Paul Richard Sharp
DKK 5.9 million. Funded by the Danish Research Council, Sapere Aude (01.09.2016)
Sapere Aude: The DFF Research Leader aims to give excellent, younger researchers, your researchers who have performed top research in their field, the opportunity to develop and strengthen their research idea.
Title: Denmarks economical breakthrough in the 19th century: A new interpretation
It is about fundamentally rethinking Danish economic history, which has traditionally focused on the transformation of Danish agriculture from the 1880s with the rapid spread of a new technology (the centrifuge) and new institutions (the cooperative movement). Denmark developed so rapidly that a skeptic might be inclined to believe that there is more than a simple breakthrough to modernity behind. I want to show that history goes back much further and has its origins in the knowledge transfer from abroad and the restructuring of Danish agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Secondly, I want to show that the history of cooperative dairies has been misunderstood. I expect to demonstrate their dependence on coal imports and will examine whether they really were superior to their less successful Irish counterparts.