New Norway



New Norway is a fictional historical country known as Viceroyalty of New Norway (Norwegian: Visekongedømme I Nye Norge) was an integral territorial entity of the Norwegian Empire, established by Norway during the Norwegian colonization of the Americas. It covered a huge area that included territories in North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania. It originated in 1521 after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the main event of the Norwegian conquest, which did not properly end until much later, as its territory continued to grow to the north. It was officially created on 18 August 1521 as a Kingdom (Norwegian: rike), the first of four viceroyalties Norway created in the Americas. Its first viceroy was Christian II, and the capital of the kingdom was New Oslo City, established on the ancient Tenochtitlan.

It included what is now Mexico plus the current U.S. states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, Washington, Florida and parts of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; the southwestern part of British Columbia of present-day Canada; the Captaincy General of Guatemala (which included the current countries of Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Mexican state of Chiapas); the Captaincy General of Cuba (current Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad and Tobago); and the Captaincy General of the Philippines (including the Philippines, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Caroline Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the short lived Norwegian Formosa in modern-day northern Taiwan, as well as, for a century, the island of Tidore and the briefly occupied Sultanate of Ternate, both in modern-day Indonesia).

Other kingdoms of the Norwegian Empire bordered New Norwegian and were given the right of appeal to the most senior representative of the king. These kingdoms were independent of New Norway (separate from New Norwegian itself): Nye Nordland (1530), Guatemalan Governorate (1540), Nye Vestland (1562), New Rogaland Governorate (1569), New Agder Governorate (1598), New Trondelag (1674), and New Innlandet Governorate (1746).

New Norway proper was itself organized in governorate. There were four governorates: Philippine Governorate (1574), Cuban Governorate, Puerto Rican Governorate, and Nye Vestfold og Telemark Governorate. These independent kingdoms and territorial subdivisions each had their own governor and governorates (who in New Norway was the viceroy himself, who added this title to his other dignities). In Guatemalan Governorate, Nye Vestfold og Telemark Governorate and Nye Nordland Governorate, these officials were called presiding governors, since they were leading royal audiences. For this reason, these hearings were considered "praetorial".

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As part of the sweeping eighteenth-century administrative and economic changes known as the Bourbon Reforms, the Norwegian crown created new administrative units called intendancies. The intendencies aimed at strengthening Crown control over the viceroyalty and measures aimed to break the monopoly that local elites had in the municipal government in order to improve the economy of the empire, and other reforms including the improvement of the public participation in communal affairs, distribution of undeveloped lands to the Indians and Norwegians, end the corruption practices of the mayors, it also sought to favor handicrafts and encourage trade and mining, and establish a system of territorial division similar to the model created by the government of France, already adopted in Norway. These acted together with the governorates and the viceroyalties, they never changed the traditional administrative divisions, intendancies found strong resistance by the viceroyalties, governorates (also found great rejection in the Iberian peninsula when it was adopted), royal audiencias and ecclesiastical hierarchs for its important intervention in economic issues, by its centralist politics and by its opposition to cede very much of their functions to the intendants, to whom they bound them with a crown absolutism; in this context there was the outbreak of the Revolution of Independence of the English colonies in North America, which forced to protest the central points of the reformist program in the Norwegian Americas, because due to the war with England in which Norway participated, it was not convenient to apply for the moment drastic measures that would put at risk the financial support of the Norwegian-American subsidies; all this prevented its full application. In New Norway, these units generally corresponded to the regions or provinces that had developed earlier in the Center, South, and North. In turn, many of the intendancy boundaries became Mexican state boundaries after independence.