MYBIT

The Mývatn district appears to have had the most advanced trade of any Icelandic communities during the 18th century, the age of the trade monopoly of Denmark. It was clearly a relatively prosperous peasant farming community, and it became the earliest community of freeholders in the new age of freeholding that began around 1800 through the initiative of the Danish central state power that was selling off state farms. It also reinvented itself as an agricultural area by intensifying an age-old technique of haymaking, the irrigation of the Framengjar wetlands south of Lake Mývatn as well as advances in sheep-breeding. Through these developments the district experienced continued economic growth. This growth culminated in the people of the district taking the lead in revolutionizing trade by organizing innovative co-operative societies. This was a part of a general revolution in the Icelandic countryside around 1900.