History of Bremen (city)
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For most of its 1,200 year history, Bremen was an independent city within the confederal jurisdiction of Germany's Holy Roman Empire. In the late Middle Ages, its governing merchant guilds were at the centre of the Hanseatic League, which sought to monopolise the North Sea and Baltic trade. To establish and confirm its independence, the city had to contend first with the Prince-Archbishop of Bremen, and then with the Swedes, who had become the masters of the surrounding, former episcopal, duchies after the Thirty Years' War.
In the late nineteenth century Bremen was drawn by Prussia into the German Empire. Thanks to new sea wharves and anchorage at Bremerhaven, the city became Germany's main port of emigration to the Americas, and an entrepôt for her late developing colonial trade. The Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) was founded in Bremen in 1857 and it later became one of the world's leading shipping companies.
In the twentieth century, Bremen, a broadly liberal and social-democratic city, lost its autonomy under the Hitler regime. After the devastations of World War Two, in which two thirds of the city's fabric were severely damaged, this autonomy was restored. Bremen became one of the founding Länder (or states) of the German Federal Republic. From the late 1950s, the post-war Wirtschaftswunder drew workers to the city from Turkey and Southern Europe, so that, combined with refugees resettled in the 21st century, around a third of Bremen's current population is of recent non-German origin.