Antecedents to Danish Capitalism in the Twentieth Century

This chapter provides an overall introduction to modern Danish history. It aims to define the main features which constituted Denmark’s transition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy at the signing of the Danish constitution on the 5th of June 1849. The conventional historiography of Danish history has mainly depended on a consensus history, where the country’s development from the 900s Viking expeditions, the Danish Reformation in 1536, the Autocracy of the seventeenth century, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Dano-Swedish Wars, the abolition of stavnsbåndet in 1800, the democratization in 1849 and later parliamentarism in 1901, as a long story about the Danes as a consensus-driven people, I argue that this picture is not entirely accurate. The chapter explains particularly the introduction of free-market policies and break from a legacy of mercantilism as a trade-off between different interests. This largely came about as a tax policy change—one that ultimately enabled the welfare statewelfare state of the twentieth century.