The Danish empire and Norway’s place therein

This article argues that Norway’s political status at the point when it was pried from Denmark by the Great Powers in 1814 was that of a semi-core in an empire. The basic premise of the paper is that Denmark and Norway both were polities, with a polity being a social unit that has a distinct identity, a capacity to mobilize persons and a degree of institutionalization and hierarchy. The article begins with a nutshell conceptual history of ‘empire’ and concludes that Denmark was an empire in a conceptual sense. By applying the analytical literature on empire to Denmark, this study demonstrates that Denmark was also an empire in an analytical sense. Having established what kind of polity Denmark was, it goes on to determine the status of the Norwegian polity within it. Empires consist of a core, as well as of a number of peripheries whose closeness to the core varies. Norway was drawn closer to the imperial centre throughout the eighteenth century. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a part of an empire being closer to an imperial core than Norway was to Copenhagen. The article concludes by suggesting the term semi-core to account for Norway’s place within the Danish empire.