Principality of Calenberg - Economic and Social History

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 bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.”
    —Nicolai A. Berdyaev (1874–1948)

    “We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
    —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)

    “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.”
    —William James (1842–1910)