What made these barely populated countries so historically influential...

I want /pol/ to leave. You cannot disagree that it is incredibly impressive how much of an impact nordic countries had if you take into account the fact that they had super small populations and not many resources to work with before oil.

I'd say cold climate and that they're pretty fucking isolated, I'd say them being Scandinavians would be a factor but looking at how they're doing recently, it seems pretty evident that they're not as smart as I thought they were

Finland is Nordic, it is not Scandinavian though.

How does cold climate is an advantage when building a strong nation? By that logic Russia should have been Utopia by now, not to mention all of these siberian nomadic tribes.

Because basically all we had was knights, we never had any real duchies and lordships

They had some sort of pseudo feudalistic culture, but economically they werent feudal.

This is why it always bothers me when I play crusader kings and there are Dukes of Östergötland and other unhistorical crap that didnt exist during the Middle ages

I was saying in the sense that the ancient Scandis probably had to figure their shit out if they were going to survive, on top of being isolated and having small populations (unlike Russia) they were able to develop close knit communities.

You're right about it being cold not amounting to anything in more recent times though

dunno about knights but the peasants were mostly free men and owned their own lands instead of being literal slaves

>What was their recipe for success?

Cold and dark -> Nobody wants to invade the shitholes -> Uninterrupted peaceful development -> Rational and well-functioning states

Atlantic ocean + Huge natural resources -> Trade and export economies that benefited immensely from the shift from a Mediterranean economy to the Atlantic world economy
Compare this to German principalities that would have to pay dozens of tolls to get their goods to the Atlantic.

Staying neutral in both world wars (and Nazi-Germany spewing loads of cash into the economies during occupation).

Only adults can marry etc. -> Confirmation shows you are an adult -> Need to read catechisms to pass confirmation -> High literacy rate

thanks, finally a post that isn't a meme
how big was influence of protestantism in all of this? You can notice a trend that the countries which are (or were) historically protestant are usually doing better in modern times than catholic/orthodox european countries

The last part is his post is pretty much 100% protestantism

A study of areas in Europe of who turned protestants shows that bourgeoisie dominated areas turned protestant, but (agrarian) areas dominated by nobles and clergy stayed catholic. After all, the bourgeoisie was literate. So instead of protestants creating capitalists, the capitalists created protestant states.

They aren't historically influential at all

The only noteworthy thing they did during their history was invade the British isles and help during the Thirty Year's War.

After that they became progresively irrelevant, and today they are totally irrelevant. They were irrelevant during both world wars, they were irrelevant during the age of Imperialism in the 19th century, they were irrelevant during the age of exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries....

>Aryan genes
Indians should be fucking geniuses

There was no serfdom.

>In Finland, Norway and Sweden, feudalism was never fully established, and serfdom did not exist; however, serfdom-like institutions did exist in both Denmark (the stavnsbånd, from 1733 to 1788) and its vassal Iceland (the more restrictive vistarband, from 1490 until 1894).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

they are

at least in Punjab+Uttar Pradesh+Delhi+Chandigarh

Let's not forget 20th century
>Sweden doesn't get involved in WW2 -> doesn't have to bear massive war costs while benefiting with Germans buying all the iron they can mine
>Norway finding the biggest oil reserves in North Atlantic
>Finland dancing between US and Soviet influence, selling Western tech and luxuries (by soviet standard) to Russia and refining Russian raw materials for the west

>england is invaded by svend tveskæg who conquers everything apart from wessex in the south
>svend dies and his son knud takes over
>æthelred in wessex takes over while knud is off ruling denmark
>knud comes back and conquers it all back and then takes over wessex too a month later
>knud then forces scotland to pay tribute too
>england then has two more danish kings until the last dies without a heir
>edward the confessor then takes the throne as his half brother

Bongs literally never ousted Danish rule, it happened by itself.

>uninterrupted peaceful development

They invaded and fought amongst themselves constantly. Denmark and Sweden are the two countries in the world with the most wars fought between one another.

What was the equivalent called? Sorry if I sound ignorant I legitimately didn't know Scandinavian countries didn't have duchies.

>Nobody wants to invade the shitholes
We handled that part ourselves, thank you

The climate of Scandinavia is perfect for oat which in turn makes feeding large armies of horses possible.
Also the relative peace of the region makes it possible for the kings to focus on universities and cultural institutions instead of war.

The wars weren't that bad. It was basically border skirmishing, and they never managed to inflict any major defeats on each other as their defensive powers was too strong.

>Focus on universities
>Scandinavia had only 2 universities (Uppsala and Copenhagen)
>Scotland (SCOTLAND) had 4

I literally just had to go through a high school level history course to qualify for a university degree, being Danish of course we had to we wuz about vikangz. Through out the viking period and before they had "stormænd" which literally just translates into great man or big man. They're pretty much just village chiefs or wannabe kings who don't have enough shit to swing around to call themselves kings, except some still did. Usually the only thing keeping them from doing that was having a bigger guy saying he was king of your place. And they were pretty much a clan based society too.

>noble prize winners
about that user..

Scotland got BONGED though.

That what happens when you have larger populations and a richer country. There were also latin schools in almost all market towns.

I guess the closest thing we had was jarl/earl who was often appointed by the king and was usually more like a second-in-command than a local lord

Geographic isolation, plethora of deepwater ports, large underpopulated areas to exploit, cold climate forces a culture to be industrious.

I don't think it has anything to do with being richer or having a larger population (Scandinavia has always had a much larger population than Scotland).
It was more likely due to power being heavily centralized in Sweden (including Finland) and Denmark-Norway (including Iceland) that meant that only one centralized university was needed. The graduates were after all just future lawyers, judges, preachers and bishops of the centralized regime.

>feeding large armies of horses possible.
too bad the land itself is hard for horses to walk in.
too much rock and moutnain

also keep in mind that up until like the early modern age we had no more than TWO proper cities in norway.

What year? In the 1600s Sweden alone had 4 universities

>too much rock and moutnain
Only Norway can be considered mountainous. Forest is more of a problem in Sweden and Denmark is mostly flat.

Not right. Lund only became a university in 1666. So that makes 2 universities after 1666.
Scotland had four already in the 1500s.

They have the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the US.

WE WUZ

That's because only the upper classes, most educated and richest ones get to immigrate to US. Same with Nigerians.

Sweden also had a university in Greifswald and in Dorpat. The royal academy of Åbo was a university in all but name so that makes 5.

Sho bre - swede

only sweden had any influence of any sorts, the danes were slapped around when they tried to

norway never existed nor did finland independantly until recently and they havent done jack shit either

they became a great place to live with resources, low population and geographical isolation

norway found oil, sweden had copper and later iron, finland boomed thanks to its large forrests and built a paper industry, denmark was a center of the baltic trade and with farmlands