Economic and Social History
The Principality of Calenberg was initially a rather insignificant territory and Welf lordship developed here quite late. By the reign of George of Calenberg in 1636, the principality had experienced 140 years of almost continuously poor government that cared little about the state. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the cultural centres lay outside Calenberg in the towns of Brunswick, Hildesheim and Lüneburg. New centres were created at the residences of Wolfenbüttel and Celle. Even the city of Hanover was not governed by the Calenberg princes until 1636 . The other towns remained unimportant.
Only after the reign of George of Calenberg and its subsequent elevation to the electorate did the former Principality of Calenberg become the nucleus of the what later became the German state of Lower Saxony.
Industrialization had already began during the liberal French period. The industrialist, Johann Egestorff (1772–1834), used the economic opportunities of the years from 1803 to 1813 and was able to purchase limestone quarries on the hill of the Lindener Berg, west of Hanover. To burn the lime he had coal mined in the Deister hills. His son, Georg Egestorff, started an iron foundry and engineering company. The Calenberg village of Linden then developed into an industrial town.
Read more about this topic: Principality Of Calenberg
Famous quotes containing the words economic, social and/or history:
“The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)