Norway was for centuries in royal union with Denmark. This broke up in 1814 when Denmark was forced to cede Norway to Sweden. The Norwegians had always been fiercely independent but lacked the resources to reject either Danish or Swedish sovereignty until 1905, when full independence was declared and the union of crowns with Sweden was dissolved. King Haakon VII, Danish by birth, was elected King of Norway.
Norway was then a mainly fishing, farming and seaborne trading economy but industrialisation arrived in the form of shipbuilding in particular. Everything changed when oil was found in the late 1960s. The vast and transformative wealth created by the oil was used to build an immense sovereign fund for the benefit
