Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Towards a Theory of Divergent Development
- 3 Cousins Divided? Development in and of Political Institutions in Scotland and Norway since 1814
- 4 Agrarian Change in Scotland and Norway: Agricultural Production, Structures, Politics and Policies since 1800
- 5 The Evolution of Local Government and Governance in Scotland and Norway
- 6 The Development of Industry and North Sea Oil in Scotland and Norway
- 7 Reflections on the Making of Norway
- 8 Money and Banking in Scotland and Norway
- 9 Religion in Scotland and Norway
- 10 The Nordic Welfare Model in Norway and Scotland
- 11 Access, Nature, Culture and the Great Outdoors – Norway and Scotland
- 12 Education in Norway and Scotland: Developing and Re-forming the Systems
- 13 Norway and the United Kingdom/Scotland after the Second World War
- 14 Conclusions
- The Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Reflections on the Making of Norway
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Towards a Theory of Divergent Development
- 3 Cousins Divided? Development in and of Political Institutions in Scotland and Norway since 1814
- 4 Agrarian Change in Scotland and Norway: Agricultural Production, Structures, Politics and Policies since 1800
- 5 The Evolution of Local Government and Governance in Scotland and Norway
- 6 The Development of Industry and North Sea Oil in Scotland and Norway
- 7 Reflections on the Making of Norway
- 8 Money and Banking in Scotland and Norway
- 9 Religion in Scotland and Norway
- 10 The Nordic Welfare Model in Norway and Scotland
- 11 Access, Nature, Culture and the Great Outdoors – Norway and Scotland
- 12 Education in Norway and Scotland: Developing and Re-forming the Systems
- 13 Norway and the United Kingdom/Scotland after the Second World War
- 14 Conclusions
- The Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
This chapter is an attempt to tell Scottish readers how another small, peripheral country became a reasonably economically efficient but relatively egalitarian nation – in marked contrast to the kingdom of which Scotland is a part. My contribution is based on a lifelong study of the history of modern Norway, fieldwork in many different local communities – mostly in the northern part of my country, where I grew up – and serious participation in local and national politics. But I have learned a lot about Norway through fieldwork and shorter trips to comparable situations abroad, in Newfoundland, Iceland and Scotland, where I have had the good fortune of having friends and colleagues like the late Robert Storey, his wife the Gaelic scholar Lisa Storey and our common friend, John Bryden.
In April 1964, I spent a week on Vatersay, at the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides. At that time, I worked as a research assistant on the project ‘Human geography studies of North Norway’ at Tromsø Museum. The anthropologists at the University of Edinburgh invited me as a visiting ‘Northern Scholar’ for a month, including a grant for travelling around the country.
I must admit that I, as an agricultural economist with some social anthropology and sociology in my tool chest, was rather unprepared for my North Norway project, which I tried to develop in the direction of finding differences between declining coastal villages and those that seemed to be able to survive – comparing their access to natural resources, ability to raise capital, access to markets, and so on. But my observations and conversations with people on Vatersay and Barra were a very important impulse to expand my set of interacting explanatory categories beyond ecology and local culture. The decisive importance of the politically manipulable rules of the economic game became very easy to discover – like in fields such as fish marketing and subsistence agriculture – and the natural conditions in Vatersay were favourable as compared with many Arctic local communities, where people carrying on subsistence agriculture and seasonal fishing fifty years ago enjoyed a living standard indeed comparable with urban wage labour anywhere.
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- Information
- Northern NeighboursScotland and Norway since 1800, pp. 154 - 163Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015