Conflict and Development

The project investigates the economic influence of the split between Inner mission (conservative, pietist) and Grundtvigian (liberal) forces in the Danish church. Specifically, we focus on the so-called ‘Creamery wars’, in which the dispute was carried into the cooperative creameries often centred on the question of whether to produce on Sundays. Danish emigrants also carried the conflict to the new world, where Danes were known as ‘sad Danes’ and ‘happy Danes’ as a reference to their religious allegiance. Recent evidence shows that Danes integrated much faster than others into the USA. A hypothesis that we seek to test is whether there is a connection to the religious dispute.