1st Edition
From the North Sea to the Baltic Essays in Commercial, Monetary and Agrarian History, 1500–1800
By Michael North
Copyright 1996
302 Pages
by
Routledge
The Baltic in the early modern period has been called a 'Nordic Mediterranean'. In the studies collected here, Professor North is concerned to examine the ways in which this Baltic region became integrated into the international division of labour and the emerging world economy. The volume opens with a new introductory essay, and the first section then focuses on commodities exported to Western Europe - grain, timber, flax, hemp and other raw materials. The following studies examine how this ever growing bulk trade stimulated a flow of money and payments in the opposite direction, and led to the formation of the manorial economy and second serfdom in the grain-producing countries of the Baltic hinterlands.
Contents: Introduction; The export trade of Royal Prussia and Ducal Prussia, 1550-1650; The export of timber and timber by-products from the Baltic region to Western Europe, 1575-1775; A small Baltic port in the early modern period: the port of Elbing in the 16th and 17th century; The lighterman business in the Baltic ports: Danzig, Elbing and Königsberg (16th-18th centuries); The Baltic trade and the decline of the Dutch economy in the 18th century; Hamburg: the ’continent's most English city’; The European rice trade in the 18th and early 19th centuries; Der Große Lübecker Münzschatz von 1533 als Quelle der hansischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte; Banking and credit in Northern Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries; Bullion transfer from Western Europe to the Baltic and the problem of trade balances, 1550-1750; Bullion transfer from Western Europe to the Baltic and to Asia, 1550-1750: a comparison; Geldumlauf und Wirtschaftsregion: Untersuchungen am Beispiel Königlich Preußens und des Herzogtums Preußen in der Frühen Neuzeit; Die frühneuzeitliche Gutswirtschaft als Problem der polnischen und deutschen wirtschaftshistorischen Forschung; Untersuchungen zur adligen Gutswirtschaft im Herzogtum Preußen des 16. Jahrhunderts; Die frühneuzeitliche Gutswirtschaft in Schleswig-Holstein; Wage labour versus corvée labour in East Prussian agriculture (16th-18th centuries); Abgaben und Dienste in der ostdeutschen Landwirtschaft vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Bauernbefreiung: Bestimmungsgründe für die langfristigen Substitutionsprozesse; Ducal Prussia: an internal periphery? (16th-18th centuries); Englische Reiseberichte des 17. Jahrhunderts als Quelle zur Geschichte der königlich-preußischen Städte Danzig, Elbing und Thorn; Index.
