustavian Autocracy began in 1772, when Gustav III took the power and gave much more power to himself than the kings in the Age of Freedom had had. He carried through a lot of changes, among other things he abolished the death penalty for some crimes, and he forbid torture. He even did much for Swedish culture, and he established the Swedish Academy (those who today appoint the Nobel Prize winners) In 1789 Gustav III introduced royal autocracy instead of the former parliamentary government. In 1792, the king died, and when his son Gustav IV Adolf had came of age four years later, he took over the Government. During his reign Sweden lost Finland, an island between Sweden and Finland named Åland and a territory in the north part of Sweden. A lot of people blamed this on the king, and there were even many people unsatisfied with the autocracy of the king. In March, 1809, Gustav IV Adolf abdicated and This was the end of the Gustavian Autocracy. At this time in Spain you had the war of succession, and Felipe V was king. The breakthrough of industry and democracy Until the 1860 s, iron was the most important export product for Sweden. It was attractive because of the high quality. The economical situation changed dramatically when the timber industry developed in the middle of the 19 th century. We used our big forests in the north and made paper out of the trees. And because of this, Sweden achieved the biggest timber export in the world. In the 1870 s, something very important happened. We started to build railways. To be able to expand, we needed money. Therefore, people formed banks and jointstocks. As industry developed, a lot of people started to work. Their working conditions were poor. They had long working-days and the factories were dirty. People were unsatisfied with this and therefore they formed trade unions to get more influence. The big breakthrough of democracy came in 1921, when the Swedish Parliament agreed to give everyone, men and women, the same right to vote.

5 90 Progress, Depression and Preparedness: Before the First World War, there came many inventions and technical improvements in Sweden. In the twenties, these industries started subsidiary companies in many countries and conquered a worldwide market. Sweden made great industrial progress and in the 1930 the economical boom was described as the Second Swedish Age of Greatness. But during the summer 1920, Sweden got big financial problems and in 1929 a huge depression began in the USA and in 1930 it reached Sweden. The whole Swedish industry landed up in distress and the households had to live on little money. The Second World War broke out in 1939 and Sweden formed a coalition government who fought to keep Sweden out of the big war. The Swedish history after the second world war, the Swedish welfare: To have Europe rebuilt after the war, products like iron ore, wood and machinery were necessary. And this was just what Sweden had a lot of and could sell at sky-high prices. This is why Swedish products increased in most parts of the world. Between 1950 and 1975, you could call it "the golden years when everything went well and the standard of living improved rapidly, and the value of our industrial production increased to the triple value, despite the shortening of working days and longer holidays. The ideal of happy normal family life in the 50s was as follows: a mother, a father and a couple of kids having a picnic out in the countryside on a Sunday with their new family member, the Volvo. To get a house of your own with a nice lawn became very important after the war and was also part of the ideal of living. In the middle 70s, when general Franco died and two days later Juan Carlos swore the royal oath, the rest of the world had caught up with us and this made it harder now for Sweden to compete with the new rivals. This caused bankrupts in industry and unemployment. At the end of the 80s, a stop in building premises occurred and the value of the Swedish crown decreased, and because of that, debts could not be paid back and the whole banking system found itself in a big crisis. To solve the economical problems Sweden had borrowed money from other countries, and because of this, we now have had to pay for all of that by paying a lot of taxes, cut downs in medical care and reduction in contributions. The last years, however, the national saving has given result and we have reduced our national debt.